Fire Lover: A True Story by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unlike most post-WWII American true crime writers, Joseph Wambaugh has a prose style. It's a breeze, Chandleresque, tough-guy style: he uses slang, obscenities, metaphors for crying out loud. As an example, here's a paragraph about Ted Bundy:

All death-penalty lawyers remembered the time when America's most notorious violent serial offender, Ted Bundy, had wanted to do some life-and-death trading. After he'd had such a great time representing himself at his trial, giving interviews and fielding marriage proposals, it all had stopped. When he was just days away from his appointment with the Florida electric chair, he offered to locate his victims' bodies if the governor of Florida would commute his death sentence to life without parole. But the authorities told him, in effect, Too late, Ted. You got a date with Ol' Sparky, and Satan is waiting for his number-one draft pick.
(259-60)

So Wambaugh is an unfailingly entertaining writer, and he does a good job of conveying the black humor of law enforcement (not surprisingly, since he was a detective sergeant for the LAPD). He's maybe the only writer I've encountered who can show that humor well enough for a reader to share it. (Rule tries, occasionally, but it always falls flat and awkward.) And he's very good at tracking what he calls the balkanization of American law enforcement--the way that neighboring jurisdictions see themselves as being in competition rather than cooperation and sneer at each other like rival high schools. And he's absolutely willing to wade in and call people out on their mistakes and bad judgment. His heroes in this book are two firefighter/arson investigators: Marvin Casey, who had this serial arson case solved in 1987, four years and scores, if not hundreds, of fires before John Orr was finally arrested in 1991, but couldn't get anyone to listen to him because he was accusing an arson investigator (and because the fingerprint examiner made an indefensible blunder), and Steve Patterson who insisted in the face of cynical, condescending derision from cops that a cold case victim deserved to have them expend their precious time trying to solve her murder.

I appreciate Wambaugh's humor and his chutzpah. But everything has the defects of its virtues, and Wambaugh can get grating. I found this particularly true during the lengthy coverage of Orr's lengthy trials (more than 200 pages, so basically half the book) as Wambaugh caromed from patronizing the jury(/ies) to making catty comments about the prosecutors to taking potshots at the defense lawyers (and always just a little contemptuous of John Orr--and on that I'm in agreement with him). He is capable of respect for his subjects, but he doles it out sparingly: the fingerprint expert who cowboys up and admits his egregious mistake under oath in open court, and the people who testified in the penalty phase of John Orr's trial for murder about the loss of their loved ones in the Ole's Home Center fire in 1984 (that's the fire I've tagged this book with, because it is--astonishingly--the only time John Orr's fires actually succeeded in killing anyone).

John Orr is considered one of the worst--if not the worst (the other contender being Thomas Sweatt)--serial arsonists of the twentieth century. One of the ATF agents who investigated him thinks that Orr set more than 2,000 fires between 1984 and 1991. Orr used his training in arson investigation to commit arson, and he used his credentials as a deeply respected arson investigator to cover for his crimes. John Orr, first on the scene? Well, that's just how dedicated he is to his job. His novel/memoir, Points of Origin (Orr claims it's fact-based fiction; prosecutors claim it's a very thinly veiled record of his crimes) and his attempts to publish it make it clear just how willing Orr was to trade on his arson to get what he wanted. I'm with Joseph Wambaugh; this man deserves nothing but contempt. The more you point to his dedication as an arson investigator and the number of cases his solved and the number of investigators he trained, the worse his crimes look. As usual I'm conflicted about the death penalty, but I'm certainly glad that Orr got life without parole. He is not a person who either deserves or can be trusted with freedom.



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