Customer Reviews

Hollywood Station: A Novel

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Under the watchful eye of the Sergeant they call the Oracle, the members of Hollywood Station go forth each day to protect and serve the diverse population of Hollywood, never knowing what the day will bring.
One shift, they might have to referee a dispute between Spider-Man and Batman. On another, they might stumble upon a robbery scene where a bound and gagged victim is nervously squeezing a live grenade between his legs in an effort to keep it from going off. On yet another shift, one of their number might be severely beaten at the end of an otherwise quiet sting operation. Despite the uncertainty they face, they do it day after day, year in and year out.

Rich in colorful incident, at times laugh out loud funny, at times achingly poignant, Hollywood Station marks the triumphant return of Joseph Wambaugh to the police procedural. Portraying a police department under fire from within and without, Wambaugh gives the reader insights into the people who do this often thankless job; his cops are tired, and grouchy, and quick tempered, but above all, they're human, dealing with high pressure situations on a daily basis, always subject to surprise. Eschewing political correctness in his search for the truth, Wambaugh emphasizes that humanity in all its glory and tragedy, producing one of the most memorable books of 2006, a worthy successor to previous classics like The Blue Knight and The Choirboys. As the estimable Ray Bradbury says in his blurb, "Bravo."

One word: wow! Wambaugh is back - big time. A stripped down masterpiece of what it means to "protect and serve" in post-Rodney King LA, rendered with the passion and conviction that only an ex-cop like Wambaugh could muster. "Hollywood Station" will make you laugh, the petty politics and bureaucratic meddling will frustrate you, the heroics and camaraderie of understaffed and overworked street cops will make you proud, but most of all, the tales of "Hollyweird's" sleaze, glitz, crime and justice will keep the pages turning at the pace of high speed chase.

The plot spins loosely around the hand grenade-robbery of a jewelry store by Russian mobsters and the antics of a pair of burned out meth freaks, Farley and "Olive Oyl" Ramsdale. But the plot is only a convenient backdrop for Wambaugh to showcase a colorful collection of characters on both sides of the law. Told through a "Hill Street Blues-like" series of vignettes of the patrolmen and women of LA's Hollywood station, the legendary station sergeant, "the Oracle", dispenses wisdom honed by over forty years on LA's mean streets, playing mom, dad, coach and priest to his young troopers. But seemingly disconnected storylines weave together in time for a slick and satisfying conclusion, complete with a neat and unexpected little twist. Reading Wambaugh again after such a long hiatus reminds me that the popular crime writers of today - Connelly, Lehane, Crais - are beholden to Wambaugh much like "Flotsam and Jetsam", "Hollywood" Nate Weiss, Budgie Polk, and the other fictional officers to Hollywood station are in debt to "the Oracle." Gritty and realistic, this long awaited return was worth every minute, a heartfelt and poignant tribute to LAPD's finest. As the Oracle would say, "go on out tonight and have some fun," and read this book.

As I began reading HOLLYWOOD STATION, I couldn't help but be reminded of Ed McBain. The similarities are countless. McBain invented the police procedural. McBain also relied on multiple story lines as each of his detectives worked on separate cases. McBain worked in social issues occasionally. They were both masters of characterization with characters who jumped off the page. The main resemblance, however, is the humor both authors employ. I found myself laughing out loud while reading The 87th Precinct series, and Wambaugh is a close second.

Wambaugh hasn't written a police procedural since THE FLOATERS, and I was worried he wouldn't be as good as I remembered. Never fear; Wambaugh hasn't lost a step. The main thread of the story deals with "tweakers," people who are addicted to methamphetamines. Farley Ramsdale and his girlfriend Olive steal mail from mailboxes and sell it to the Russian mafia. This, in turn, leads to a jewelry store robbery and an armored car hold-up. Wambaugh's collection of blue shirts begin to investigate. There is the Oracle, a sergeant with over forty years experience on the force; there are two surfer cops, nicknamed Flotsam and Jetsam; there's Fausto Gambino, another old-time copper who's been teamed with a woman who's just had a baby; there's Hollywood Nate, who seems to care more about getting stand-in jobs in the movies and television than he does police work; there's even a Russian-American cop, Viktor Chernenko, who's called in to deal with the Russian mafia.

