17 Dec 2012 03:37:42
A former LAPD detective sergeant – he quit when his fame began intruding on his work – Wambaugh reveals on his website that he ran out of his own material to mine for his fiction 30 years ago. He began collecting fresh stories from serving officers, and in the front of Harbour Nocturne, the author thanks 51 of them "for the terrific anecdotes and great cop talk". From the costumed street characters who hustle tourists in front of Grauman's Chinese theatre to the police officer who lets a Gypsy off a ticket to avoid a curse, and the child lying dead while his mother and grandmother watch television, Harbour Nocturne's stories of real-life policing are odd, tragic, hilarious – always compelling.
So are the members of the LAPD midwatch – some familiar, some new – who patrol the city between 5pm and 3am every day, "the height of street action". There's "Hollywood Nate", cop and aspiring actor, Chester Toles, dubbed "the Unicorn" because he can never be found when he's needed, Marius Tatarescu, a burly Romanian-born "jokester", his partner Sophie, 20 years on the job, married and divorced three times and a dedicated animal rights advocate. Best of all, there's the surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam, who speak an almost entirely incomprehensible lingo ("You should see all the Emmas in butt-floss bikinis start jigging their chesticles when they ogle the robo kahuna with the bionic hoof") and who are drawn into a strange and convoluted undercover operation.
Jetsam has a prosthetic foot, and an undercover sergeant wants to use him as bait to trap a wealthy Russian obsessed with amputees, who's involved with a human-trafficking gang bringing Asian girls into the US to work in massage parlours. This is how the Hollywood cops cross over with the story at the heart of Harbour Nocturne: that of Dinko Babich, a longshoreman in the port of San Pedro, who stumbles across a Mexican girl working as a dancer for the gang. Dinko falls almost immediately for the beautiful Lita, prostitute with a heart of gold, and when she sees something she shouldn't, spends the novel trying to protect her from the gang members who want her dead.
Dinko's story keeps the novel moving, but it's the cops who bring it to absorbing, riveting life, together with Wambaugh's gripping, convincing vision of the melting pot of cultures that is LA. "Welcome to the harbour, where the sewer meets the surf. Where the debris meets the sea," says Dinko at one point. It's dirty, drug-addled and disturbing, but as the police officers are always saying, to explain the inexplicable, "This is fucking Hollywood". A worthy addition to the canon of the author known as the father of the modern police novel, Harbour Nocturne should not be missed.
