January 15, 2007

Joseph Wambaugh's "Hollywood Station"

My new VDARE.com column:


Wambaugh’s Sharp Eye For PC, Immigration Trends
By Steve Sailer

One of the richest veins of American popular culture has been the Los Angeles crime novel. Perhaps its leading exponent since Raymond Chandler is a former Los Angeles Police Department detective sergeant named Joseph Wambaugh. In the early 1970s, Wambaugh began writing bestselling cop novels such as The New Centurions and The Choirboys and true crime tales such as The Onion Field. The 2Blowhards blog explains Wambaugh's cultural importance as:


"In writing-history terms, he took the Ed McBain-style police procedural and filled it to bursting with irreverence, heart and despair." ...


Accordingly, it's a noteworthy event when—at the suggestion of James Ellroy (LA Confidential), one of the many novelists influenced by him—Wambaugh returns to his classic LAPD stomping grounds for the first time in 23 years. In Hollywood Station, the old master has collected a new trove of war stories from 54 cops, making this 340-page novel about the mid-watch shift at the Hollywood police station in June 2006 a terrific read.

LA is the world's most absurd large city, and Hollywood is its funniest neighborhood. After each shift, the cops swap stories to determine who was called out on the evening's most memorable BHI (Bizarre Hollywood Incident). Example: being summoned to the famous courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where street people garbed in movie legend costumes pose for tourists' cameras, by an ersatz Marilyn Monroe (6'-3" and with a five-o'clock shadow), who witnessed, in a dispute over tourist-hustling turf, Batman cold-cocking Spiderman. While they're at it, the cops also haul in on cocaine charges Tickle Me Elmo.

Wambaugh's cop-heroes aren't saints. When bored one night, two aging surfer dude officers drive down to an apartment building full of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang members to play "pit bull polo." The Salvadoran gang-bangers let their vicious dogs run wild, terrorizing all the children in the neighborhood. So the partners cruise slowly around the building a few times until the beasts are in a frenzy. Then they play a few chukkers of pit bull polo, leaning out the police car windows and swinging their batons like mallets.

Hollywood Station is mellower, less despairing than Wambaugh’s early masterpieces. As he reflects: "Doing good police work is the most fun these cops will ever have in their entire lives." And he's finally learned to appreciate the female half of the human race.

Still, Hollywood Station has a serious, even angry side. [More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

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