Stephen J. Cannell had a chilling thought: What if the guys who police the police went bad? As in crooked? Then what?

        Then chaos, a message that comes through with decibels to spare in his sixth novel, The Tin Collectors. It's the tale of police policers in the Internal Affairs Division, the cops in charge of investigating police misconduct. They're nicknamed tin collectors because they confiscate badges.

        “This started, like so many of my books, as something completely different,” he said during a recent book-tour stop in Cincinnati. “It began with a controversy about the L.A. Coliseum and L.A. not having a football team. I thought the Coliseum was ripe for a novel.

        “Somewhere in that research, I ran across IAD, how they were called the "rat squad' and the "tin collectors' and all that. I started hanging out at hearings and saw some very strange outcomes, even for Los Angeles.

        “I didn't have a sense of corruption or cover-up, just strange.”

        Corruption and cover-up he saves for the book, a topsy-turvy tailspin in which the bad guys are in charge and the good cops are on the run.

        Sgt. Shane Scully's problems begin when the wife of his former partner calls in the middle of the night and asks him to come subdue her abusive husband, who's on the brink of killing her.

        He rushes over, violence escalates and before he knows what happened, his ex-partner is dead and Scully's holding the gun.

        Although it's clearly self-defense, it's the beginning of a nightmare on fast-forward: IAD decides it wasn't self-defense and never mind the eye witness. She was, after all, Scully's old girlfriend and Ray, his ex-partner, was one of the most popular cops on the force.

        Scully is suddenly an outcast of gigantic proportions.

        Oh, and did we mention that the dead cop was also the mayor's bodyguard? His honor isn't happy.

        His honor's also up to his lapels in something dirty, it becomes soon apparent, as is the chief of police and a gaggle of top cops. But not Alexa Hamilton, the officer assigned to prosecute him at his IAD hearing.

        As time goes on, she turns out to be the only one who believes Scully and, you guessed it, falls into his love-starved arms before they team up to straighten out this mess.

        This is classic Cannell: Fast, full of action, crammed with nasty turns and packed with half a dozen subplots that eventually weave their way into the whole: Cooch, the troubled Hispanic teen who may or may not be Scully's son, the product of a feverish one-night stand 16 years ago; that house at Lake Arrowhead with the one-way bedroom mirror that allows for photo ops and plenty of blackmail; ex-girlfriend and widow Barbara, trying to get back with Shane; a shady land deal that almost gets L.A. its NFL franchise.

        “That's a product of the way I write,” says Mr. Cannell, an ex-TV producer — Rockford Files, A-Team, Commish, Wiseguy, 21 Jump Street — who misses nothing about TV but the commotion of a live set.

        “I plot the first-third, very bare bones, then add complications. Then, develop characters and figure out their journey through the plot.

        “My one rule is to plot it tightly and make sure something happens in every chapter.”
       

FAST WRITER

               Stephen Cannell produces books as fast and furiously as he once produced television shows. His seventh novel — The Viking Funeral — is finished and will be published early next year. Like the Tin Collectors, it's another Shane Scully novel, a wise move since readers apparently like the L.A. cop : Tin is No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

        His eighth novel, the non-Scully Runaway Heart — also is finished and set for publication in 2003.

        “Sometimes, I write faster than they can print,” he understates. “But writing's what I do now. Six hours a day, every day. I don't see myself ever going back to TV.”

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