Photo by Craig Carlson

“It seems that your books have become less violent.” “Yes, they are less violent. Probably because I’ve gotten older."

It was 10:05 a.m. when he parked his Corvette on the street in North Park at the office of Orson Ellis Talent Unlimited. Orson was a failed talent agent, formerly of Hollywood, U.S.A., now living in San Diego, California, who’d made a “scientific” study of his failure as a Hollywood agent, scientifically concluding that it was the result of his mother not dubbing him Marty, Michael, Mort, or some other name beginning in M.

Finnegan's Week is set entirely in San Diego and Tijuana. The events take place during one week in October of 1992, just before the presidential elections.

After locking his Vette, he noticed a passing coach full of elderly tourists, probably going somewhere like La Jolla, where they’d discover that they could spend two months at a timeshare at the Lawrence Welk Resort with unlimited golfing for what a simple “frock” would cost in a pricey La Jolla boutique. He knew that most of the seniors would be wearing walking shorts, and would have varicose veins like leeches clinging to their poor old legs.

He also realized that the seniors were not that much older than himself. It made him think of polyps. Before entering Orson Ellis Talent Unlimited, he decided that Mother Nature is a pitiless cunt.

The agency was not impressive, but Thirtieth Street and University Avenue was not a trendy address. Orson had decorated the place to make you think you could actually get a job there, until you realized that all the inscribed photos of famous movie stars lining the walls weren’t clients, only people to whom he’d sucked up during his twenty years of failure in Hollywood.

— from Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh

"I was interviewing some cops, and they said, ‘You know, they have a lot of toxic waste over at the Naval Air Station [North Island]."

I’m the new kid on the block,” says former LAPD detective and current bestselling author Joseph Wambaugh. He refers to the move, in June of this year, to his Point Loma home, though he lived for the preceding three years in Rancho Santa Fe.

Actually, Wambaugh was a new kid in San Diego in 1954. He remembers getting on a bus at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot after enlisting, shortly after he moved here with his parents from Pittsburgh when he was 17. “My hair was slicked back in a D.A. Remember those?” He recalls the sergeant grinning evilly at him and his ’do asking him, “ ‘You one of those L.A. cats?’ At that moment,” Wambaugh says, “I wanted my mommy.”

“I just thought my toxic-waste contractor would be a a scammer. I put him in Point Loma before I ever thought I’d move to Point Loma. People will say, ‘Aha! Which one of your Point Loma neighbors is that?’ ”

Fifty-six-year-old Wambaugh sits at a cocktail table at Qwiigs Bar & Grill in Ocean Beach in late September sipping a vodka and tonic. He looks a boyish 45, dressed in khaki Dockers, a button-down emerald shirt, and brown suede walking shoes. His sunglasses hang around his neck from a cord, and he smiles easily recalling his first memories of San Diego. He cautions against the Los Angelization of the city. When asked if he hates L. A., he says, “Now I do. I didn’t always.”

Hogs Wild was a biker hangout in Imperial Beach, and there were six Harleys in the parking lot by the time the two haulers arrived in Shelby’s battered Ford pickup.

Wambaugh’s 14th book and 10th novel appeared from William Morrow & Co. in October. Finnegan's Week is set entirely in San Diego and Tijuana. The events take place during one week in October of 1992, just before the presidential elections.

The story involves 45-year-old Finbar “Fin” Finnegan, a ‘crimes against property” detective working out of the SDPD’s Southern Division, who is also an aspiring actor looking for a role in the locally filmed television series Harbor Nights (read Silk Stalkings). Fin is assigned to investigate the theft of a bobtail van hauling toxic waste, whose drivers decide to steal a few thousand pairs of flight deck shoes from the U.S. Navy since the drivers are often in the North Island warehouse unsupervised.

While Nell was driving down the Silver Strand from Coronado she couldn't stop thinking about how hard she'd worked on her hair that morning.

The van, in turn, is stolen from the thieves, along with the toxic waste, and “good cop” 40ish Nell Salter, with the district attorney’s environmental crimes unit, is called in. Salter and Finnegan work the case with 28-year-old Navy investigator Bobbie Ann “Bad Dog” Doggett.

Like any small city, NAS North Island had its own police and fire departments and its own crime. Bobbie Ann Doggett was a plainclothes detective assigned to investigate those crimes.

