Joseph Wambaugh, author who knew gritty reality of cop life, dies at 88
Before the release of Joseph Wambaugh’s first novel, “The New Centurions,” he received an unusual offer from the star of the strait-laced TV police drama “Dragnet” to look over the pages.
Mr. Wambaugh knew his superiors in the Los Angeles Police Department would recoil at his story of the dark side of police work and cops dealing with the stress, violence and moral ambiguity of patrolling the streets. Jack Webb, who played the by-the-book “Dragnet” detective Joe Friday, promised to help smooth things over with LAPD brass if he liked the book.
The manuscript came back laced with hundreds of paper clips marking sections that unsettled Webb. “So I just, you know, I just scraped off all the paper clips, threw them in the trash,” Mr. Wambaugh recounted.
“The New Centurions” (1970) became a bestseller and set in motion Mr. Wambaugh’s eventual exit from the LAPD amid his rise as one of the virtuosos of stories from the gray zones of police work with cops who are flawed, jaded, sometimes broken and always complicated.
In Mr. Wambaugh’s more than 20 novels and nonfiction works — many of which were adapted for the screen — the lines between law enforcement and lawbreakers often become blurred. Beat cops and detectives struggle with their own demons as much as they grapple with their cases amid a backdrop of grifters, informants and bars where people drink to get drunk.
“All I did was turn things around,” said Mr. Wambaugh, who died Feb. 28 at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, at age 88. “Instead of writing about how cops worked the job, I wrote about how the job worked on the cops.”
Mr. Wambaugh was there. He joined the Los Angeles police in 1960 as a patrolman after earning a bachelor’s degree in English from California State College (now University) in Los Angeles. He said he preferred to go into teaching. The LAPD pay was better.
He was among the police units mobilized in 1965 when the city’s Watts neighborhood erupted in deadly riots after the arrest of a Black man by a White police officer — unrest that was also seen as rage against the area’s poverty and neglect.
Mr. Wambaugh was promoted to detective in 1968, working out of Hollywood and getting to know the denizens of drug dens and strip clubs. He also returned to Cal State as a part-time student to get his master’s degree in English. At home, he started to jot down his experiences as a cop. His “scribblings,” as he called them, were known only to his wife until he finished the manuscript for “The New Centurions.”
The book includes the mayhem of the Watts riots, as well as the anger and institutional bigotry among his fellow cops. “I knew damn well [LAPD chiefs] weren’t going to approve even the first 10 pages of my novel, because I was really telling the truth about police work,” he told The Washington Post in 2016. “So I thought, ‘I’ll take a chance, even though I know my career is on the line.’”
Reviewer Walter B. Greenwood, writing in the Buffalo News, applauded the novel’s “social realism” that “makes the reader understand a great deal about what being a cop is really like and what cops are really like.” (The novel was adapted into a 1972 film starring George C. Scott and Stacy Keach.)
His next books, including “The Blue Knight” (1972) and “The Choirboys” (1976), also took aim at the good-guy image of police work portrayed by TV shows such as “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” and tapped into the wider questioning of authority since the 1960s. Mr. Wambaugh’s characters often had more in common with the world-weary motifs of hard-boiled detective fiction or the irony-laden fatalism of “Catch 22” — and written in a similarly lean and snappy style.
In “The Blue Knight,” a veteran officer thinks about “the instinct,” his ability to tell when something just isn’t right. “Like an animal, you can feel when you got one, and it can’t be explained,” Mr. Wambaugh wrote. “You feel the truth and you know.”
In “The Choirboys,” a police lieutenant is lauded for drafting mind-numbing new rules about the size and shape of acceptable sideburns and mustaches on the force. “He beamed proudly,” Mr. Wambaugh wrote. “The regulations were perfect. No one could understand them.”
In 1973, Mr. Wambaugh co-created the NBC anthology series “Police Story,” which aired until 1980 as a forerunner for even grittier police dramas including “Hill Street Blues.”
“If [Mr. Wambaugh] didn’t invent the police novel, he certainly reinvented it,” Michael Connelly, author of the bestselling novels (later adapted into a Prime Video series) featuring fictional LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, told The Associated Press in 2007.
