Word: wambaugh
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...Winds of War, Wouk (I last week) 2--Wheels, Hailey (2) 3-The Assassins/ Kazan (4) 4-The Exorcist, Blatty (5) 5-The Day of the Jackal, Forsyth (3) 6-The Blue Knight, Wambaugh (8) 7-The Betsy, Robbins (6) 8-Rabbit Redux, Updike (7) 9-The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Higgins 10-The Word, Wallace
FICTION 1 -The Winds of War, Wouk (1 last week) 2-Wheels, Hailey (2) 3-The Day of the Jackal, Forsyth (3) 4-The Assassins, Kazan (5) 5-The Exorcist, Blatty (4) 6-The Betsy, Robbins (6) 7-Rabbit Redux, Updike (7) 8-The Blue Knight, Wambaugh (9) 9-Our Gang, Roth (8) 10-The Peaceable Kingdom, de Hartog
...wall defending a chicken shit burglary like it was the Sacco-Vanzetti trial." Knowing that a suspect is guilty, Bumper lies on the stand about the circumstances of the arrest, partly to protect one of his informants, partly to ensure that the man gets convicted. Out on the streets, Wambaugh suggests, cops have to make their own accommodations...
...sort of documentary of Bumper's last three days before retirement, the book tends to be a bit ostentatious in such honesties, as if they established Bumper's credibility. In the end, Wambaugh sentimentalizes Bumper as a sort of repellently lovable supercop who, whenever he is not strongarming "pukepots," is bantering in Yiddish, Spanish or Arabic with the ethnics on the beat...
Oddly, some most persuasive moments occur when Bumper sits down to consume one of the Lucullan meals he regularly cadges. Wambaugh's feeling for food is almost erotic. Thus as Bumper takes dessert in an Arab restaurant: "I scooped up a mouthful and let it lay there on my tongue, tasting the sweet apricot and lemon rind, and remembering how Yasser's wife, Yasmine, blended the apricot and lemon rind and sugar, and folded the apricot puree into the whipped cream before it was chilled...