It's as though "Catch-22" had been written by Popeye Doyle.

Twice in "The Choirboys" Joseph Wambaugh stops to think out loud about what he's trying to tell us. Both times he puts his words into the mouth of Baxter Slate, who, improbably, grew up in Dominican Catholic schools and studied classical literature before becoming a cop and a choirboy….

Neither of these stops is necessary. They are like sandwich boards, advertising a place in which the reader is already trapped. Wambaugh has set up housekeeping in a sewer; we don't need any reminders of what we can smell all around us….

Very little in Wambaugh's first two novels prepares one for the scabrous humor and ferocity of "The Choirboys." "The New Centurions" (1971) and "The Blue Knight" (1972) were bittersweet slices of naturalism, unlikely Hamlets on wry crisp, as if to elaborate the extenuating circumstance that cops, too, have feelings...