One real-life story from Mr. Wambaugh’s early years on the force never lost its grip. In 1963, Los Angeles police officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger pulled over a car for an illegal U-turn. Inside the car were Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith, who were looking for a liquor store to rob. They disarmed the police officers and drove them at gunpoint about 110 miles to an onion field near Bakersfield.
Campbell was fatally shot in the chest. Hettinger managed to escape. Their captors were convicted and sentenced to death in November 1963, and the sentences were later commuted to life in prison.
Mr. Wambaugh reconstructed the incident and its aftermath in his first nonfiction book, “The Onion Field” (1973), written during a six-month leave from the LAPD. The book became an instant bestseller as reviewers drew comparisons to Truman Capote’s chilling retelling of the murder of a Kansas family, “In Cold Blood” (1966).
Mr. Wambaugh’s account described how Hettinger’s life unraveled from the trauma of the abduction and the psychological pain of being waylaid by two thugs.
“I was put on Earth to write ‘The Onion Field.’ That’s how I felt about it,” Mr. Wambaugh said in an NPR interview in 2008. “It was such an emotional experience for me.” (Mr. Wambaugh wrote the screenplay for the 1979 film version, starring John Savage as Hettinger and James Woods as Powell.)
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Left the force
Mr. Wambaugh said he wanted to juggle his two careers as police detective and writer, but his fame increasingly interfered. Some suspects asked for his autograph. He decided to leave the force after a partner held open a squad car door for him in 1974.
“If they’d shown more resentment or jealousy, it would have been easier to deal with, but they didn’t. They were sweet,” he told Palm Springs Life in 2007. “They held open doors for me. And that was worse.”
After turning in his badge, Mr. Wambaugh’s books included nonfiction reportage with “Echoes in the Darkness” (1984), about murders in a Philadelphia suburb, and “The Blooding” (1989), which followed the hunt for the killer of two teenage girls in England.
Some novels had cops who had fully gone to the dark side. In the noir-esque “The Glitter Dome” (1981), two officers relish the power “to kill people and do other good police work.” A cop in “The Delta Star” (1983) known as The Bad Czech pretends to be doing lifesaving CPR on a suspect but is really trying to fatally squeeze blood out of the man’s wounds.
Other books parodied Southern California’s follies and vanities such as “The Secrets of Harry Bright” (1985) that ripped into the lives within the gated communities of Palm Springs.
His last books comprised the five-part “Hollywood Station” series, set in the years after the LAPD’s image was battered by the beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991 and later disclosures that an elite anti-gang unit had framed suspects.
In “Hollywood Hills,” (2010), police officer Britney Small is called to a bar to investigate a man pouring his drinks into an urn. The man explained he was taking his father’s ashes out for one last drink.
“Dad liked to stand at the bar with his foot on the rail,” the man said.
“I understand that, sir,” the officer replied. “But he had feet then.”
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Joined Marine Corps
Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh Jr. was born on Jan. 22, 1937, in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a town about 10 miles from the city that shares its name. His father was police chief, and his mother was a homemaker.
The family traveled to California to attend a funeral and decided to stay, Mr. Wambaugh said. He graduated from high school in Ontario, California, and joined the Marine Corps in 1954. He served until 1957 and used GI Bill benefits to pay for college, first earning an associate degree in 1958 at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California.
Many of his books were adapted for television, including the NBC miniseries “The Blue Knight” (1973) starring William Holden and Lee Remick, and a TV series based on the same book that ran on CBS from 1975 to 1976 starring George Kennedy. The 1974-1978 NBC drama “Police Woman,” starring Angie Dickinson, was a spinoff of “Police Story.”
In film, Mr. Wambaugh was often critical at how plotlines were streamlined. He was so upset by the 1977 movie adaptation of “The Choirboys,” directed by Robert Aldrich, that he took out a full-page ad in Daily Variety to air his grievances.
In 1955, he married his high school sweetheart, Dee Allsup. Other survivors include two children; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Their son, Mark, was killed in a highway crash in 1984 in Mexico.
Mr. Wambaugh’s death, from esophageal cancer, was announced by Janene Gant, a family friend.
Mr. Wambaugh said he developed a lifelong fascination with trying to get into the mind of sociopaths because his own upbringing left him with a deep personal code of right and wrong.
“So I have to cope with a conscience all the time,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “And I’m interested in a creature who has none of that.”