This unlikely trio of sleuths is up against the moronic and truly scary Shelby Pate, a meth freak biker with a guilty conscience; Abel Durazo, his more phlegmatic and laid-back Mexican partner; and their boss, the sociopathic yuppie scum Jules Temple. The case is so flat-out weird, amorphous, and largely unsolvable, it has all the earmarks of real life.

But Wambaugh shakes his head and maintains, “The only idea I had was doing something with toxic waste. I didn’t know anything about it. I asked my friend [SDPD detective] Tony Puente, to whom I dedicated the book, to line me up with people who know about toxic waste. That’s how I started with the environmental crimes investigators. One was very helpful, Donna Blake out of the D.A.’s office. I sort of gave her job to Nell Salter.

“And then I was interviewing some cops, and they said, ‘You know, they have a lot of toxic waste over at the Naval Air Station [North Island] .’Sol talked with the director of security over there. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, they’re always coming in here. The Navy creates waste all over the world — some of it’s nuclear, some of it isn’t. The civilian contractors are always coming in.’ So I got the idea that I would have a civilian contractor who is doing something funny. Then I started interviewing people at the Naval Air Station. I don’t know, it just grew.”

Finnegan's Week is a well-plotted novel with an ending that is refreshingly ragged, again, striking a note more like life than fiction.

“I don’t usually do the detective story genre ending where the hero confronts the killer and triumphs. In most of my novels the detectives working on the case — at least in my recent novels — don’t even understand what has happened. The reader understands; the detectives don’t. In my last one, Fugitive Nights, the same thing happened. Only the reader knows what really happened. The detectives never will.

“I sort of relegate plot a little bit down on the list of importance in my mind. I don’t really have an outline when I start a book. If I did, it wouldn’t be any good. I create characters and, if you’re really cooking, they take over. They direct you. You follow them.

“I mean, I created Shelby, this low-life tweaker. I thought he was just gonna be a peripheral character, but he became better because he insisted on it. As the story progressed, he kept growing almost in spite of what I thought. He became a very important character.” Wambaugh laughs and sips at his drink with the look of amazement that can be seen on any fictionsmith known for characterization; the look says, ‘I have no idea where this comes from, and frankly, I don’t want to know.’

After discovering that the missing waste caused the death of a child in Tijuana, Shelby and Abel retire to a bar to reflect on recent runaway events.

Hogs Wild was a biker hangout in Imperial Beach, and there were six Harleys in the parking lot by the time the two haulers arrived in Shelby’s battered Ford pickup. Almost every pickup in the lot had a gun rack inside.The saloon had been the scene of some legendary brawls, including a few with sheriff s deputies. The bar mirror was cracked and taped in three places, and the metal shade hanging over the pool table looked like it had been strafed by an M-16. The sawdust on the floor was not there to absorb beer, but blood.The jukebox may as well have been owned by Garth Brooks; you could sit therefor an hour before you’d hear any other country singer. In Hogs Wild it was either country or heavy metal. The saloon was windowless and dark, day or night....He wasn’t quite as big as a cement truck and he sported the beard of a werewolf. He wore a cutoff gray sweatshirt and black jeans as grease caked and filthy as Shelby’s. His boots were savagely studded with metal discs, and you could shoot pool on his belt buckle. He was about Shelby’s age and size, but his body mass looked concrete hard....Shelby Pate didn't care what happened to him. Not anymore. He'd become...transformed.He turned on his stool and faced the monster looming over him. He said, “Kin we just have our shooters, dude? Kin we do that without you goin turbo?" “Sure you kin," the bearded biker said. “Down the avenue with the other Messicans.... ”He kicked the bearded biker three, four, five times in the upper body. Abel heard ribs break with the second kick. The next one was in the kidney and the bearded biker screamed in agony, jerking his hands away from his bloody face, trying to protect his body. The next kick only made him whimper. 'Then the bartender said to Shelby, “That's enough, dude. You learned him about life 'n times.That's enough...."After they were outside, Abel said, “Le's go, 'mano! Le's get away!..."When Shelby swaggered back into the bar, the bloody bearded biker was in a fetal position, and a customer was phoning for paramedics.The ox [Shelby] showed the bartender his gap-tooth grin and said, “I fergot to ask. Do you validate parking?"

What about Jules Temple, the rich kid toxic-waste entrepreneur? Is he based on anyone Wambaugh knows in San Diego?

