Last summer, Joseph Wambaugh, crime writer and former cop, told the Los Angeles Times that females excel at police work. “The very best cops are the ones who can get people to talk to them. That’s what detective work is,” he said. “Women are eminently better qualified at that.” The protagonist of his ninth novel is a woman, but forget what Wambaugh told the Times. In his world, blue is still a color better suited to boys than to girls.
Breda Burrows, late of the LAPD, has hung up her private-eye shingle in Palm Springs. After several months she hires burnt-out, boozed-up Lynn Cutter as her leg man. While tailing a rich old guy whose rich younger wife wants to know why he’s making deposits in a sperm bank, Cutter stumbles on a mystery involving either Mexican drug smugglers or Middle Eastern terrorists. With Burrows’s approval, he hands off the sperm case to a psychically wounded, retired male cop, who cracks it. (How? By getting people to talk, of course.) That frees Cutter and another cop, a young screw-up working on his own time, to nail-sort of the smuggler/terrorist. Burrows does zip. Nonetheless, while surreptitiously admiring Cutter’s buttocks, she has an epiphany: “Suddenly Breda realized that she hadn’t been to bed with a man since she’d left L.A.! " This woman is a detective? Say it ain’t so, Joe.
“Fugitive Nights” is actually a pretty good two-ply yarn. As a sketcher of barflies, Wambaugh has always been a true artiste; his picture of the denizens of The Furnace Room Bar and Grill is especially tasty. (“His nose was bulbous, wrapped in a pink hairnet of veins. Like many of the other Furnace Room Romeos, Ten-till-six wore a thatch of man-made hair on top. It was slightly askew because of his starboard lean, and his lower dentures were in his shirt pocket.”) But characterization is in short supply. Almost everyone speaks in one-liners, maybe because they live in Palm Springs, home of Sonny Bono and Bob Hope. (Some of the action takes place at Hope’s golf tournament.) When they’re not cracking wise, the four sleuths talk tough, but they’re softies: there’s enough arterial gold in this quartet to fill an S&L vault. In Wambaugh’s next book, maybe a woman will really do some crime-solving, as advertised.
