In the shadow of the moon, Hollywood Station

Joseph Wambaugh served as a LA police officer was one of the first writers to use a more realistic approach to writing about police work. His newest book, Hollywood Station, is his first book in ten years and it is a well balanced mix of black humor and suspense.

The story centers around the LAPD Hollywood Station and it has a mix of colorful policeman including two surfer-cops, the grizzled sexists serving with female cops, the wannabe actor cop and the over his head newbie. The first half of the book is made up of alternatively humorous and grim stories of life on the police force. This is something Wambaugh emphasizes, when the police go on a call, they don't know if someone is going to try to kill them or present them with an outlandish situation. He also uses this section to detail the effects of Federal oversight on the post-Rampart scandal LAPD.

Just as the book seems to be little more than a collection of anecdotes helping us to understand the world from the cop's point of view, Wambaugh rolls out a tightly constructed suspense plot line involving meth addicts and Eastern European gangsters. Wambaugh toys with the reader, setting up tense situations only to release and then finally hitting the reader with the finale. This reminded me how little suspense is created in modern mysteries, the emphasis being more on creating gritty realism, providing surprises or further developing characters.

A number of mystery writers, especially the gritty and LA-centric ones, cite Wambaugh as a key influence and this book is prove that he still has it.