“Well, I’ve known a lot of sociopaths in my time. It never mattered if they had money or breeding or not. They’re still sociopaths. Charles Manson is a sociopath and so is Ted Bundy, but they’re very different in their backgrounds. Of course, not all sociopaths are serial killers either. Some of them are U.S. senators or congressmen, certainly movie producers and television executives.

“I just thought my toxic-waste contractor would be a conscienceless guy with no moral compass, a scammer. I’ve known a lot of these characters. It’s funny though, I put him in Point Loma before I ever thought I’d move to Point Loma. I had no intention of moving here at the time. Now that the book is coming out people will say, ‘Aha! Which one of your Point Loma neighbors is that?’ ” The former policeman laughs as if he can’t wait to field the question again.

“Your female characters have grown tremendously in dimension,” I suggest, “since your early novels like The Choirboys or The Glitter Dome. ”

Wambaugh leans forward over his drink and nods his head vigorously. “Certainly with The Choirboys and The Glitter Dome, you’re right. It’s that women themselves have become more fully realized. Being a novelist and somewhat of a journalist, I just follow the trends and write about them. And women have become more fully realized than they were 25 years ago, when I started writing books, that’s for sure. Naturally, my female cops have become more important.

“When I started out as a cop, women didn’t even do patrol work, they were relegated to custodial duty, juvenile cops, sometimes undercover when a man couldn’t do the job — but they certainly didn’t do uniformed patrol. Of course, they do everything now, and women have become more important to me as characters.”

Like any small city, NAS North Island had its own police and fire departments and its own crime. Bobbie Ann Doggett was a plainclothes detective assigned to investigate those crimes, most of which were misdemeanors. When they were felony crimes, the Naval Investigative Service usually handled the cases.Because she was a command investigator Bobbie was “designated" by the base commander to interrogate anyone regardless of rank. This meant that an E5 like Bobbie could, theoretically, grill a command officer. She hadn't felt so powerful since the days when she'd first earned the “crow" of a petty officer, taking on the responsibility of command over subordinates.... There'd been two tours at sea, one of them in the Gulf War, and Bobbie had learned very quickly that master-at-arms is not a popular rate on a navy ship. She'd been made to feel like a cop from the very beginning, in a job that didn't attract the most feminine of females. A lot of the female masters-at-arms were butch and looked it. But it was easier for Bobbie to deal with them than the male personnel who assumed she was gay because of her master-at-arms rate, and because she preferred to wear her blond curly hair loose, short and uncoiffed, avoiding eyeliner, skin toners and excessive lipstick. Bobbie figured that was their problem.

“When I wrote the character of Bobbie,” Wambaugh says, “I interviewed a male investigator at North Island. I thought it would be a lot more interesting if there were two females along with Finnegan so we could get a lot more personal feelings involved. The jealousy thing. I asked Roger Warburton, the security director over there, if he’d ever had a woman do that job and he said yeah. So I decided my character was going to be a woman. The only concession I made was that I gave her a nickname that you might think of as masculine, but ‘Bad Dog’ is all woman.”

While Nell was driving down the Silver Strand from Coronado she couldn't stop thinking about how hard she'd worked on her hair that morning. First she'd ladled the mousse on her perm the instant she stepped out of the shower, then she'd combed it out ever so carefully, then she'd scrunched it up for twenty minutes until her do cried out: Tousle me with reckless abandon!And Fin hadn't even noticed. He couldn't take his eyes off that kid [“Bad Dog"]. But of course that was typical. Why had she thought he'd be different from every other male person who walked the earth? Why was she even remotely concerned with what that three-time loser thought about her freaking hair?

Most of Wambaugh’s books are funny. In fact they are progressively more so with each new title. When I suggest that I have never met a policeman who might be mistaken for Henny Youngman, Wambaugh looks thoughtful and serious. “No, not when they’re around civilians. Amongst themselves, that’s a different story. That’s when the defensive gallows humor kicks in. But I like to think that my books have been funny for a long time. I like to think The Choirboys was funny, and I wrote that in 1974.”

Where do these one-liners and gags come from? Is Wambaugh making this stuff up, or is this material from other cops?

“There are things I’ve heard, and I alter them a bit here and there. If I hear a line that I really love, I just can’t let it go. For example, Finnegan says he’s probably gay except for the sex part. I heard it in a bar. I was with some drunk who said that. I thought that was a fantastic line, right out of a drunk’s mouth.”

