Hollywood Station Review

Hollywood Station By Joseph Wambough

Of late I have been all this and that about Derek Raymond, the fatalistic British crime writer who was once a professional criminal.  He is something else, I’m not going to say he isn’t all of a sudden.  The flip side of that though is Joseph Wambaugh, the American crime writer who was once a policeman. I used to go job hunting and networking at PI conferences, it was actually PIs that recommended him to me.  He’s good.  Interestingly, Wambaugh is almost just as sick and twisted, or at least that Hollywood Station book he did is.  I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond goes into depth of one very homicide case were a hooker with AIDS is hacked to piece by her crazy boyfriend. The opening chapter of Hollywood Station ends with a bloody murder-suicide, one of many brutal plotlines intertwined in the book that follows the operation of police in the LAPD Hollywood Station. You get suicide by cop, child rape, psychotic vets, streetwalkers, Eastern European mafia and the destitute lives of crystal meth addicts. There’s a whole bunch of weird shit he does where those people in Hollywood that dress as movie charcters commit crimes, because they are really drug addict panhandlers.  There is one major plot thread that involves a crystal meth addict couple that steal mail and sell it to the Armenian mobster and his Russian girlfriend that are involved in identity theft and a jewelry heist.  The situation does not end well and along the way we get a portrait of the despair of crystal meth addiction.  Along the way there are a number of gruesome other cases that pop up while the one with the Eastern European mafia and the meth addicts goes on.  Some of them are really fucked up. The one with the little girl getting raped is particularly gross.  He’s even got this homeless guy that the cops don’t want to deal with because he defecates when cops arrest him. 

And of course, there are the meth addicts in there.  The lives of the meth addicts are Farley and Olive are depicted in gruesome detail, they loose teeth, live by theft, and exist in a constant state of danger as a result of their habits. The drug addicts and disturbed people are convincingly destitute.  The cops are mostly relatively normal human beings, but they have their inner demons that they wrestle with.  Wambaugh tries to wrap it up like a cop show with “another day on the job” kind of a happy ending, but by then there’s been so much freaky shit that happens that by the end you can see their really is no going back for his cop characters.  Cops have to deal with some extremely sick individuals and develop their own crisis in the process of dealing with such high stress situations.  I think Wambough understands both sides of that equation well.  I think it works.