Like a ghost returning to the scene of the crime, Joseph Wambaugh was back on the streets of Hollywood. Nearly 40 years ago he had patrolled the fabled, sleazy boulevards as a Juvenile cop with the Los Angeles Police Department – long before he became a master of the modern police novel. Now he was back in town, researching new material for his first book about the LAPD in many years, and it was an uneasy homecoming.

“I felt that I knew this place better than most, but there had been so many changes since I last wrote about Los Angeles,” the author said. “It felt weird to be back. I had to find out what was different here.”

As he cruised the neighborhood and interviewed dozens of cops, Wambaugh learned two things in a hurry: Hollywood and the LAPD have changed enormously since he began writing books such as “The New Centurions” and “The Onion Field” in the early 1970s. But the basic psychological makeup of the officers who patrol the streets was the same. Both of these elements form the main focus of his just-published novel, “Hollywood Station” (Little, Brown), a fast-paced, often surreal chronicle of contemporary police life in Los Angeles.

In “Hollywood Station,” cops are struggling just to be cops. They chafe under the weight of the 2001 federal consent decree imposed on the LAPD in the wake of a department scandal. They have contempt for racial diversity guidelines that – they say – compel them to invent the names of white people interviewed in Hispanic and Asian areas. They speak cynically about the persistent threat of civil rights lawsuits making it impossible to do their jobs.

Critics would counter that the department is paying the price for years of corruption and racial insensitivity. But amid this greatly changed policing landscape, the author found some psychological continuity.

“The basic police personality has not changed,” Wambaugh said. “Firefighters are team players; they live to save people, to help people. But cops are not team players. They’re individualists. They’re in-your-face people. They go out every night not knowing if they’re going to save people, or hurt somebody or kill somebody. And they never wear their emotions on their sleeves. They keep it all inside. When they get home, it takes a toll on them, with divorce and suicides.”

Writer Joseph Wambaugh, who became famous for writing novels about the Los Angeles Police Department, has written Hollywood

Undeniable influence

The world of emotionally burned-out cops has been a recurring theme in Wambaugh’s fiction. But “Hollywood Station” shows a deepening sense of character and motivation; after 35 years of writing, his appreciation for the frustration that officers grapple with, especially as they age, has matured.

Widely regarded as the first writer to probe the inner lives of police officers in modern fiction and nonfiction, the 69-year-old Wambaugh also is credited with influencing a spate of television shows including “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue” and “Hill Street Blues” that have portrayed the complex psychology of cops on the beat. And “Hollywood Station” itself might be headed for the TV screen. Producer David E. Kelley – creator of “Boston Legal,” “The Practice” and other shows – recently optioned the book for a series.

L.A. psyche

Wambaugh’s 17th book posed a special challenge: His goal was not just to describe the new Hollywood from a police officer’s viewpoint. He wanted to explain it in the context of the L.A. psyche.

“There’s an old saying among LAPD members whenever something bizarre or surreal comes up from the streets of Hollywood,” Wambaugh noted. “They’ll say, ‘It’s Hollywood, it’s the heart of Los Angeles,’ just like they said ‘It’s Chinatown’ in the film. Hollywood, for an author, can become a dark mirror of the entire city.”

In returning to Los Angeles as a subject, he was also determined to show that he can still deliver the goods. Since he began writing in the late 1960s, the police procedural novel has exploded in popularity as an international genre. In America, Michael Connelly, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, James Ellroy, Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson and Ridley Pearson have become brand names.

The idea of revisiting the LAPD, he said, came in part from Ellroy. “He kept saying to me, ‘You lived through this, and you’ve never ceased being an L.A. cop,’ which is true,” the author recalled. “I mean, I hang out with cops all the time, and I read everything about them. I look at the L.A. Times every day to see if there’s anything going on with the LAPD. Everybody who knows me knows I’ve never stopped.”

Unlikely to change

For all his success, however, Wambaugh has a sensitive ego when it comes to his legacy. Ever since he began writing, he said, he has been on the outs with a series of LAPD chiefs. Only the current chief, William J. Bratton, he said, has given Wambaugh the respect he believes he has earned by now as a writer and symbol of the department.

“He (Bratton) invited me to an event at the academy and I talked and signed books all evening. No other police chief has used me in PR like I thought I should be used. I mean, I’m more than willing to be used. I can help the department with its image.”

Nowadays, he said with a sigh, that image has been badly tarnished. There are far less ambitious men and women lining up to join a force that Wambaugh said is still the nation’s best. A sure-fire way to reform the mess, he suggested, would be to restore the chief’s independence from political meddling, with civil service protection. But that kind of change, he conceded, is unlikely.

“I tell the truth about cops,” he said. “Some like it. Some don’t.”