Customer Reviews

Hollywood Crows: A Novel

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

But still very enjoyable. The first reviewer of the book said Wambaugh was in "the declining years" of his work. Maybe that's true - we all grow old - but this novel, the second of the "Hollywood" series, is still better than many other crime novels by authors in fresh bloom.

I don't think Wambaugh's work can be compared to other crime novelists. His "procedurals" have scarcely any decernable plots - though this one has more than most - but are instead character studies of both the high and low forms of life in Los Angeles. Cops and criminals and everyone in between.

Wambaugh's work is not for everybody. It certainly would not appeal to the political correct among us. Maybe that's why I like his work so much.

If you didn't know it was Joseph Wambaugh, you'd swear that Carl Hiaasen took a vacation in LA, hung out with the LAPD, and wrote this cynically funny tale of cops and those they protect, and especially those who they are protected from. But Hiaasen could never tell a police story with Wambaugh's authority, and only an ex-cop could render it with Wambaugh's sincere passion for the men and women in blue.

Like it's predecessor, "Hollywood Station", "Crows" (short for LAPD's "Community Relations Office") is told through a series of Hill Street Blues-style vignettes loosely wrapped around a central plot. In this outing, The Leopard Lounge, a Sunset Boulevard strip joint, it's oily owner, Ali Aziz, and his impossibly gorgeous soon-to-be ex-wife Margot combine to form the story's deliciously sleazy and very Hiaasen-like core of deceit, blackmail, sex and murder. Ali's problem is that Margot has custody of his beloved five-year old son and half the family fortune, and he'd prefer to see Margot as not only an ex-wife, but also an ex-person. Not that Ali has any corner on the duplicity market: the scheming Margot plumbs new depths of greed and corruption in pursuit of her wanton desires. It is Wambaugh's knack for character development and an easy, natural dialog that takes "Crows" above the pack and again secures the author's well deserved accolades for capturing life-inside-the-precinct. Back from "Hollywood Station" are Flotsam and Jetsam, the surfing sleuths whose SoCal beach banter nearly requires a translator, and will find you chuckling out loud. "Hollywood" Nate Weiss is still flashing his SAG card and looking for the big break, and hottie cops Ronnie Sinclair and Cat Song are as beautiful - and untouchable - as ever - and a new, predictably insufferable and clueless precinct house sergeant to replace the legendary "Oracle" of "Hollywood Station."

But this is not all fun and games - Wambaugh's distaste for the bureaucracy of the post-Rodney King federal consent decree is palpable and justified, as the restrictions placed on the department create mountains of work but little additional protection for LA's citizenry. And while Wambaugh's dark and cynical humor dominates, the story takes an unexpected but well executed turn to poignancy by the end, proving that in LA there are few winners and even less redemption.

In summary, well-paced and brilliantly crafted - a novel that captures LA life on the streets, at the same time highly entertaining and deeply sobering. A highly recommended read.

Having read this novel, my Wambaugh total is now up to - well - one, to be exact. It's about LA Cops and LA people, and provides a little peek into the sordid underbelly (apologies, but I always wanted to get an opportunity to say that) of life on the Hollywood streets.

The story isn't about the famous sign or the stars on the pavement, and it's not about black birds or old women, and to be quite honest, the plot isn't really that good in the first place, but the black humor and the low morality level is what keeps the reader turning the pages.

On the side of law and order (chung-chung!) we meet Matthew McConaughey-type surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam, who have a knack for finding trouble and a lot of true grit (from the beach). There's veteran Bix Ramstead, a loving family man coasting towards retirement, and then there's potentially famous actor Nate Weiss biding his time before being discovered. There's a trio of strong female officers named Cat, Ronnie and Gert, and a few others including the officious and clueless Sergeant Treakle, but you can read about them for yourself.

On the civilian side, there's a weaselly little cokehead named Leonard, a strip club owner named Ali Aziz, his ravishingly beautiful wife (and ex-employee) Margot, and a Mexican pharmacist who's willing to turn the other cheek for a treat and a trick. You'll also find out what goes on behind the scenes with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and all the other characters on the strip.

Naturally, some of them come into contact while Wambaugh turns his all-too-human characters into the terribly obvious story-line, and although he blows most of the suspense by straight-out telling you most of the details, there are one or two little twists he keeps until the right time. He also hits pretty hard at police procedure and bureaucracy in the light of the need to maintain an untarnished image after the Rampart affair.

I'm gathering that he's written better books, and although I don't think this is one of them, it has enough juicy stuff to make you look.






Amanda Richards, July 22, 2008

In his waning years of productivity, the author who so beautifully portrayed the real story of the LAPD in The New Centurions, The Choirboys and The Onion Field, is keeping his hand in a strange brew of bureaucracy, politics and modern police work in this follow-up to Hollywood Station. Sprinkling the cast with some of the same eccentrics, denizens of Hollywood and connecting areas, this novel makes a half-hearted stab at the cop humor sustaining a profession that deals daily with unsavory conditions and the human suffering that attends poverty, petty criminal enterprise and a city struggling to survive a hostile environment. The Hollywood Crows are a special team assigned to the Community Relations Office, sometimes referred to as "the sissy patrol" or "the teddy bears in blue" because the risk in this work is much lower than regular tours of duty.

