Supercop?

By * Lance Morrow

THE BLUE KNIGHT by JOSEPH WAMBAUGH 338 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown.

$7.95.

The ten months that Joseph Wambaugh's first novel, The New Centurions, spent staked out on the bestseller list were perhaps less a tribute to the author's literary skill than to the authenticity of his material. Wambaugh was working a rich contemporary vein: the life of the Los Angeles police force, on which he served for more than a decade. Although Centurions brought him an official reprimand for failing to submit his manuscript for advance approval, Detective Sergeant Wambaugh is back with another police novel, turned out between tours of duty.

The Blue Knight is Bumper Morgan, a 49-year-old patrolman on the verge of retirement after 20 years in the L.A.P.D. Wambaugh almost challenges his reader: "You want a pig? I'll show you a real pig." Bumper is a flatulent, potbellied, 275-lb. prototype of the bulls that demonstrators love to hate. The caricature is deliberate; the author means to endow a stereotype with complexity and sentiment. Bumper has his own street ethics: "When it came to accepting things from people on my beat, I did have one rule -- no money. I never felt bought if a guy gave me free meals or a case of booze, or a discounted sport coat, or if a dentist fixed my teeth at a special rate . . . Also, I never took anything from someone I might end up having to arrest."

In court one afternoon for the trial of a robbery suspect he has brought in, Morgan observes: "We have a very diligent bunch of young public defend ers around here who . . . will drive you up the wall defending a chicken shit burglary like it was the Sacco-Vanzetti trial." Knowing that a suspect is guilty, Bumper lies on the stand about the circumstances of the arrest, partly to protect one of his informants, partly to ensure that the man gets convicted. Out on the streets, Wambaugh suggests, cops have to make their own accommodations.

A sort of documentary of Bumper's last three days before retirement, the book tends to be a bit ostentatious in such honesties, as if they established Bumper's credibility. In the end, Wambaugh sentimentalizes Bumper as a sort of repellently lovable supercop who, whenever he is not strongarming "pukepots," is bantering in Yiddish, Spanish or Arabic with the ethnics on the beat.

Oddly, some most persuasive moments occur when Bumper sits down to consume one of the Lucullan meals he regularly cadges. Wambaugh's feeling for food is almost erotic. Thus as Bumper takes dessert in an Arab restaurant: "I scooped up a mouthful and let it lay there on my tongue, tasting the sweet apricot and lemon rind, and remembering how Yasser's wife, Yasmine, blended the apricot and lemon rind and sugar, and folded the apricot puree into the whipped cream before it was chilled."

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