The mischief of The Choirboys has been put into the reader's mind by such certified authorities as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his Little Sir Echoes on the New York Times. The slender dozen titular choirboys of Wambaugh's novel give unintended credence to the popular view: they are psychopathically introspective, irresponsible, and dubiously moral Los Angeles night-shift policemen who call a "choir practice" around a slimy duck pond in MacArthur Park whenever one of them suffers an unusually traumatic psychological shock of the sort every dedicated police officer experiences daily. But these choirboys feel more deeply than they think, so their probings deteriorate into an alcoholic stupefaction just short of such paralysis that they cannot cry Ite, missa est before gangbanging two megamammalian police groupies named Ora Lee Tingle and Carolina Moon.

I do not deny Wambaugh's thesis that every police department has its choirboys. To some...