‘Golden’ Guy : Books: Author Joseph Wambaugh takes a kinder, gentler, approach with the cynicism in his latest novel.

After living for 13 years among its face lifts and Ferraris, Newport Beach’s best known author finally has written about his hometown.

Joseph Wambaugh’s new novel, “The Golden Orange,” is a caustic, cynical view of the wealthy waterfront community, the kind of place where shoppers buy slabs of abalone “like it was lunch meat, at $40 per pound” and a Mercedes is “considered a Chevy Nova.”

Then, there are the “hot mommas”--the “sleek and slim and expensive” fortysomething women who hang out at a place that seems to be a thinly veiled Balboa Bay Club. Wambaugh’s fictional women are constantly on the prowl for wealthy husbands. They spend their days on the private club’s beach working on their tans and their evenings in the club bar, which is just dark enough to “camouflage nips and tucks and bad sutures and lumpy implants and curdled silicone.”

So what does Wambaugh do on the eve of the’s book’s publication?

He leaves town.

“And sure enough,” said Wambaugh, “30 people have already asked me: ‘Are you leaving Orange County because you wrote a book about Newport?’ ”

The author shook his head and laughed: “It might sell a few books, if they think that.”

Actually, Joe and Dee Wambaugh put their Linda Isle house on the market for $3.3 million and moved to San Diego County’s exclusive Rancho Santa Fe to escape Orange County’s traffic and to give their two dogs more space to roam.

Wambaugh’s not worried what his yacht club pals will think of his characterization of Newport.

“Oh, they’ll love it,” he said. “They’ll be claiming to be in the book even when they’re not. They enjoy the notoriety.”

Wambaugh decided to use Newport Beach as the backdrop for a novel because “I wanted to tell an interesting suspense story and it seemed that that atmosphere would work. I think a suspense story needs some sort of interesting atmosphere, preferably an exotic atmosphere. Newport Beach is an exotic atmosphere to most of the world--very exotic.”

Since his first book, “The New Centurions,” was published in 1971 while he was still a Los Angeles Police Department burglary detective, Wambaugh has written a string of fiction and nonfiction best-sellers, including “The Blue Knight,” “The Choirboys,” “The Onion Field” and, most recently, “The Blooding.”

“The Golden Orange,” his 12th book, is his first novel in five years. It opens with 40-year-old alcoholic ex-Newport Beach cop Winston “Winnie” Farlowe having his usual 3 a.m. alcohol-induced visitations: Twin hallucinatory buzzards he has dubbed “Fear” and “Remorse.”

One drunken escapade aboard the Balboa Island ferry comes to the attention of Tess Binder, an alluring, three-times-divorced member of Newport’s moneyed elite. Binder shows up one night at Farlowe’s favorite waterfront gin joint and proceeds to introduce him to her world.

Binder is a woman with a past and Farlowe is dangerously caught up in her present when someone takes a shot at them during a weekend in the desert.

In creating his characters for “The Golden Orange,” Wambaugh tapped a wealth of firsthand observations.

Take Tess Binder’s home on what Wambaugh terms in his novel as “the ghetto” side of Linda Isle. That’s the side of the private island, he writes, where some houses sell for “as little as $1.2 million on leased land” and residents, instead of having a main harbor channel view, are forced to face Pacific Coast Highway and “endure traffic noise.” Wambaugh, who has lived on both sides of Linda Isle, said he picked up the “ghetto” gag from a real estate agent.

His inspiration for Tess’s yacht club was the Balboa Bay Club where, according to Wambaugh, there really are “hot mommas.”

“The Bay Club’s famous for that,” he said, laughing. “Everybody knows that. I’m not revealing any big secrets there.”

In the book’s acknowledgments, Wambaugh thanks former and current Newport Beach police officers, who “treated me to terrific cop talk.”

As he’s done with all his recent novels, Wambaugh said, he would “just get a bunch of cops together and go to dinner, have a few drinks and talk. Virtually everything in the book that has to do with cops I got from them--working the beach patrol and all that crazy stuff. They were excellent talkers.”

Winnie’s hangout, Spoon’s Landing, is a composite of several bars on the Balboa Peninsula. Although they’re not the kind of places he frequents, Wambaugh himself has been known as a heavy drinker.

“I was when I was younger,” he said. “I’ve grown up a little bit.”

Still fit and trim, with his hair cropped as short as in his LAPD days, Wambaugh now rides an exercise bicycle. He ran every day for 16 years, he said, but it took its toll on his knees and his back.

“I was absolutely obsessive” about it. “I do everything to excess.”

That includes writing. When he’s working on a book, he’ll write up to six hours a day, seven days a week, the act of writing being so intense that, he said, “I get a little nauseous after about six hours.”

Wambaugh completes a book in six months or less. But the time between books is growing longer.

“It’s not that I take time off; the cup empties,” he said. “You have to wait for it to fill.”

Wambaugh said he’s not only five years between novels, but “it’s not easy to find a good nonfiction story.

“They don’t come along everyday. I don’t know of any right now that I could jump into. Sure, there’s big crimes that happen . . . But there’s 80 writers out there and 10 TV companies. That’s not for me.”

When he started publishing, Wambaugh said, “writers weren’t conscious of jumping on these kinds of stories.” He said the story of “The Onion Field,” the nonfiction book he is most proud of, “was just sitting there.”

Unlike his early books, in which he worked in the same milieu he was writing about, “now I have to go out and get it,” he said. “I do research. If it’s a novel, I talk to cops. If it’s nonfiction, I talk to the people who lived it. I’m getting out there. I’m not doing these interior monologues for 330 pages about my first experience in the back seat of an Oldsmobile or something.”

Indeed, Wambaugh bypassed that particular literary rite of passage, the coming-of-age novel.

“I was saved, I’m sure, because, one, I had police experience and, two, when I was coming of age I was too busy to ‘come-of-age,’ ” said Wambaugh, who joined the Marines at 17, was a cop at 23 and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English by attending college in his spare time. “Honestly, the kind of novel you’re talking about, I didn’t have time to think of that.”

Wambaugh views “The Golden Orange” as his “softest book, the softest novel that I’ve ever written. You don’t find what has been termed ‘the ghoulish glee’ in my stories in ‘The Golden Orange.’ ”

He laughed: “You find a kinder, gentler Joe Wambaugh.”

That gentler approach, he said, “just seemed appropriate. I didn’t think about it consciously. I just started writing and that’s what came out.”

That’s not to say he couldn’t have written a harder-edged tale set in Newport Beach.

“Oh, yeah. I could have used my ‘Choirboys’ weapons and written a savage satire,” he said.

But he chose not to.

“Maybe I’m mellowing with age,” he said. “I’ll have to ask Dee about that.

“Dee, am I mellowing with age?” he yelled up to his wife in the kitchen. “We’re talking about ‘The Golden Orange’ being a kinder, gentler Joe Wambaugh.”

His wife of 33 years, peered down into the family room.

“Well, he is mellowing just a tad,” she said. Then she grinned: “I would not say a big tad.”