'Hollywood Hills': A rollicking ride-along with the LAPD
Joseph Wambaugh's wonderful character, the late, great police sergeant known to the Hollywood Station cops as "the Oracle," often told his young officers that doing good police work was the most fun they would ever have.
By Joseph Wambaugh
Little, Brown. 356 pp. $26.99
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Reviewed by Paul Davis
Joseph Wambaugh's wonderful character, the late, great police sergeant known to the Hollywood Station cops as "the Oracle," often told his young officers that doing good police work was the most fun they would ever have.
Having gone out on patrol numerous times with Philadelphia police officers, I can appreciate the remark. Police officers observe and respond to the entertaining antics of their fellow citizens, but they also encounter cruelty, depravity, and violence.
No writer describes the cop world's twin masks of comedy and tragedy as well as Joseph Wambaugh.
Wambaugh, 73, has said his 14 years with the Los Angeles Police Department provided him with source material for only his first three novels. (Hollywood Hills is his 15th.) Now, he informally interviews scores of police officers over drinks and dinner and then incorporates their stories into his novels. Knowing that Wambaugh's often incredible fiction has a basis makes it that much more interesting to me.
In Hollywood Hills, the fourth novel in a series that portrays the LAPD cops who work out of Hollywood Station, Wambaugh again offers dark humor, social satire, and police drama. His carefully drawn characters are colorful but utterly believable. The cops aren't super cops, but fairly ordinary, vulnerable, and imperfect human beings, which adds to their appeal.
"The police station in which the detectives were housed was an unusual place, perhaps the world's only police facility where framed one-sheet movie posters decorated the walls," Wambaugh writes in Hollywood Hills. "In the geographic territory of the station the bizarre was commonplace and if something eerie or outlandish could not be explained or even understood, more often than not, the cops would just shrug and say, 'This is [obscenity] Hollywood.' After that, nothing more needed to be said."
Back are the surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam and "Hollywood Nate" Weiss, an aging but still aspiring actor who carries his Screen Actors Guild card with his badge. We also meet Della Ravelle, a training officer who offers her rookie charge practical advice, such as the need to shave her legs before a watch.
If she doesn't shave and gets injured on the job, an ER nurse will tell the other cops about her stubble and at Hollywood Station they'll call her "Cactus Legs."
Wambaugh sets the Hollywood Station cops on a collision course with a crooked art dealer, an ex-con and larcenous butler, and a pair of drug-addicted amateur burglars. Cops and crooks converge around the Hollywood Hills estate of Leona Brueger, widow of a processed-meat tycoon.
The widow, a flirtatious cougar with subtle surgical enhancements, turns her attention to Hollywood Nate, leading him on with promises that her B-list movie-producer boyfriend will get him a speaking part in a movie when they return from Italy.
That trip to Italy represents opportunity for Nigel Wickland, a "posh" but bankrupt art dealer who plans to steal valuable paintings from Brueger's estate while she's gone and replace them with replicas. He draws in Raleigh Dibble, a former caterer who did federal time for passing bad checks and now works as Brueger's butler and caretaker of her elderly brother-in-law, a resident of the estate's guesthouse. Wickland tells Dibble that the widow will never know the difference between the real paintings and the fakes.
Add to the mix Jonas Claymore, who smokes OxyContin and is fascinated with the "Bling Ring," the young burglars who robbed the homes of Orlando Bloom, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan while they were out partying.
Claymore plans to improve on the Bling Ring's methods, and he and his equally drug-addled partner, Megan Burke, drive through the Hollywood Hills looking for opportunities.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood cops encounter a six-foot-tall, 280-pound ex-con with White Power jailhouse "tatts" who refuses to leave a drug party put on by the Addams Family wannabes the cops refer to as "Mr. Goth and Mrs. Goth."
Along with the wackiness, there's violence, and it takes an emotional toll on Wambaugh's cops. A rookie is shaken when she kills a criminal in a gunfight. A veteran cop is horrified by a brutal attack on a woman and her baby.
Like Wambaugh's previous novels, Hollywood Hills is an entertaining and starkly realistic ride-along with the LAPD.