Granted, the streets are just as crazy, regardless of police presence: the "Characters" who inhabit Hollywood's Walk of Fame, charging tourists for photographs, making surreptitious drug deals to pad their meager profits, a breeding ground for pickpockets and other scam artists; the walk-in tanning salons that front a vigorous trade in "human services"; the ubiquitous strip clubs; the fast food venues (another place to score); and the helpless frustrations of lower income working people forced to live among the fringe-dwellers. Some of these cops mix in well, particularly Flotsam and Jestsam, muscular, tanned surfers who live for the waves, an unpopular supervisor known as "chicken lips" and "Hollywood Nate" Weiss, who proudly carries his new SAG card with his police identification. Newly assigned to the CROWS, Veronica Sinclair is paired with veteran Bix Ramstead, who may be the only monogamous cop left in LA.

Two by two, training officers and rookies and the street-smart regulars ride the streets for their daily portion of law enforcement. There are really no stars in this novel, only a wide cast of personalities, cops and citizens and the events that bring them all to one tragic moment of reckoning of shock and grief, before moving on to the next shift in a fantasy landscape that promises more than it ever delivers. Hollywood is, after all, only a city like many others, crime and problem infested, riddled with cons and criminals, everyone looking for a break. No better or worse than Las Vegas or Miami. But these are Wambaugh's people, albeit a bit frayed around the edges (Dare I say "long in the tooth?"). Clinging to what he knows best, the author's forced humor fails to disguise a weary cynicism, a tacit acknowledgment of the infinite ways people can devise to harm one another and those around them. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

Lest readers think that Joseph Wambaugh has gone ornithologist on them, Hollywood Crows are not winged creatures flying through the fabled entertainment community of Los Angeles. Crows is an acronym for "community relations officers" of the Los Angeles Police Department, ombudsmen and liaisons in the community. Given its sordid history, no other law enforcement agency in America needs the efforts of this group more than the LAPD.

Wambaugh has chronicled the lives of police officers for the past four decades. His first book, THE NEW CENTURIONS, was both critically acclaimed and a bestseller. His early novels were published while he continued to serve as a Los Angeles police detective. The combination of successful author and working cop led to some unusual circumstances that one might expect in crazy California. "I would have guys in handcuffs asking me for autographs," he was said to have remarked.

The modern police officers portrayed skillfully in novels by authors such as Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos, and on the small screen in countless variations of "Law & Order" and in HBO's critically acclaimed "The Wire," can trace their beginnings back to Wambaugh. He was one of the first writers to recognize that police officers have personal lives and often face pressure similar to most middle-class Americans. But these difficulties are often exacerbated by the fact that they confront crime and danger on the job. Wambaugh's books humanize police officers and their work with humor and grace; his popularity has changed crime fiction and given it a legitimacy that it lacked previously.

HOLLYWOOD CROWS, Wambaugh's latest work of fiction, follows his traditional plot structure of introducing readers to both hard-working police officers who truly care about their job and unthinking bureaucratic officers who seem incapable of working intelligently or innovatively at any level. It is clear that Wambaugh longs for a different era in police life, when officers had more independence to perform their jobs. At the same time, however, he recognizes that many of the changes in police work are the result of lapses in judgment and professional malfeasance by police departments.

Of course Wambaugh's novels would be incomplete without the other side of the law enforcement equation: the law breaker. One of the genuine endearing qualities of his wrongdoers is that they are not evil, mean geniuses plotting to destroy mankind. Instead they are generally inept crooks who often end up caught because of their own stupidity rather than through expert police work. That is the way it generally happens in the real world --- most bad guys catch themselves. If they were smart, they would have jobs with major corporations where they could steal far more than they can on the street.

HOLLYWOOD CROWS introduces readers to surfer cops, appropriately nicknamed Flotsam and Jetsam, and to female officers Cat Song and Ronnie Sinclair. The obligatory hardened veteran officer, Bix Ramstead, represents the contrast between modern police officers and those who served in a different era, when police work was the job of white males. Throughout the novel, audiences are reminded of the difference between the modern police department and police work exemplified by Jack Webb in "Dragnet." As Wambaugh details the daily experiences of the contemporary officer, he lets readers decide if society has benefited from the modernization of its law enforcement community.

