Joseph Wambaugh, cop-turned-best-selling-author, dies at 88
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Before Joseph Wambaugh came along, the unofficial bard of the Los Angeles Police Department was Jack Webb, whose unsmiling Sgt. Joe Friday peppered every episode of “Dragnet” with homilies about moral weakness and crime.
“Marijuana is the flame, heroin is the fuse, LSD is the bomb,” Friday seethed to a suspect in a 1967 episode. “So don’t you try to equate liquor with marijuana, Mister. Not to me. … Don’t you con me with your mind-expansion slop!”
Then came Wambaugh, an LAPD veteran whose fictional cops would have had Joe Friday screaming for the California Penal Code and a bottle of disinfectant. Wambaugh’s characters were morally flexible, heroic, repugnant, compassionate, callous, deeply flawed, darkly comical — in a word, real.
Wambaugh, whose 16 novels and five nonfiction crime narratives transformed the portrayal of cops in America, paved the way for gritty TV shows such as “Hill Street Blues” and “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and inspired a new generation of crime writers, died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., according to Janene Gant, a longtime family friend. He was 88.
The cause of his death was esophageal cancer, Gant said. He had learned about his illness about 10 months ago. His wife of 69 years, Dee, was at his side, Gant said.
His bestselling novels included “The New Centurions,” “The Glitter Dome,” “The Choirboys” and “Black Marble.” The best known of his nonfiction works was “The Onion Field,” a chilling story that starts with a routine stop for an illegal U-turn and quickly leads to the execution of a Los Angeles police officer in a Kern County field.
Michael Connelly, a former Los Angeles Times police reporter who became an author of acclaimed crime novels, said he came to think of Wambaugh as a mentor 25 years before actually meeting him and becoming his friend.
Before Wambaugh, crime novelists often focused on “the loner detective who works outside the system he distrusts and even despises,” Connelly wrote in a preface to the 2008 edition of Wambaugh’s first novel, “The New Centurions.”
“It fell to Wambaugh to take the story inside the police station and patrol car where it truly belonged, to tell the story of the men who did the real work and risked their lives and sanity to do it. And to explore a different kind of corruption — the premature cynicism and tarnished nobility of the cop who has looked too often and too long into humanity’s dark abyss.”
Wambaugh put it simply.
“All I did was turn things around,” he told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2019. “Instead of writing about how cops worked the job, I wrote about how the job worked on the cops.”
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At every turn, Wambaugh broke with convention. Crimes might or might not be solved. Bad guys might or might not meet justice. And the cops themselves might be straight-arrow, tough-but-fair, square-jawed professionals — or maybe not.
Wambaugh, who after 14 years left the LAPD as a detective sergeant to pursue his writing career, was particularly tough on departmental bureaucrats and top brass.
In “The Choirboys,” a timid lieutenant fails at his assigned secret mission: sneaking into the department’s personnel files to change his ambitious boss’s IQ score from 107 to 141. However, he redeems himself as an administrator by writing impenetrable new rules on the size of officers’ sideburns and mustaches.
“It took Lieutenant Treadwell 13 weeks to compose the regulations,” Wambaugh wrote. “He was toasted and congratulated at a staff meeting. He beamed proudly. The regulations were perfect. No one could understand them.”
The gulf between Wambaugh’s working officers and their highest-ranking leaders was huge. The IQ-deficient Commander Moss “often said that if anyone organized those ignorant bastards, look out. Commander Moss was like a slaver who lived in fear of native footsteps on the decks in the night.”
Of course, some of Wambaugh’s street cops were demented.
In “The Delta Star,” an immense, perennially angry officer known as The Bad Czech chases down a petty thief in downtown L.A. and futilely tries to hang him from a fire escape.
Later in the story, he catches up to a violent serial mugger who had been stabbed and is clinging to life. The cop crouches beside him and vigorously “performs CPR,” pumping nearly all the blood from the dying miscreant’s body with every squeeze.
When an elderly witness thanks him for so valiantly trying to save a criminal’s life, he is appropriately modest.
“Thank you, ma’am,” The Bad Czech said shyly. “It don’t hurt to remember that we’re all God’s children.”
Even with the debauchery and depravity so vividly portrayed by Wambaugh, unsung acts of goodwill and tenderness emerge through the blue fog. The streets of Los Angeles — particularly Hollywood — are a backdrop not just for addicts, scammers, human traffickers and a cult that fetishizes amputees, but also for people in distress and the cops who help them.
In “Harbor Nocturne,” a perky 91-year-old woman calls for help in waking her husband Howard.
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“He always takes an afternoon nap,” she tells Hollywood Nate Weiss, an officer who holds a SAG card and is always looking for his big break in movies. “It’s just a longer nap this time.”
Hollywood Nate and his shy young partner Britney Small had just been on patrol in their cruiser, discussing their terrible dreams. Nate has recurring visions of his slain partner, a woman with “a chuckle that sounded like wind chimes.” Britney is haunted by the assailant she shot to death and upset by the admiration it brought her from more seasoned cops.
Minutes later, they were comforting the stricken widow, holding her hand as she showed them old photos of a family trip to the Grand Canyon. Later, Britney wept, and softhearted, hardboiled Hollywood Nate soothed her: “Even gunfighters have to cry sometimes,” he said.