“Booze seems to play a major role in most of your books,” I say. Wambaugh nods and sips and nurses his vodka and tonic. He bears no indication that he could have first-hand insight into both the nightmare and comic effects of John Barleycorn such as he describes in The Glitter Dome, The Golden Orange, Fugitive Nights, and Finnegan's Week.

“Yes,” he nods. “All my cops are basically boozers.”

“Do cops really tend to drink that much?”

“Yeah, they certainly do. The job is stressful, you can imagine...so, yeah, some kind of sedative is thought to be needed.”

“I interviewed a detective,” I tell the lean, fit-looking writer, “who told me this was no longer as true as it used to be, that cops tend to go to the gym nowadays instead.”

“There’s some truth to that,”

Wambaugh agrees. “The older cops still do their drinking, and the younger cops go out in their patrol cars with their laptop computers and go to gyms and eat asparagus and tofu. Cops reflect society, and that’s what the yuppies are doing, and young cops aspire to be yuppieish today. Whereas in my day, it was totally different.

Nobody gave a damn about jogging — we’d just go have a drink.

“I’ve always found the cops who do go drink to be more interesting.” The former badge number 178 spreads his hands as if to say, “So sue me.” “Those who need a sedative because they’ve been traumatized by their jobs are more interesting to me than someone who says, ‘Man, I was really burnt today, I was really freaked, so I’m gonna go out and do a 10K!’ It’s very hard for me to relate to someone like that.

“It’s easier for me to understand the guy who says, ‘I’m freaked. Let’s head for the nearest bar. Let’s put a couple down and talk about it.’ Talk about it, see? Also it’s more dramatic, more revealing and more human. The guys who go out and get rid of it in a 10K run might get rid of it temporarily by submerging it in exhaustion. The guy who goes to the bar, has a couple of drinks, and talks about it handles it better. I trust the guy at the bar more than I do the guy doing the 10K."

Fin and Nell were lucky to get a window table, where they ordered tropical drinks served in ceramic coconut shells by a waitress in a sarong. They looked out on a “boardwalk” made of concrete that stretched four miles south to Mission Beach. And because autumn was late in arriving, the boardwalk was loaded with joggers, walkers, Rollerbladers and skateboarders draped in bags-rags out for their evening exposure. Most of the hardbodies wore combinations of Day-Glo shorts, tank tops, T-shirts, swimsuits and cutoffs. There was a bit of hip-hop and grunge, but not like L.A. ’s Venice Beach.... [Tjhey didn’t talk much about anything for a few minutes, because of the impending sunset. Sitting there at the fake monkeypod cocktail table, drinking from a fake coconut shell, being brushed lightly by a fake potted-palm branch, they were getting caught up in the nostalgia. A hint of the way it was, the way it must have been, in bygone days when summer never ended along California’s coast. Because life was different then, or so they said, all who’d lived it....By the time it happened, Fin and Nell had already finished their second drink. He turned to her and she looked as sad as he felt after all the fire had vanished.She gazed into his eyes for a moment, and she astonished him by reading his mind. By saying what he felt. “J know,” Nell said, nodding. For a little while, before it disappears, you can really pretend, cant you? That life's a beach after all. "Fin was awfully glad he'd matured. In the old days he'd have married her for that.

Thinking of the character of Finnegan himself I ask, “Do you know cops who are aspiring actors?”

“My police partner was. When I was on job and became a writer and started doing stuff in television, he got very interested. The bug bit him, and he went out and got a [Screen Actors Guild] card. I put him in everything I ever did. He played a bit part in everything. He even went out and got a part [as a detective] on his own in Shampoo.

“When Fugitive Nights was filmed earlier this year, there’s a scene in it with Sonny Bono playing himself at a golf tournament. Sonny Bono’s playing partner is a Palm Springs cop and an aspiring actor.

“There’s a lot of cops that want to be actors. And why not?. Cops are actors a lot. Every time they get a suspect and try to get a confession out of him, one of them’s acting, or both. They do ‘good guy/bad guy,’ that’s an act. Every time a cop is undercover he’s acting. Sometimes he’s got to play the role of his life.”

