What Wambaugh shows is that these choir practices are usually the direct result of the horrible things the cops routinely have to deal with while constantly being harassed by their bosses for violations of petty rules while ignoring the emotional well-being of the officers. The cops engage in what they call choir practice where they go to MacArthur Park with cases of booze they’ve mooched from liquor store owners, and then they proceed to get totally pants-shitting howl-at-the-moon drunk while gang banging a pair of police groupies.ĭoesn’t make them sound very appealing, does it? The rest of the so-called choir boys are also a collection of misfits with disastrous personal lives.
Spencer is a clothes horse who works his ‘police discount’ to buy high end retail stuff at wholesale prices. Sam Niles has been stuck with his annoying partner and supposed best friend, Harold, since they were in Vietnam together. ‘Roscoe’ Rules is a racist moron with knack for taking the most routine calls and turning them into riots. Baxter Slate is a former classics student haunted by a disastrous tour working Juveniles. There’s the tough veteran ‘Spermwhale’ Whalen about to get his 20 years in. Wambaugh then shifts through the events leading up to the death by following 5 pairs of uniformed police officers working out of LA’s Wilshire division. As they try to figure out a way to spin the story and minimize the damage, we get the impression that a bunch of police officers went on a drunken rampage and somebody died as a result.
The book begins with the LAPD brass in an uproar about a potential scandal involving a killing during a ‘choir practice’.
For my money, probably his best work along those lines was The Choirboys. Joseph Wambaugh worked the LAPD in the 1960s-70s, and during an era when cops were almost invariably portrayed as square jawed heroes, he wrote novels that dared to show the police as very flawed, damaged and relatable human beings. But show me those soulless pretty people tracking serial killers by getting their DNA tests done in three minutes on a CSI show and my eyes glaze over. Or have some kind of offbeat protagonist that interests me like Raylan Givens on Justified. Or be an epic tragedy with corrupt characters like The Shield. To get me interested in a cop story these days, it has to be some kind of ultra-realistic look at the bureaucratic nightmare of real police work like The Wire. For me, all of these stories try to portray the various kinds of cops as politically correct robots who go about their jobs with a kind of determined detachment except for maybe the occasional bit of angst to add a little faux drama to the mix. Despite being a big crime/mystery fan, I’m not really into the scores of police procedural novels or dozens of TV shows that litter the networks these days.
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