Thematically Wambaugh deals with the increasing state and federal interference in police work since the Rodney King incident. The cops even file false reports to deal with the ban against profiling. The coppers list white people they've stopped who don't exist. Wambaugh also delves into the increasing acceptance of female detectives on the squad. There is a funny sequence where Budgie Polk, Fausto's new female partner, is lactating while on duty.

When Ed McBain died last year, I lost one of my old reliables. Wambaugh is the closest thing we've got to take his place. We can only hope he doesn't wait as long with a follow-up to HOLLYWOOD STATION.

Thank You Mr. Wambaugh for coming home! You've been missed.
The sign of a great novelist is to make the fantasy real. To involve the reader in a world where fantasy merges into reality in such a way that the reader has empathy for the characters. Mr. Wambaugh does this in Spades with Hollywood Station. Humor, grit, sadness, and euphoria all erupt on the pages of this in the "belly of the beast" police novel. Plot is tight and quick moving. Street dialog is gritty and as real as it gets. Character development is good and I hope some of the actors return to reprise their roles. All in all the book grabs you from page one, gets in your face, and finally lets you go in the last sentence.
No gratuitous violence or sexual scenes. Just a good story about what it is like to be a cop in Hollywood. "Hey dude get you board and let's go!"
If you like Connelly then Wambaugh is your man. Highly recommended.

Joseph Wambaugh's return to fiction could not be any better. No one has ever chronicled the lives of cops in America's most famous police department, the LAPD, than Wambaugh who was a serving cop when he wrote his first novel "The New Centurions" back in 1970. It was groundbreaking and spawned imitators as great ideas often do. He followed up with "The Choirboys" some years later, again telling what it was like to be a street cop in the City of Angels. Prior to this new work, I had considered "Choirboys" the best and truest cop book ever penned. Having been a police officer for over 30 years, I know the difference from those who talk the talk vice walk the walk.

"Hollywood Station" is an absolute gem! Is is great literature? No. But it is true, even though it's told in a novel's framework. It's all there: the action, the dialogue, the dark humor, the heartbreak, the serendipity of a case suddenly and unexpectedly solved, the quirky characters, and most of all, what it means to be a cop in these times. Even though the book's set in LA, it could be about any urban police department. Our lives are remarkably similar. There's some comment too on what it means to be a part of something larger than yourself, take pride in your professionalism and doing well, and having outsiders trying to tell you how to do your job "correctly." (By the way, Joe, I agree with your thoughts on Compstat. Now if it could show us where the next crime would occur, well...)

All in all, this is just an outstanding book. Like they say in Hollywood Division, it "stays real." Semper cop!

It was his friend the fellow crime novelist James Ellroy (to whom this novel is dedicated) who urged Joseph Wambaugh to write another book set among the Los Angeles police. So after a too long, 20-year absence we finally have another of Wambaugh's sprawling, epic, black-humored tales of L.A. cops caught in the urban war zone. This novel really is a throwback to the glory days of "The New Centurions", "The Choirboys", "The Blue Knight", and "The Onion Field." There is a noticeable difference however. In the old days, you were liable to finish a Wambaugh novel like "Blue Knight", "Choirboys", or "The Secrets of Harry Bright" feeling like you had fallen off a cliff into a pit of the darkest, deepest despair. There's still tragedy in "Hollywood Station", but it seems that Wambaugh has come to terms with some things at age 70. I wouldn't say he has gone soft at all, but there is a mellowness in this book. Especially towards the female characters like the single mom Budgie Polk, there is an unanticipated tenderness in Wambaugh's writing. It's almost as if Wambaugh is actually "The Oracle", the wise, kind old nameless sergeant who presides over the besieged cops of Hollywood station. There is a small portrait of an "old socialist", unexpectedly fair professor at a politically correct university that could almost be considered a peace offering to old adversaries. In this book we find a couple of characters who are unconsciously looking for surrogate parents; in a suprisingly benevolent universe (for Wambaugh) they find them.