Just after the riots in L.A. I saw you on morning news show and they asked you to comment on the Rodney King beating by L.A. cops. You used the word ‘surreal’ a couple of times, and I wasn’t sure what you meant in regard to such a horrific episode.”

“All right, all right.” Wambaugh leans forward. “I think I agreed with the judge in the second trial when he said something to the effect that everything was all right up until the last 19 seconds [of the video tape]. And then, in the last 19 seconds they punished him...and it just kept going. It just seemed to me that somebody was repeating the scene that I already witnessed, because it didn’t seem as if anything more should happen. Like, ‘Cut! It’s over!’ But it wasn’t over. These guys were freaked, and it just kept going. It just seemed surreal. It was not like anything I’d ever witnessed before.

“But having said all that — that they punished him — as long as you want me to talk about it, I’ll say this. In America it doesn’t matter what the crime is. It doesn’t matter how horrendous the crime is — when someone is acquitted, they’re acquitted. And we don’t try them twice.

“Some people said that the [Sagon] Penn case in San Diego resulted in a racist verdict that set a guy free who murdered a cop and shot a civilian and all that. But it doesn’t matter. He was acquitted. Period.

“So you don’t try him for civil rights, which is just an excuse to try someone for the same thing. We just don’t do that. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, the national board, said that the second Rodney King trial was clearly double jeopardy. It’s an outrage. That’s the way I felt about it.

“I watched the first trial in its entirety on TV. That was not a racist verdict. It was a job where the defense beat the hell out of prosecution. The prosecution could have convicted at least two of those guys and maybe three for a simple crime like battery. But, oh, no, they went for broke. ‘We’re gonna convict ’em with assault with a deadly weapon with an intent to inflict great bodily harm.’ Once they did that, they lost the case.

“The defense took that film, frame by frame, and said to the jury, ‘If they’re intending to inflict great bodily harm, why are they hitting him on the arms and the legs and the buttocks? Show us one frame where they’re hitting him on the head.’ And they couldn’t. So the prosecution lost that by sloppy tactics. It was not a racist verdict. The jury didn’t say, ‘Those cops are innocent.’ They said, ‘Those cops are not guilty of the crime charged.’”

Wambaugh leans back, “That was one of the most dangerous criminal trials in my lifetime. I believe that the Rodney King case will go down in legal history — and people will totally forget the first trial — what people will remember is that this is the first time the United States government tried somebody twice for the same crime.

It has never happened before, but they did it this time. And why?

When that verdict came down during an election year, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot all said, ‘We’re gonna try those guys again until we get it right.’ ”

Here Wambaugh laughs, but without any real mirth.

“You take shots,” I say to Wambaugh, “at Clinton and Perot, a couple of shots at Bush, though not many, in Finnegan's Week.

What are your politics? How do you vote?”

“I haven’t been a member of any political party in 20 years.

I’m an independent voter. I didn’t think Bush was worth writing about because well over a year ago at this time, it was obvious he was finished.

History. No fun writing about him.

When this book comes out, he’s gone. I knew that Clinton and Perot would continue to be fun. I knew they’d continue to do dumb things.

And they are — they do. But, no,

I’m not a Republican or a Democrat.”

Wambaugh rarely gives out blurbs (those one-line or one-paragraph endorsements on book jackets), though he once received a book from the Naval Institute Press, “And whoever heard of them? The book turned out to be The Hunt for Red October. Now, already in his relatively short career, [Tom Clancy] has sold more than I will ever sell in my entire career.” Wambaugh laughs without apparent envy.

Has Wambaugh noticed any dipping in sales in recent years? “The conventional publishing wisdom nowadays says that mostly women buy novels, usually novels by women and about women. Elmore Leonard and Robert B. Parker, for example, guys in your league, don’t sell the way they did, say, five years ago.”

“The sale of books in general have gone down,” he says evenly. “In the early days, a paperback book was a dollar-fifty or something. People used to buy. them, read them, and toss them on the seat of the bus. Nowadays, these things are so damned expensive that people pass them around to their friends. Nobody’s sales are what they used to be. My books still sell pretty well, though. I can’t complain.

“I like Elmore Leonard, and for a good old-fashioned police procedural, I like Ed McBain and those 57th Precinct novels. Those are well-written books. I didn’t even start reading him until I had been published a long time. Of course I like Truman Capote. In Cold Blood to me was masterful. I had the pleasure of knowing him.

