When Nate, whose womanizing was legendary at Hollywood Station, shot her his Groucho leer, Ronnie said, ‘Forget it, Nate. Ask me for a date sometime when you’re a star and can introduce me to George Clooney.
“Hollywood Crow’s” hero, uniformed cop Nathan Weiss, works his beat and has more on his mind than routine police work. For one thing, his patrol buddies call him “Hollywood Nate” “because of his obsession, recently waning, to break into the movie business.” For another thing, “Nate had been pulled out of trouble, usually involving women, and spared from disciplinary action more than once by the supervisor.”
Hollywood Nate is a blue collar guy suffering the frustrations of the politics of his social class. “The Oracle the kind of cop Nate told everyone he had wanted to be when he grew up had been replaced by a politically correct, paper-shuffling little putz with dwarfish arms, no lips, and a shoe fetish.”
Nate does not seem to derive life-fulfilling gratification from his work. He looks around for other opportunities. When he notices a “Hills bunny,” he wonders if the beautiful woman “would ever need a cop, but after finally getting his SAG card, Hollywood Nate Weiss was starting to believe that maybe anything was possible.”
Impulsively, Nate jots down the woman’s license number, and when he returns to his patrol car, runs it on the DMV database. He learns she lives on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Hollywood Hills, one of the city’s ritziest neighborhoods.
Nate’s penchant for womanizing kicks the plot on its course once the “stunning young woman” captures his attention.
Fluttering in and around the main plot, “Hollywood Crows” flies over the bumpy turbulences of many colorful characters both inside and outside the Police Department. CROW serves as an acronym (Hollywood Division Community Relations, or CRO) which the cops pronounce as Crow. This acronym takes on metaphorical meanings too.
Dressed in their dark uniforms, the police swoop from one crime scene to the next, picking up the pieces of bizarre situations and people. Flittering around the main plot are divers anecdotal stories, scenes that provide us with a realistic flavor of Los Angeles, its culture, and eccentric citizens of all social classes from the homeless to moguls of industry and to “lots of jackals and bottom feeders tweakers mostly.”
From these many anecdotes, we sense the city’s human side. Its humanity allows people to live in a carnival of foibles and flaws. Despite their faults, and often because of them, characters like Hollywood Nate and his colleagues like Jetsam and Flotsam, native born surfer cops, emerge as accidental heroes. Although they might appear to operate like the Keystone cops, at the end of the day, they get the tough job of justice done one way or another.
The side stories capture an essence of life in Los Angeles as only police officers could know intimately through their daily job. Wambaugh served and protected the good citizens of Los Angeles for ten years with the LAPD as a detective sergeant.
Despite the heavy work load and so many peculiar incidences that Nate and his fellow cops have to investigate, “on an impulse, he cruised up to Mt. Olympus” to have a look at the place where the “stunning young woman” lives.
He waits. She pulls out of her garage. He tails her and pulls her over. “Dizzy Margo didn’t come to a complete stop back there did she?” She asks. Nate starts feeling like a teenager all over again. At least until his cop’s sense of guessing “what’s the real game” kicks in.
The intrigue begins when Margot Aziz, whose ex-husband owns strip clubs, invites Nate to her house, making it clear to him that, no, her husband won’t be home. When Nate meets the Mt Olympus beauty, the scene rolls out superbly, showing the nuances of doubts and flirtations in Nate’s head and speech.
This is how the story sets up in the first 50 pages or so. You’ll have to read the book to learn how things turn out. A pleasure to read, this story reveals a unique view of Los Angeles.
Photo via Hollywood Crows
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1 American Alligator // May 22, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Great review!
I just subscribed via email to the blog!
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