Not that Wambaugh still doesn't have strong opinions about those with unexamined, unjustified contempt for police officers. He is withering about the current state of the L.A.P.D., caused by those who overreacted to the scandals of the 1990's. Wambaugh sees a police force understaffed, underfunded and dispirited by federal courts, biased press, and a new, explosive epidemic of crystal meth abuse. This book reeks of authenticity; it's obviously based on long conversations with current officers. There are gripping gritty accounts of that meth plague; the new, booming field of internet-assisted identity theft; the Russian mafia in all its brutal glory; and Wambaugh's usual catalog of casually encountered horrors.

You read a Wambaugh book for the people you find inside it. There are several three-dimensional characters who are drawn with the consummate skill of an old master. It's been said that David E. Kelley of "Boston Legal" fame has bought the rights to this book and wants to turn it into a television series. That could work, but I would rather see the Coen brothers turn this into a movie. It has the eccentric characters, black humor and heart of "Fargo." (I sound like Hollywood Nate, the movie-obsessed cop of this novel.) Anyway, if you like quality fiction you should get this as soon as you can. Wambaugh is a great American writer who deserves to be mentioned along with Updike and Roth. He's as fun as a genre writer but in the end busts out of that too-narrow classification.

LAPD's Hollywood Division is not as glamorous as it sounds. Here the prostitutes and transvestites troll for johns while "tweakers" fish envelopes out of mailboxes in search of anything they can use toward the purchase of their next hit of crystal meth and celebrity clones stroll along the Hollywood walk of fame seeking gullible tourists. Since Rodney King, law enforcement officials, from the beat cops to the detectives, must bide by rigid rules and continual scrutiny, from their internal affairs division to Washington DC. But they have the protective eye of their Sergeant on their side, a man they refer to as the Oracle, who has been on the Job for 46 years.

The story centers around a tweaker named Farley Ramsdale and his girlfriend, whom he calls Olive because she resembles Popeye's Olive Oyl. Farley is a small-time crook who thinks he is being smart by making Olive do all the dirty work: fishing envelopes out of mailboxes, trying to pass counterfeit bills in stores, and stealing magnetic cards from hotels which Farley sells to other criminals specializing in identity theft. When Cosmo, an Armenian immigrant and Ilya, his Russian girlfriend, steal diamonds from a jeweler, Farley quickly puts two and two together; Farley is the one who passed on to Cosmo a letter from the jewelry store inventorying the diamonds. When Farley demands a cut of the action, Cosmo decides he and Olive must be eliminated, but from that point on, everything begins to spin out of control.

Wambaugh is a master at characterization and witticisms. His humorous style and observations make this a fun read, with quirky, offbeat characters and plenty of action. What seems at first to be a loose, albeit amusing, telling of the goings on within the Los Angeles Police Department Hollywood Station and the criminals that surround it, comes together at the end to form one heck of a good story. The situations the officers find themselves in are at times laugh-out-loud funny, as are the interactions between the characters. Hollywood Station provides a poignant look into the inner workings and ever-present political wrangling behind the scenes of the LAPD. Highly entertaining; recommended.

If you are a Joseph Wambaugh fan you will be disapointed in "Hollywood Station." This is a far cry from his earlier works such as the "Onion Field", "Choirboys" etc. For almost half of the book there was no plot. One must read further to discover the story that unfolds. It seems the real premise of the book is how the LAPD had changed these many years, and not for the better. The story is filled with complaints from the characters concerning a federal consent decree that has brought the LAPD under close scrutiny by outside agencies. This, I am sure, is based on fact.
Wambaugh has written sixteen prior fiction and nonfiction books. "Hollywood Station" is much like his latter works, thin and not too interesting. After an absence on the book scene for many years, this book is a real letdown.

A nice return to form for Mr. Wambaugh. I must admit I found the seemingly endless anecdotes of cop stories (terrific stuff by the way) a bit more compelling than the plot. There is nothing wrong with the plot at all save the ending which might be a little pat but, the individual cop stories make this an easy recommendation.

As a fan of Wambaugh's earliest works, I looked forward to his newest novel, like many other readers. His return to the police novel after many years away is only mildly satisfying. While Hollywood Station is entertaining, most readers will forget they read it within a month. It is light on plot, has some interesting characters and easy to read. It has little depth. There isn't much that makes this book stand out from the crowd.