The two are among a handful of characters — like Flotsam and Jetsam, the surfer detectives — who reappear in Wambaugh’s work. In “Hollywood Hills,” Officer Small confronts a man talking to himself and pouring drinks into an urn at a once-elegant bar “where after a martini or two, aging patrons could appear to each other the way they used to be and not the way they currently were.”
The man, it turned out, was taking his father’s ashes out for a drink. Britney told him to keep his dad at a dark corner table where he wouldn’t upset other customers.
“Dad liked to stand at the bar with his foot on the rail,” the grieving son explained.
“I understand that, sir,” the officer said. “But he had feet then.”
Born Jan 22, 1937, Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh Jr. grew up in East Pittsburgh, Pa., where his father worked in a steel mill and, for a time, was the city’s police chief. When Joseph was 14, his family came to California for a funeral and decided to stay.
After high school in Ontario, , Wambaugh served in the Marines from 1954 to 1957 and then earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Cal State Los Angeles. He wanted to teach, but the LAPD paid better than the schools.
As he rose through the ranks, he earned a master’s degree from Cal State. He also tucked away notes about his experiences on the street and, defying department rules, turned them into his first novel, “The New Centurions.”
When Chief Ed Davis heard about the pending publication, he threatened to fire Wambaugh. The ACLU took up his cause and Jack Webb said he’d intervene with the chief if Wambaugh’s work was worthy.
“My homicide partner and I drove to Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills and dropped off the manuscript,” Wambaugh recalled in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Quarterly. After a few weeks, Webb had read it and stuck a paper clip — about 500 in all — over every passage that might offend the higher-ups. “I kept the paper clips,’’ Wambaugh said, “and never met Webb.”
His first novel, “Another Roadside Attraction,” was published in 1971 when Robbins was 39 -- more than three decades after declaring to his parents, at age 5, that he’d be a writer.
The 1971 novel was a Book of the Month Club selection and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 32 weeks. It was made into a movie with George C. Scott as benevolent older cop Andy Kilvinski, who shepherds prostitutes into a patrol wagon and buys them scotch just to provide a respite from the dangerous streets they walk. In retirement, Kilvinski kills himself.
Still a working officer — though “censured” instead of fired — Wambaugh came out with “The Blue Knight” in 1972 and “The Onion Field” in 1973. For the latter, he took a six-month leave of absence, interviewed 63 people and plowed through more than 40,000 pages of transcripts from one of the longest murder trials ever conducted in California.
The 1963 abduction of LAPD Officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger became Wambaugh’s obsession. His gripping account of Campbell’s death and Hettinger’s crushing depression has been likened to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” with both authors applying a novelist’s storytelling techniques to cold fact.
“I was put on Earth to write ‘The Onion Field,’ ” Wambaugh told NPR. “That’s how I felt about it.”
But life at the LAPD was becoming increasingly difficult. People arrested by Wambaugh were asking him for roles on “Police Story,” a popular TV series he helped create for NBC. One suspect he was handcuffing turned to him and asked, “What’s George C. Scott really like?”
“Man, I’ve got to get out,” Wambaugh told himself.
Wambaugh left the LAPD in 1974. He abandoned his hopes of a pension but became one of America’s most popular writers, earning, by one early estimate, at least $1 million per book.
Wambaugh and his family moved around upscale neighborhoods in Southern California, from San Marino to Newport Beach to Rancho Mirage to Point Loma, near San Diego. Along the way, he wrote crime novels focused on the Orange County yachting set, upper-crust dog show fans, Palm Springs country clubs, the America’s Cup, and the Nobel Prize.
Instead of drawing exclusively on his own LAPD experiences, he would buy drinks for a half-dozen cops at a time and take copious notes as they told their stories. In the acknowledgments for “Hollywood Hills” alone, he thanks 51 officers from four departments.
In addition to “The Onion Field,” Wambaugh’s nonfiction includes `“Lines and Shadows,” about the San Diego Police Department’s undercover efforts to protect migrants from human predators; “Echoes in the Darkness,” about the murder of a Pennsylvania teacher and her two children; “The Blooding,” about the use of genetic fingerprinting to nab a killer in England; and “Fire Lover,” about a firefighter-arsonist in Glendale.
“If it’s nonfiction, I talk to the people who lived it,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m getting out there. I’m not doing these interior monologues for 330 pages about my first experiences in the back seat of an Oldsmobile or something.”
Four of Wambaugh’s works were turned into feature films — a process so infuriating to the author that he helped finance two of them for greater control over the outcome. He was so incensed by the film version of “The Choirboys” that he bought a full-page ad in Daily Variety to lambaste Lorimar Productions and director Robert Aldrich.
At a UCLA panel discussion on the nature of evil in crime writing, Wambaugh recalled the day he came face to face with it. His first encounter with evil, he said, was “when I sold my first book to Columbia Pictures.”
Wambaugh’s survivors include his wife, Dee, the high school sweetheart he married in 1955; daughter Jeanette; and son David. Another son, Mark, died in a 1984 car crash in Mexico.
Asked how he’d like to be remembered, Wambaugh summed it up with the no-nonsense crispness of a patrolman handing out a speeding ticket.
“Cop writer,” he said. “That should work.”
Chawkins is a former Times staff writer.
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