Cops and Writers

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton bounded onto the stage to Miklos Rozsa’s dum-de-dum-dum fanfare from “Dragnet.” The occasion at the L.A. Police Museum last year was billed as “A Night With Joe Friday: A Tribute to LAPD Detectives Real & Reel.” A dozen real detectives had been nominated for the first annual Hat Squad Award, named for the legendary robbery division team whose members, according to the program, represented “what a detective should be.” Half a dozen criminalists competed for the Ray Pinker Forensic Specialist of the Year Award.

But in an official confusion of fact and fiction, half a dozen writers were being honored along with many of the department’s detectives, whom Bratton hailed as “the legacy that Joe Friday personified,” because, as Bratton said, “until ‘Dragnet’ detectives had no image.”

Among the scribes were two TV writers--Dallas Barnes, whose credits include “Baretta” and “Kojak,” and Stephen Downing, who wrote episodes for “T.J. Hooker.” But more notable was that new Hollywood hyphenate, the LAPD detective-writer--Paul Bishop, best known for novels featuring police Det. Fey Croaker; Steve Hodel, author of “Black Dahlia Avenger”; Keith Bushey, coauthor of “The Centurion’s Shield”; and the legendary Joseph Wambaugh, who holed up in a museum jail cell autographing whichever of many titles that detectives lugged to the event.

“Maybe you’ll be up there next year,” a Rampart Division detective said to me, but I insisted “That’s not what I do.” My previous novels had been international thrillers, the most recent stories set in Singapore and Japan. Now I was researching a new novel set in L.A., reworking the extended mythology of the city, its crimes and its police detectives. Since graduating from USC, I had schlepped pen and pad halfway around the world, and arrived where I started--an Eden where serpents abound. I have gone down the same mean streets as both a reporter and as a novelist and screenwriter, and that journey has taught me that cops treat reporters differently than they do the mythmakers.

The first time I became aware of this was while researching my novel “The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell.” I had asked to tour Oakland P.D.’s jail, interrogation cubicles and morgue. I fully expected my request to be viewed with paranoid suspicion, ignored, stonewalled. “It’s much more ‘them versus us’ out here, because a lot of cops have been burned by journalists,” Bishop once said in a talk at the Writers Guild. “It has turned into a very adversarial relationship.”

But I had included a copy of my previous thriller with my tour request, and a note explaining that MGM had purchased the film rights. Suddenly, I was more than a reporter after mere facts. “This isn’t a punk from one of the local papers,” the Oakland police sergeant said when he introduced me to the head jailer. “This is big time.” (I did not reveal that I had been a “punk” from the San Francisco Examiner just a few years before.)

The heavy steel door slammed behind us and the electronic lock clicked into place.

“You know what my most important tool is?” the jailer asked.

“Not a clue.”

“This.” He pulled a penknife from his pocket. “To cut them down in the morning.”

For a moment I was appalled. But there was no black humor here. The jailer was sharing a dramatic detail, that dark insight into the prisoner’s sometimes self-destructive mind he felt a novelist should have but the reporter seldom gets. The cops’ attitude--open, confiding, a source of colorful, even outrageous anecdotes--was a revelation. They considered my questions, however probing, to be de rigueur research for a novelist or screenwriter. The second epiphany came the next day at the Contra Costa County morgue, where I was researching a scene. After briefing me on procedures, the deputy sheriff in charge unexpectedly asked, “Would you like to see the autopsy room?”

He ushered me into a large, well-lighted space where pathologists worked on naked corpses in various states of putrefaction, dissection and decapitation. After I got over the shock, my stomach settled and I noted the telling detail. On the wall above one of the gruesomely occupied autopsy tables was a framed autographed photo of Jack Klugman in his role as Dr. R. Quincy, M.E. It is an irony of police work that this grimmest, most soul-searing of jobs has acquired an aura of Hollywood glamour.

Not long after the movie “Dirty Harry” came out, I covered a shooting in Compton with a TV news crew. Instead of the regulation .38 snub-nosed detective specials, several cops toted the large-caliber handgun that was Harry’s weapon of choice. When I asked about it, the homicide investigator gave me his tightest Clint Eastwood smile. In a world in which dope peddlers and gangs now are armed with Uzis and AK-47s, the heavy artillery posed Dirty Harry’s question, “Do you feel lucky, punk?”

A short time later I met an L.A. robbery-homicide detective who enhanced his resemblance to Telly Savalas by shaving his head and handing out lollipops to gang bangers with Kojak’s upbeat “Who loves ya, baby?” The mean streets have become a dark hall of mirrors in which life reflects art reflecting life, down an infinity of often surreal role-playing.

In the DVD of a recent LAPD Academy graduation at Elysian Park, crime novelist Michael Connelly sat onstage just behind the speaker, Police Chief Bratton. In Connelly’s previous novel, his detective Harry Bosch--assigned to the Hollywood division--had quit the LAPD. Bratton pointed out that, like Connelly’s literary creation, hundreds of real police officers had quit the department before Bratton took over in October 2002. “I’m trying to encourage Mr. Bosch--excuse me, Mr. Connelly,” Bratton corrected himself, “to encourage Detective Bosch to return to the department.”

The moment was ripe for satire, but American crime fiction, movies and TV are morality plays in which the good guys usually win and even Dirty Harry is, at heart, a moralist and honest cop. So in post-”Quincy” TV, the “CSI” teams extol 18-hour workdays and painstaking science, and foxy pathologists talk compassionately to bloody corpses, reassuring the dead that they will get justice.

The LAPD just held its second annual “Night With Joe Friday,” but this year only real detectives and criminalists were honored. That is as it should be. I trust that life will continue to imitate art, and hope that the life-and-death drama of the mean streets may someday more closely resemble the morality plays that we writers create. It gives writing purpose.