There are plenty of police
procedurals in the land of fiction thrillers but I can't think of another author who writes with
such an
authoritative voice. His picture of what life is like on the personal-professional level for the band in blue and the criminal hustlers who keep them in business smacks of experience. His view of Hollywood is full of crackheads, tweakers (meth-addicts), tourists, Serbo-Croatian criminals, dope pushers, whores and all the rest who pursue an illegal buck.
Speaking as someone who drives the streets he describes I have to say, "Here?! Y'never woulda' knowed it."
But, it's a great yarn that suggests what could be going on under a resident's radar and beneath the headlines. Wambaugh's crew of cops patrol from our other side of the line, suffering under the edicts and oversight of a Police Commission. They are anything but standard issue as they apply their dedication "To Protect and To Serve."The"Oracle," the sergeant who has been around the longest and runs the station, assigns his officers to teams with some sensitivity toward personalities, attitudes and needs. In one instance, he pairs upa lady cop to the gruffest old sexist still sporting a badge--more to help him than her.
The work never stops for law enforcement in this productive urban area that's so well supplied with criminals up and down the scale of theft and homicide. One of an officer's biggest challenges is to figure out where the connections are. Under their noses, for example, is "tweaker" Farley Ramsdale and the girlfriend Farley calls Olive Oyl." This woman is dumb as a clump of dog hair" is how he thinks of her, but she's not too dumb to use as a decoy to avoid getting caught nor to assist him in any one of his regular scams.
One of those consists of dropping mouse traps with strings of duct tape into mailboxes in order to fish out cash, social security numbers and whatever items of value he can trade for a supply of "glass" (crystal meth). And,once-in-a-while there's a letter of special interest, like the one describing a shipment of diamonds to a local jewelry store.
When Farley later learns of the successful robbery that resulted from this piece of intel, he confronts Cosmo Betrossian, the Armenian, the benefactor of it. Cosmo paid Farley a lousy 20 bucks for the letter and you can't blame Farley --a businessman even if he is a conniving sociopath-- for wanting to renegotiate when the information turns into a bonanza. Even Cosmo sees the point and, having been to his fence Dmitri, the Russian nightclub owner of "The Gulag" and a man Cosmo fears, he offers Farley a $10,000 cut as soon as he receives his payoff. Meanwhile, the consequences of the jewelry heist are only beginning.
With all the complexity of the cop and underground interraction, with its human foibles and motivations, Wambaugh's genius is in maintaining clarity, which he does expertly, while not all owing the normal fumbles of reality to become the "gangs that couldn't shoot straight." Rather, in a roundup of carefully drawn characters in a construct of irony and tragedy, his underworld action descends to where it must for a sometimes edgy "sounds like the truth" representation. Nor does he go into the reverse style of being overly slick. Choosing not to follow the path of a strong central character --the norm of the genre -- he returns to his L.A. roots by using"anecdotes"and "cop talk" by officers of the LAPD to enrich his cleverly integrated storyline with insights from experience.
After his13-year layoff, Wambaugh, self-exiled in Newport Beach and retired, has not only not lost his unique talent but has, if anything, gained in perspective and storytelling grip.