“We did the Johnny Carson show in New York, early in my career — in fact, I was still a cop at the time. It was about 1971. He was very good with women, you know, and he met my wife in the green room while I was onstage with Carson. He took us out to 21 [restaurant] after the show. What a thrill for a cop, you know? And then he invited us to his home in Palm Springs. We stayed there, and he had the bartender from that famous gay bar in New York — Studio 54 — staying with him. I told [Capote] the story of The Onion Field, and he said, ‘Ohhh, you’ve got to write that! I’d love to write that!’ I had just kind of narrated it to him. He gave me the jacket blurb for The Onion Field.”

I had heard that Wambaugh had almost single-handedly invented the television mini-series, though this proved less than thoroughly accurate.

“Well,” he says, “The Blue Knight, with William Holden, was the first mini-series produced in America. That was based on my second book. Holden played Bumper Morgan. My partner and I went down on location when they were shooting. We were still cops and in a detective car. They took some publicity shots and stuff. Holden was in uniform.

“He was a wonderful man, a drinking man — of course it killed him, you know — a terrific guy. He looked so great in uniform that he went off to get a hamburger and a cup of coffee in this diner in skid row, you know, East L. A. or wherever we were. He finished his hamburger and reached into his pocket for some money, and the owner came over looking shocked.” Wambaugh starts to laugh uproariously, making it difficult to finish his story. “ ‘Oh, no, officer! We wouldn’t dare charge a policeman in this neighborhood!’ They thought he was a real cop. They wouldn’t take his money.”

Wambaugh seems to be laughing at the irony implied: If they’d known he was just a movie star, they probably would have taken his money.

“Whatever happened to the short-lived television series From the Files of Joseph Wambaugh?”

“Yeah, that didn’t go anywhere, didn’t get an audience. But Fugitive Nights as a television movie will be on in December. It stars Sam Elliott and Terri Garr. I wrote the screenplay. I had nothing to do with the production though.”

Has he directed?

“No, I’ve done scripts and produced. In addition to Fugitive Nights, I wrote the screenplay for one of my books, Echoes in the Darkness, and two feature films, The Onion Field — which was my movie. I raised the money and everything. It’s a good movie. It had one of the finest, most underrated actors in that movie, Franklin Seales, who has since died of AIDS.

“Anyway, I also wrote the script for The Black Marble, a feature film. It’s on video, a pretty good movie actually, [with] a great character actor, Harry Dean Stanton. He’s the bad guy and he’s terrific.”

What about reviews? “Do you read them? Are you affected by them?”

“Ahhh,” Wambaugh grimaces a little, looking to the ceiling. “I’ve been pretty lucky over the years. As far as popular writers, my reviews have probably been about as good as anybody’s. When you’re a popular writer, you’ll never get the reviews that, say, a literary writer will get. But I can’t complain. Often I get the best of both worlds. You’re always gonna get some bad ones, and sure, they bother me.”

In several of your books,” I ask him, “like The Golden Orange, Fugitive Nights, and the new one, you are very eloquent, funny, and moving on the subject of middle age or midlife crisis. Mostly funny. Was turning, say, 40 particularly tough on you?

Not to say that inferring something about the author from his fiction is a good idea.” “Oh, yeah,” he kills off his vodka and tonic while there is still a little ice in it. “When I turned 40 it was tough. I got into midlife crisis then, and I expect to get out of it in 10 years or so. Or maybe never,” he shrugs.

“I wrote The Blue Knight when I was 35 years old,” he points out. “It’s about a 50-year- old cop in a midlife crisis. It’s just something that I’ve always understood. Maybe I was always middle-aged, you know, even when I was young.”

“Over the years,” I venture, “It seems that your books have become less violent.” “Yes,” the author nods emphatically. “They are less violent. Probably because I’ve gotten older and I’ve written it out of me, for the most part. I’m not as angry, maybe, as I’ve written the recent books. The humor is less angry, certainly.”

