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LA Observed regulars may remember last year when Will Beall, a homicide investigator for the LAPD in 77th Street Division, sold a novel called L.A. Rex to Riverhead and the film rights to Scott Rudin. Well the book is out. The New York Times reviewed it a week ago and gave it a mixed read, apparently missing some intended satire of the Bernard Parks era at the department but saying Beall can't be faulted for lack of ambition.
His novel is a kind of crime fighter’s bildungsroman. Benji Kahn, its protagonist, is a lawyer’s son turned gangster’s sidekick, now seemingly going straight by joining the Los Angeles Police Department. A rule-bending veteran named Miguel Marquez shows Benji the ropes. Marquez, like many of the novel’s characters, has a mythic reputation, a cartoonish simplicity of character and a gruffly nurturing soul.He’s one of a number of father figures sent Benji’s way. Another, Darius Washington, is a hip-hop entrepreneur and coldblooded killer. He keeps a jaguar chained outside his bedroom door and a snapping turtle locked away in his safe. Following Chekhov’s famous rule, both come into play before the curtain goes down.
So do the Mexican mafia, neo-Nazis, the C.I.A., a pair of swords and a kitchen sink, wherein a garbage disposal is put to gruesome use. There’s also an East Coast-West Coast rapper war; a riot, complete with fires and looting; and enough vomit, blood and guts sloshing around to justify hooking these police partners up with a round-the-clock cleaning service. Interspersed with the gore are illuminating glimpses of police life. In cop terminology, the bathroom is known as the Christian Science Reading Room — which, we learn, is a good place to visit before going out on patrol, because that way there will be “less bacteria down there in case you happen to take a bullet in the gut.” Mad dogs, which cops are occasionally called on to shoot, are “ghetto elk.” And crack got its name because cocaine hydrochloride, concentrated by heating, would make “a cracking sound as it cooled.”
Interesting choice of reviewer: Mark Kamine, assistant production manager for "The Sopranos."