L.A. detectives quell crime -- one novel at a time

                            

Hundreds of novels have been set in Los Angeles. My preferred genre is the hard-boiled detective mystery featuring tough-as-nails private cops such as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Or Michael Connelly's street-smart veteran Los Angeles Police detective Harry Bosch.

Former LAPD detective-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh writes good fact-based fictional stories about the personal lives and on-the-job adventures (misadventures?) of Los Angeles detectives and beat cops. His The New Centurions (1971) and The Blue Knight (1972) became movie and television hits. The Choirboys (1975) depicts the raucous side of off-duty cops.

Wambaugh penned other fiction and non-fiction works over the years, recently returning to familiar City of Angels turf with a series about L.A. cops in Hollywood. Hollywood Station (2006) has likeable characters, is fast paced and full of anecdotes gleaned from working officers. The series includes Hollywood Crows (2008), Hollywood Moon (2009) and Hollywood Hills (2010).

Author James Ellroy examines the gritty underside of 1950s L.A.in four gripping police mysteries, The Black Dahlia, White Jazz, The Big Nowhere and my favorite, L.A. Confidential, also an excellent movie starring Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger.

I enjoyed the movie Devil in a Blue Dress (Denzel Washington), based on the 1990 detective mystery of the same name by Walter Mosley. It's one of his Easy Rawlins books about a Black detective in Los Angeles during the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The series includes Black Betty (1995), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), Cinnamon Kiss (2005) and others.

These days, though, it's Michael Connelly's  detective mysteries that earn most wanted status for me. Connelly is a former Los Angeles Times crime reporter and his books are well researched and crisply written. He has a feeling for local geography and character development and gets police and court procedure right. I've read half of his 16 Bosch novels and the others await on my bookshelf. Bosch also appears in other Connelly works. Three books to get you riding along with Harry Bosch are Angels Flight, The Concrete Blonde and The Black Echo.

Other writers of "Angelino" detective/crime fiction include Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer private detective series and James M. Cain of The Postman Always Rings Twice fame.

If it's good reading about some bad people you want, these books can be a place to begin.