San Diego’s Old Town — wildly popular with the city’s vital tourist industry — was never one of Fin’s favorite haunts, even though a lot of cops frequented an Old Town restaurant that served pretty fair carnitas, homemade tortillas, and decent margaritas, all of which tended to attract happy-hour working women.There wasn’t much left in Old Town of the Spanish period when Father Junipero Serra and the soldiers of the Presidio brought the gospel to the local Kumeyaay whether the Indians liked it or not. There was some evidence that they didn’t, in that the peace-loving Kumeyaay destroyed the friar’s original mission.The early nineteenth century brought the Mexican period and with it large adobes, including some impressive haciendas, actually built for a rich Peruvian, had been transformed into a restaurant with courtyard dining, and it packed in the tourists. But most of the surrounding shops sold items that could be purchased more cheaply in Tijuana.A grassy square in the middle of Old Town Plaza was the best part of the whole shebang, as far as Fin was concerned. It was there in the pedestrian area where he’d strolled with ex-wife number two and made the disastrous mistake of proposing marriage, after guzzling five margaritas. He’d never enjoyed margaritas since.

What about research? That seems to be a major element in Wambaugh books, both fiction and nonfiction.

“Yeah, I try to research whatever I write about. I think writers who don’t are lazy. I just stop reading when — especially if it’s a book about cops or crime — it’s written by someone who does no research and just wings it. Especially Hollywoodish writers. I close the book. It shuts me down, and I can’t suspend my disbelief any longer. It’s just all cartoons.

“There was not one honest moment in Silence of the Lambs,” he cites as an example. “It won every award there was, and it had one of the most famous law enforcement people in the world as a technical advisor, John Douglas of the FBI, who is the foremost expert in America on serial killing. I often thought, why did he say he was the technical advisor on that?

“I mean, would you want to be the technical advisor on a movie where some guy is in a Victorian prison, in some sort of an aquarium, with no civil rights of any kind? They can pick him up, throw him on a hand dolly, and put him on an airplane because some senator says so? Move him all over the country? And at the end, he not only slaughters two or three guards, but he takes one of them and puts him up 60 feet in the air, strings him up...all of this in a matter of three minutes. Batman couldn’t do it. Superman couldn’t do it. Why does John Douglas want his name on this thing as a technical advisor? It was a horror cartoon.

“I thought it was supposed to be a black comedy!” Wambaugh raises his eyebrows and smiles with the kind of boyish amazement that can only be the flip side of his trademark comic cynicism. “I was into the movie 30 minutes and I’m laughing, but...I’m the only one! This is supposed to be scaring people?”

I ask Wambaugh about his work habits.

“When I’m writing, that’s all I do. Seven days a week. I don’t take any days off. As many hours as I can work. Now, I think five hours is the limit. I used to write eight or ten hours. But I write every day until the first draft is finished. I don’t do a lot of editing until the first draft is finished. I think it’s better to get a big pile on your desk, even if the aroma isn’t too great. And then start doing your rewriting, because it’s not so intimidating. Once you’ve got that big heap of pages there, you think, ‘Okay. There it is. That’s something like a book.’ Then you can go in and shape it without the intimidation of thinking you need to produce 4- or 500 pages of something.

“Altogether,” the bestselling ex-cop says, “it takes me about two or three months to write a book.

“I’ve got to cop to something right now,” Wambaugh interrupts himself earnestly, or mock earnestly — it’s hard to tell. “I misspelled Hawthorn Street in Finnegan's Week. I put an E at the end of Hawthorn. I had to confess.”

“How do you feel about the way your books have been handled editorially? You hear some horror stories...”

Wambaugh’s editor for many years was the late Jeanne Bernkopf, to whom he dedicated Fugitive Nights. His new editor at Morrow is Gene Young, “whom I haven’t met personally,” he says. “I decided that having had a woman editor successfully for so many years, I want another woman editor. I don’t want any male editors. I think maybe a woman’s touch — if there is such a thing, and I think there is — might be good for someone who writes the kind of off-the-wall, hard-edged stuff that I write. She might keep me in line a little better. I don’t think I’ll ever have a male editor. Ever.”

Wambaugh looks out the window, north to the Hawaiian shaved ice stand and beyond to the beach bungalows and burger joints along Ocean Beach’s waterfront. “I switched to a female dentist too,” he says. “She’s got little, gentle hands. I’m looking for a female proctologist now,” he deadpans.

Returning to the subject of his female characters, I comment, “You describe women’s clothes very well, in accurate, visual detail. I want to know how you do this.”

“Well,” Wambaugh indicates he wouldn’t mind another drink, “just research again, I suppose. But then again...” He looks as if he’s just lit a fuse on a firecracker and dropped it into the high school boys’ room sink. “Maybe I’m gay...except for the sex part.”