HOLLYWOOD CROWS reinforces a point that police officers in both fiction and real life know all too well --- domestic quarrels can be the most dangerous aspect of police work. The ongoing divorce of strip club operator Ali Aziz and his beautiful wife Margot will entrap and ensnare several in devious criminal activity. Many years ago a wise judge once told me that he preferred hearing criminal trials to divorce matters because "you meet a better class of people in criminal cases." That observation is reflected in the distasteful details of the domestic battle between Ali and Margot. The couple has gone to war over custody of their son, and both combatants will do just about anything to win that struggle. Margot will use beauty, sexuality and her ability to manipulate men, while Ali will turn to his many connections with the criminal element of Los Angeles.

While domestic strife is the major storyline in HOLLYWOOD CROWS, Wambaugh has numerous additional plot threads throughout the novel. Some center on the personal lives of the officers --- including that of Nathan "Hollywood Nate" Weiss --- and their interaction with a community that has come to Los Angeles from every corner of the world. Others view the ongoing struggle of many members of an urban society to simply exist in a frantic and often unsympathetic social atmosphere. How the new multicultural police force interacts with those citizens in disputes that run from minor quarrels to major crimes serves as a backdrop of the book.

Reading Joseph Wambaugh is a joy. His books are humorous, even down to the unique and whimsical names he employs. But beneath the surface is the unmistakable fact that the experienced police officer still has important insights and beliefs about law enforcement and how it can function more effectively in our society. HOLLYWOOD CROWS is a wonderful novel written by a thoughtful policeman who still cares about that trade as well as the writing profession, which has made him one of America's finest police novelists.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman

Another great read by Joseph Wambaugh. Appears not much as changed since I worked the Hollywood area in the late 70's, brought back some memories. Being retired from police work, just reading the book, I was able to place myself in the shoes of the characters, nothing really changes. Wambaugh does a good job pulling all the characters together, good humor, tells it like it is, and the book was very difficult to put down.

As a big fan anyway, this book delivers the same entertaimment as every other book he wrote.

Joseph Wambaugh literally invented this kind of novel--the daily lives of LAPD police--on patrol in the streets as well as in their personal lives, through use of anecdotes, situations and quips. This is the 13th novel of the type since the first--The New Centurions--was introduced 14 years ago.

The story is about a crime, but more important, about the men and women of Hollywood South, cops like the two surfer cops--Flotsam and Jetsam-- and Nate Weiss, Cat Song, Ronnie Sinclair and Bic Ramstead. The plot describes the duties and foibles of the Community Relations Officers--the Crows--in their efforts to assuage the fears or complaints of citizens, such as illegal parking in an apartment house lot across from an upscale strip joint or the noise from a house whose front lawn is strewn with stolen supermarket shopping carts.

The strip club is owned by Ali Azis, who is going through a bad divorce suit with his wife, Margot. Each wishes the other dead (for different reasons). Margot's plot involve a couple of the cops, which leads to more complications, as she continually makes complaints about her husband's "threats" to establish a record. It is Wambaugh at his best, and should be read.

Highly recommended.

I wish it were 1000 pages. I want to keep reading about all these wonderful characters. Some good and some bad. Keep writing Joe, you are the best.

I'm a big fan of Wambaugh and have spent many years working with police departments in Southern California--as a researcher, but not a police officer. So I know these guys--including some mentioned specifically in Lines and Shadows. In this book and its near-companion book, Hollywood Station, Wambaugh re-visits his beloved LAPD. However, coming back after a hiatus of many years, Wambaugh is confronted by the consent decree the LAPD is under because of "just one little mistake" (it would seem from Wambaugh's telling). As in previous books, Wambaugh provides the cop's point of view in a frustrating world of criminals, lawyers and police administrators who are both spineless and feckless. As usual, the results are a miasma of psychological cripples staggering through life the best they can trying to enforce the law.

As the voice of the frustrated cop, Wambaugh finds new reasons to rant about the consent decree that ripped the formerly pristine proactive department asunder. However, you see the same kind of rants in most of his novels and in non-fiction books as well. At the same time that Wambaugh finds endless fault in the consent decree, he's the same guy who introduced us to Roscoe Rules in the Choir Boys. If there ever was a reason for a consent decree, it was Roscoe!

In one of Wambaugh's best books, The Onion Field, he served up Irving Kanarek (a real person) as the most impossibly frustrating defense attorney ever. But with Wambaugh's own sense of convoluted fairness, he points out that Kanarek was doing what a defense attorney was supposed to do and doing it darned well. (Compare the treatment Kanarek received by a fellow attorney, albeit a prosecutor, in Helter Skelter.) So while Wambaugh rants and raves about whatever cops rant and rave about, he does so with a certain eye to fairness. Wambaugh overlooks the faults of fellow cops because he understands the world they live in, but then he acknowledges some outer limit--Roscoe Rules being a composite of the line on the other side of those limits. The Crows (Community Relations Officers--CROs) live in a world between "Real Cops" and social workers (from the cops' perspective.). Their work takes up a lot of slack of the annoying non-criminal activities that routinely are expected to be handled by the "Real Cops." Wambaugh weaves a wonderful tale in this amorphous world between service and enforcement.