Though its title plays on that of James Joyce's last masterpiece of linguistic pyrotechnics, Finnegan's Week does not attempt to claim avant garde status. Wambaugh has never been a stylistic innovator. His novels reflect a competent realism in setting and plot, a realism based on a more than competent knowledge of the realities of the world he writes about. He usually adds to this fundamental realism a characteristic touch of black comedy and, as a balance, of sentimental melodrama.

Although he often employs very effective colloquial speech, he is not a George V. Higgins. The language of Wambaugh's characters is entertainingly vivid, but he does not attempt to create their world in their own voice.

Wambaugh's originality lies in his material and in his point of view. In the early novels, the material was the underbelly of a late twentieth-century American city — squalid, perverted, corrupt — and...