The badge and the boulevard

LIKE a ghost returning to the scene of the crime, Joseph Wambaugh was back on the streets of Hollywood. Nearly 40 years ago he had patrolled the fabled, sleazy boulevards as a Juvenile cop with the Los Angeles Police Department -- long before he became a master of the modern police novel. Now he was back in town, researching new material for his first book about the LAPD in many years, and it was an uneasy homecoming.

“I felt that I knew this place better than most, but there had been so many changes since I last wrote about Los Angeles,” the author said. “It felt weird to be back. I had to find out what was different here.”

As he cruised the neighborhood and interviewed dozens of cops, Wambaugh learned two things in a hurry: Hollywood and the LAPD have changed enormously since he began writing books such as “The New Centurions” and “The Onion Field” in the early 1970s. But the basic psychological makeup of the officers who patrol the streets was the same. Both of these elements form the main focus of his just-published novel, “Hollywood Station” (Little, Brown), a fast-paced, often surreal chronicle of contemporary police life in Los Angeles. The book is packed with scenes from the dark side of Sunset Boulevard and stark portraits of officers -- men and women -- who patrol the streets filled with tourists, small merchants, runaways, hookers, pimps, petty criminals, druggies and vagrants.

In “Hollywood Station,” cops are struggling just to be cops. They chafe under the weight of the 2001 federal consent decree imposed on the LAPD in the wake of the Rampart Division scandal. They have contempt for racial diversity guidelines that -- they say -- compel them to invent the names of white people interviewed in Latino and Asian areas. They speak cynically about the persistent threat of civil rights lawsuits making it impossible to do their jobs.

Critics would counter that the department is paying the price for years of corruption and racial insensitivity. But amid this greatly changed policing landscape, the author found some psychological continuity.

“The basic police personality has not changed,” Wambaugh said. “Firefighters are team players; they live to save people, to help people. But cops are not team players. They’re individualists. They’re in-your-face people. They go out every night not knowing if they’re going to save people, or hurt somebody or kill somebody. And they never wear their emotions on their sleeves. They keep it all inside. When they get home, it takes a toll on them, with divorce and suicides.”

The world of emotionally burned-out cops has been a recurring theme in Wambaugh’s fiction. But “Hollywood Station” shows a deepening sense of character and motivation; after 35 years of writing, his appreciation for the frustration that officers grapple with, especially as they age, has matured.

At 69, he still looks the part of a tough L.A. police officer. A trim, physically fit man with graying hair, he speaks in clipped, no-nonsense tones about daily life on the police force and his later years as a writer. On a recent sunny afternoon, as he relaxed on the patio of his San Diego home, his sunglasses and dark blue LAPD T-shirt made him look like a senior detective enjoying a day off.

Widely regarded as the first writer to probe the inner lives of police officers in modern fiction and nonfiction, Wambaugh is also credited with influencing a spate of television shows including “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue” and “Hill Street Blues” that have portrayed the complex psychology of cops on the beat. And “Hollywood Station” itself may be headed for the TV screen. Producer David E. Kelley -- creator of “Boston Legal,” “The Practice” and other shows -- recently optioned the book for a series. He and the author will soon begin writing a pilot script, aiming to re-create the raucous, outspoken cast of characters who drive the gritty, 338-page novel.

Wambaugh’s 17th book posed a special challenge: His goal was not just to describe the new Hollywood from a police officer’s viewpoint. He wanted to explain it in the context of the L.A. psyche.

“There’s an old saying among LAPD members whenever something bizarre or surreal comes up from the streets of Hollywood,” Wambaugh noted. “They’ll say, ‘It’s Hollywood, it’s the heart of Los Angeles,’ just like they said ‘It’s Chinatown’ in the film. Hollywood, for an author, can become a dark mirror of the entire city.”

In returning to Los Angeles as a subject, he was also determined to show that he can still deliver the goods. Since he began writing in the late 1960s, the police procedural novel has exploded in popularity as an international genre. In America, Michael Connelly, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, James Ellroy, Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson and Ridley Pearson have become brand names. Although Wambaugh’s recent books have sold well -- and were well-received by critics -- they have topically roamed far afield, focusing on criminal intrigue in the world of yachting and border patrols, and have included nonfiction titles about a Southern California arsonist and a rapist in the English midlands.

The idea of revisiting the LAPD, he said, came in part from Ellroy. “He kept saying to me, ‘You lived through this, and you’ve never ceased being an LA cop,’ which is true,” the author recalled. “I mean, I hang out with cops all the time, and I read everything about them. I look at the L.A. Times every day to see if there’s anything going on with the LAPD. Everybody who knows me knows I’ve never stopped.”

