L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels
Engel uses a wrongful conviction case to illuminate the racism and corruption rampant in the LAPD before the first reforms. In 1956, Willie Roscoe Fields, who went AWOL during WWII and had been AWOL from the job scene pretty much ever since, found a skill he used over and over again, impersonating a cop in lovers’ lanes, separating couples, and raping the young woman involved, usually white, as he pretended to drive her to the station house. The LAPD pinned the crimes on a black former cop, who had been ostracized for dating a white woman. A Latino detective was the only cop to sense or care that the wrong man had been convicted and sent to prison. His pursuit of justice serves as the backbone of the book. This is both an examination of an especially distressing racist rush to judgment and an intriguing portrait of L.A. and the LAPD in the ’50s. As such, it should interest James Ellroy fans. --Connie Fletcher