Dealing with the police bard

When Tim Smith graduated from San Diego State, job prospects weren’t promising for English literature majors. But the San Diego Police Department was hiring.

In 1978, Smith began as a rookie cop in downtown San Diego: a minister’s son with an anti-authority streak, given to sassing his superiors and quoting Shakespeare at odd times.

His nonconformity notwithstanding, he rose to the rank of lieutenant, switched to the city schools’ police force and then retired in 2003 after being injured in an on-duty traffic accident.

The 55-year-old Smith now lives in Ashland, Ore., to be near his daughter and her family and also the famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He attends all the plays. He has a blog, https://www.copworld.wordpress.com.

And now he’s written a novel about a rookie cop in downtown San Diego in 1978 — with all the other familiar traits of a minister’s son with an anti-authority streak.

“The Sticking Place” — taken from a line about courage from “Macbeth” — has the literary conventions common to the cop-story genre: young cop/old cop, after-work drinking bouts, cynical cops with messy marriages, ribald humor.

It also has a high-minded protagonist, rookie Luke Jones, who is slowly coming to terms with the fact that law enforcement is a blunt instrument not altogether suited to fixing society’s deeper problems — a lesson brought home by a down-and-out UCLA literature professor who looks up from the gutter and quotes “King Lear.” A bond is born.

“Luke is me, but he’s not me,” Smith said. “He’s certainly more interesting than me. One thing is sure, his worst qualities hold up a pretty good mirror to who I used to be: pugnacious, somewhat arrogant, intolerant of hazing and too willing to stand up when he should sit down, shut up and take his lumps.”

Luke Jones uses Shakespeare to squelch jerks, like the cop he describes as akin to the comic character Bardolph, “that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack…”

Or when he contemplates a suicide victim and remembers “Richard II”: “Of comfort let no man speak/Let’s talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs.”

Smith said that unlike Luke Jones, he never used Shakespeare “as a weapon,” but he would spout a few lines to win after-work arguments about the meaning of incidents the police had handled.

“I’d hop up on the bar or nearby table and belt out a little something to prove my point,” Smith said. “The usual response was a barrage of apple cores or wadded napkins.”

Author and fictional character also share a common strength: filling out the copious reports and forms that many officers dread as the bane of police work.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders was a police sergeant in 1978 when Smith was assigned to his squad. He fondly remembers Smith as a gregarious, egotistical rookie who matured into a “solid” officer.

“He was going to solve police work single-handedly in the city of San Diego,” Sanders said with a laugh.

As for report writing, Sanders, also an English major at San Diego State, said he had to frequently tell Smith to tone down his literary flourishes.

“I could tell he wanted to be a novelist,” said Sanders, who later became chief. “That’s not necessarily what you want on a police report.”

“The Sticking Place” captures the San Diego of 1978: a decaying downtown; a police department evolving from a kick-butt past to a “community-oriented policing” style, much to the disgust of older officers; a chain-smoking chief struggling to maintain the respect of his officers while seeming to obey the dictates of City Hall; and an ambitious mayor named Pete (read: Wilson) who dreamed of being governor, maybe president, and was determined to hold down police salaries.

The fictional rookie finds out — as the real one did — that San Diego’s civic motto, “America’s Finest City,” often collides with street-level reality.

“There’s no such place as America’s Finest City or paradise for the cops encountering broken bodies and souls on their beat,” Smith said in a recent interview. “…Take a quick spin by Petco [Park] and you’ll see there’s a mighty ugly, unsolved problem of homelessness.”

The book’s cover promises that “The Sticking Place” is the first Luke Jones novel. More will follow, promises the author, whose pen name is T.B. Smith.

“Each will focus on a major theme in policing,” Smith said, “and Luke will definitely keep quoting the Bard.”

tony.perry@latimes.com