Spouting off like the god damn pseudo-intellectual that I am.....

Just re-read The Choirboys.  Heavy shit.  Coal black humor, and it all ends in tragedy.  Very dark stuff and a whole lot of vicious attacks on the incompetence of the higher-ups in the LAPD back in '75.  Biggest problem with this book is that it was Wambaugh's peak.  Lines and Shadows came close,  but I'd pretty much given upon the guy by The Golden Orange.  Cookie cutter plots & characters, a recurring cast of smart streetwise cops who seemed to be able to do everything but straighten out their own fucked up lives,  The Law of Diminishing Returns had definitely set in.

Decided to give him another try after getting into The Choirboys again.  Reading Hollywood Crows, from '98 I think.  Not horrible, but it still seems to be an auto-pilot novel.  One of the biggest problems is that Wambaugh loves to stick real-life vignettes and anecdotes into his novels, and a lot of these really have nothing to do with the main thrust of the story.  Basically, they're padding.  Around page 75, I had to go back and re-read the book flap to see what the hell the actual plot was, because we really hadn't seemed to have gotten there yet.    I'm at page 250 now, the plot's finally chugging along, not as many anecdotes, but not much of a story to justify 325+ pages.  Probably could've whittled it down to 200 pages without losing anything. 

The biggest offender in the anecdote category is the one where the immensely overweight drunken homeless guy in a filthy, blood-spattered basement staggers and sits on a stillborn child, crushing the corpse just so the event can be used as a setup for a punchline for a callous cop.  Tommy Rivers was a doomed child in The Choirboys whose death helped set some later events in motion, and I don't recall any jokes being made about his torture, rape and abuse before he died.  This story seems like it was thrown in in case a movie option is tossed out there, some of that tasteless grossout Tom Green/Jenny McCarthey that the kids (the fucking idiot ones) love these days.

Anyhoo.....

There's some other little kvetchy parts along the way, and I think I can pretty much see how it's all going to end, but I'll finish it up, then get back into re-reading Berger's Sneaky People.  I like to keep a few going at once.  Have some Cirino and Wakoski poetry collections that I'm moving thru, too, and a book on Russian outsider/non-conformist art.  Maybe an old Robert B Parker Spenser novel after that to cleanse the palate.....