L.A. cop writes what he knows

WHEN it comes to Los Angeles-based police mysteries, the recognized leaders of the form are not cops. Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch series, started as a reporter for this newspaper. Stephen J. Cannell brought years of television writing experiences to his Shane Black series, as did Robert Crais when creating Joe Pike and other L.A. Police Department characters.

With the notable exceptions of former LAPD Det. Paul Bishop and legendary ex-cop Joseph Wambaugh, these writers had to rely on research -- newspaper accounts, nonfiction, cop memoirs or departmental reports -- augmented by sources within the department who, through sharing their anecdotes and remembrances of old case files, gave them scraps of stories from which the writers, using their own skills as storytellers, wove into fiction.

It’s clear that Will Beall, an LAPD officer, has a leg up on the non-cops when you read “L.A. Rex,” his fictional account of 77th Division rookie Ben Halloran and hard-nosed veteran Miguel Marquez. Halloran’s abuse at the hands of Marquez, the younger cop’s training officer and mentor, has the crackle and spark of what one could easily imagine was life on the streets in 1998 Los Angeles, a city still on edge after the Rodney King riots and a consent decree that shackled the department’s ability to solve crimes.

But not, it appears, Marquez’s ability to whip butt. A holdover from Chief Darryl F. Gates’ reign, the Latino is a racist of the old school who sizes up Halloran as “a Brentwood baby out here playing Adam ... 12,” and he sets up his young charge on his first night on patrol for a beating from what appears to be a harmless wino.

Marquez’s instincts are more on point than he knows -- Halloran is really Benji Kahn, son of a Jewish lawyer notorious for his representation of assorted aggrieved citizens, gangsters and gangster rappers, most notably Darius James Washington, aka Crazy D, a rap mogul who bears an uncanny resemblance to Death Row Records’ co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight.

Crazy D takes an inexplicable liking to Benji -- who also counts among his friends another of daddy’s clients, a Latino gangster named Carcosa -- and proceeds to make the young man one of his inner circle before falling out with him. The resulting contract Crazy D puts out sends Benji underground; he changes his name to Ben Halloran and eventually joins the department so he can be a snitch for Carcosa.

Some of his characters may disdain LAPD bureaucracy, but Beall should know that a department background investigation would have uncovered Halloran/Kahn in about 10 minutes. The misstep in this key bit of back story is indicative of a major problem with “L.A. Rex”: The reader is asked to swallow too much bilge water and pretend it’s champagne.

And although Beall excels at painting a slang-rich world of cops and criminals and in setting up scenes that read like the overheard anecdotes of veteran cops, the unrelenting gore and excessive detail undermines what little genuine story exists. It’s at this level that novels live or die.

It’s not that Beall doesn’t try. There are alternating chapters highlighting the important back story as well as present-day action involving Ben, Crazy D and Marquez that stir the reader’s sympathy and build suspense. There also are multiple levels of father-son relationships among Benji, Carcosa, his father and Marquez and a parallel relationship between Crazy D and his gangster father figure, Jax.

But instead of exploring these in more depth, Beall gives readers layer upon layer of gratuitous violence, some of it cleverly original, but too much of it ripped from the headlines of the life and legend of Suge Knight. (The infamous myth that Knight dangled rapper Vanilla Ice over a balcony in a royalties dispute is transmuted into Carcosa beating the unfortunately named Sarsaparilla Whiskey like a “human pinata” for a similar offense.)

Beall also plays fast and loose with facts that would drive some writers and readers to distraction, such as placing the Hollywood & Highland retail development in a 1998 story line, three years before it opened, or referencing television shows such as “MTV Cribs,” which premiered years after the novel’s main action.

One hopes that in future books Beall finds a way to balance his obvious zeal for the genre and crime fighting with the careful interplay of character, plot and theme found in the best writing of Connelly, Wambaugh and others.

But maybe he won’t have to: Beall reportedly is working on a screenplay of “L.A. Rex” for producer Scott Rudin, whose credits include “The Queen,” “The Hours” and “Clueless.”

Hopefully the close mentorship of someone who knows a good story will help Beall write a better screen version of this unfortunately overwrought first novel.

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Paula L. Woods is the author of a mystery series featuring LAPD Det. Charlotte Justice, including, most recently, “Strange Bedfellows.”