But reconnecting with this world was easier said than done. Wambaugh retired from the LAPD as a detective in the Hollenbeck Division in 1974, after the burgeoning celebrity generated by his first novels made it impossible to continue with his day job. He fled Los Angeles’ growing congestion and settled in Newport Beach. Finding Orange County’s traffic equally uncomfortable, he next moved his family to San Diego, where he now lives with Dee, his wife of 51 years. From the patio of his Point Loma home, with its sweeping view of downtown San Diego, the North Island Naval Air Station and the hills of Mexico, he began plotting his return to Hollywood.

An ear to the ground

“HOW do I write a novel?” he asked. “The same way I always do. I interview cops.”

Milking contacts he had built up over decades, Wambaugh called friends in the Hollywood station, and they put him in touch with young and old officers willing to speak about their lives. “I knew these people would have interesting things to say, and that I’d find a lot to write about,” he said. “And believe me, 54 cops later, I had plenty to say.”

He met them in watering holes in and around Hollywood and in restaurants such as the Pacific Dining Car downtown. The older, veteran cops remembered Wambaugh’s first bestselling books and sometimes brought along copies for him to autograph; younger officers, however, weren’t so sure about who he was and what he was really up to.

“Like all young people today, they’re not necessarily well-read, they do a lot of other things,” Wambaugh noted. “One young guy said to me: ‘I hear that you’re an icon.’ And I said, ‘What the hell is that -- a relic?’ But they all respected me.”

All of the officers, young and old, insisted that Wambaugh scribble away on legal pads instead of using a tape recorder when they talked. And the material they gave him formed the basis for some of the book’s most bracing episodes: The author concedes he could never have dreamed up the identity theft scam where Hollywood vagrants lower poles with mousetraps into mailboxes to fish out mail and steal information. Or the friendly Ukranian detective who tells his colleagues, in broken English, that a problem he’s been wrestling with “is the fly in the jelly.”

Along the way, Wambaugh painted a cop’s-eye profile of Hollywood in flux: Although the area had long been a magnet for tourists, runaways and petty criminals, it was now plagued by gang violence. Redevelopment, however highly touted, had not fundamentally altered the area’s seedy feeling. As new immigrant groups were arriving, African Americans were leaving.

The author used material wherever he found it. Some stories came from officers in San Diego but were transplanted into a Hollywood setting. Many characters were composites. By the end, Wambaugh wrote a book in which the most engaging people were veteran women police officers. He did not set out to do this, but he was hardly surprised when they stood out so dramatically in the mix.

“The fact is that police work, especially in the investigative stages, is mostly about talk,” he said. “You have to be able to persuade people to talk to you. And women are more persuasive that way. They’re not afraid to talk, to reveal their true feeling or emotions -- and that makes the person reporting a crime, or suspect or a victim, more ready to unload.”

A little over 15 years ago, Wambaugh declared in a Los Angeles Times interview that it was no longer outrageous to think a woman could be chief of the LAPD. He still believes this, and it shows that after so many years, Wambaugh still has a penchant for getting under the skin of department hard-liners.

Butting heads with the brass

BORN in Pittsburgh, the son of a Catholic cop, his family moved to Southern California in 1951. He joined the Marines at 17, and became an LAPD officer in 1960. Unlike many of his colleagues, he hungered for a college education and got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English by taking night courses at Cal State L.A. After several failed stabs at short stories, he published his first novel in 1971.

“The New Centurions” followed a group of recruits from the academy to the Watts riots, and it sparked anger among the brass. The debut was a shocker because it portrayed the lusty, profane side of a force previously personified by the stick-figure characters on “Dragnet.” He quickly followed with other bestsellers, including “The Choirboys,” “The Black Marble” and “The Blue Knight.”

For all his success, however, Wambaugh has a sensitive ego when it comes to his legacy. Ever since he began writing, he said, he has been on the outs with a series of LAPD chiefs. Only the current chief, William J. Bratton, he said, has given Wambaugh the respect he believes he has earned by now as a writer and symbol of the department.

“He [Bratton] invited me to an event at the academy and I talked and signed books all evening. No other police chief has used me in PR like I thought I should be used. I mean, I’m more than willing to be used. I can help the department with its image.”

Nowadays, he said with a sigh, that image has been badly tarnished. There are far less ambitious men and women lining up to join a force that Wambaugh said is still the nation’s best. A sure-fire way to reform the mess, he suggested, would be to restore the chief’s independence from political meddling, with civil service protection. But that kind of change, he conceded, is unlikely.

“I tell the truth about cops,” he said. “Some like it. Some don’t.”

Mostly, though, Wambaugh enjoys the irony -- and dark humor -- of this world. As he guided a visitor on a tour of his study, showing off memorabilia on the walls, he paused at a black-and-white photo: It showed three cops shining flashlights into the camera, standing behind a German shepherd police dog straining at the leash.

“That’s LAPD community relations in action,” he cracked. “At your service.”

josh.getlin@latimes.com

Wambaugh will be appearing with James Ellroy at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Westwood Crest Theatre, 1262 Westwood Blvd., as part of the Writers Bloc series. Tickets are $20. (310) 335-0917.