Joseph Wambaugh, LA cop turned author of bestsellers including The Onion Field and The Choirboys

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02-03-2025

Joseph Wambaugh, who has died aged 88, was a former Los Angeles detective who in the 1970s became a bestselling author of grim and gritty books about the police such as The Onion Field (1973) and The Choirboys (1975); later, in The Blooding (1989) he produced a highly-acclaimed account of the first British murder case to be solved using the revolutionary 'genetic fingerprinting' technique.
In a writing career spanning more than 30 years, Wambaugh – 'the dean of crime writers' as he came to be called – was credited with redefining police fiction, transforming the cop novel from a hard-boiled sub-genre into serious literature and almost single-handedly reinventing the police procedural with novels like The New Centurions (1971).
Wambaugh also sounded the death-knell for the cardboard television cops of the 1950s such as Joe Friday of Dragnet and Eliot Ness of The Untouchables. For when, in the 1970s, Wambaugh created Police Story, a series for the American network NBC, he revolutionised the way police were portrayed on the small screen, letting cops be seen as human beings with human characteristics, flaws and failings. Later series such as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were said to owe their form and tone to Wambaugh's pioneering work.
At New Year 1987, Wambaugh read in his California newspaper about a murder inquiry in the English Midlands. All men aged between 17 and 34 in the villages of Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe and surrounding areas were being asked to volunteer samples of their blood and saliva so that they could be eliminated from police inquiries into the murders of two 15-year-old Narborough girls, Lynda Mann, raped and strangled in 1983, and Dawn Ashworth who met the same fate in 1986.
Wambaugh was struck by this unprecedented move, but by the time the police got their man the following September, Wambaugh had also learned about the role played in the case by so-called DNA fingerprinting, a technique developed at Leicester University by the geneticist Dr Alec Jeffreys. Having secured a promise of co-operation by the detective leading the inquiry, Wambaugh flew to England and spent two weeks knocking on doors and conducting interviews with various participants in the case.
To Wambaugh, an expert on police methods from his days in the LAPD, its attraction lay in the protracted testing of the bodily fluids of more than 4,500 men and youths. It was the first murder inquiry in which the new science of genetic fingerprinting proved to be critical; at first, the analysts unexpectedly cleared a much-fancied early suspect, and then, some months later, helped to convict the real murderer, Colin Pitchfork, a married man of 28 from Littlethorpe.
Wambaugh's account of the case in The Blooding was not his first excursion into the realms of non-fiction crime. More than 15 years before, with The Onion Field, Wambaugh had grappled with a true story that had obsessed him since his time as a cop: the execution-style murder of a policeman, Ian Campbell, by two small-time punks in a lonely Californian onion field in 1963, and the effects it had on the subsequent lives of the perpetrators and Campbell's police partner.
Although the murderers escaped the electric chair for seven years on a technicality (they had not been read their rights), they were eventually executed although neither expressed any remorse for what they had done.
Two years later, Wambaugh produced his most successful crime novel, The Choirboys, a comic but ultimately tragic tale about a Los Angeles police nightwatch and the futile quest of 10 burnt-out LAPD officers for respite from the boring (but sometimes terrifying) demands of their shift on what they called 'choir practice', after-hours sex and drinking rituals – among other things – in MacArthur Park. 'Very little in Wambaugh's first two novels prepares one for the scabrous humour and ferocity of The Choirboys,' warned the critic John Leonard in the New York Times. 'Each of the policemen wears his cynicism like a bulletproof jockstrap.'
Wambaugh had a rough ride in Hollywood when it came to having his books made into films. He was so unhappy with what happened to his screenplay of The Choirboys, released in 1977 that he sued and won a $1 million settlement and the removal of his name from the script.
Four years earlier Wambaugh had sold the rights to The Onion Field to Columbia Pictures, but when the studio abandoned the project, Wambaugh tried to buy them back. When Columbia refused to sell, Wambaugh sued and won, formed his own production company, hired his own director and sank $850,000 of his own money into the project. Released in 1979, with Wambaugh's own screenplay, the film was hailed as one of the best of the year, with Newsweek's critic congratulating Wambaugh on 'a prowling, gripping disturbing movie that has its own far-from-simple vision of evil in our wretched and sinister cities.'
Yet such a gloomy scenario was strikingly at odds with its creator, a twinkling, open and sociable man with a relaxed sense of humour. He lived in a house overlooking the Pacific and once owned by John Wayne; although a self-confessed hard drinker, he dispelled hangovers with a two-mile run each morning before sitting down to work. The former cop became a driven writer, never failing to make it to his desk even 'when I'm sick, hung over, hands shaking at the typewriter or when it's raining'.
Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh Jr was born on January 22 1937 in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of a policeman and a cleaner. The family was Roman Catholic working-class, three-quarters Irish and one quarter German, and during his childhood he served as an altar boy.
When he was 14 the family moved to Los Angeles, where his father became a washing-machine repair man; in high school in the suburb of Ontario, young Joseph was, on his own admission, a 'terrible' student, and in 1954, aged 17, he joined the US Marine Corps. Discharged in 1957, he enrolled at college and on matriculation the following year took day work, first in a steel mill and then as a police officer, while continuing his studies at night.
Finding that he was good at literature, he took a BA degree in 1960 and a Masters in English eight years later.
Although he had planned to teach English, in 1960 Wambaugh instead decided to join the Los Angeles Police Department and in 14 years rose to the rank of detective sergeant in the burglary detail of the Hollenbeck division, a socially blighted predominantly Mexican-American neighbourhood in east Los Angeles.
In August 1968 Wambaugh witnessed the race riots in Watts, which made a profound impression on him. 'People were dropping dead all over the place,' he recalled. 'I have no idea who was shooting. I had no idea what to do about it. All we did was sort of back up and protect our ass.' In 1971 he used the experience as the basis for a highly-moving scene in his debut novel The New Centurions.
Throughout his years in the police, Joseph Wambaugh kept notes for use in any future career as a writer, jotting them on scraps of paper, even hamburger wrappers, and stuffing them all in a drawer. 'I'd come back from a case with my hands sweating,' he remembered. 'I thought that if I wrote it right, I could make other peoples' hands sweat, too.'
He began submitting short stories to magazines, receiving nothing but rejections until a former editor of Atlantic magazine, Edward Weeks, suggested he try writing a novel. So every night for six months, at the end of a full day's work, Wambaugh wrote a minimum of 1,000 words, finally sending Weeks the 145,000-word typescript of The New Centurions.
The book told the story of three fictional Los Angeles police officers through their first five years on the force as their initial idealism is corroded by hard and entrenched attitudes, while the public continued to regard the rookie cops as civilisation's front line, not unlike the Roman centurions who stood and fought against the Visigoths.
Wambaugh's story was not only published but proved to be one of the most successful books of 1971, selected by the Book of the Month Club and appearing in the bestseller list for 32 weeks, ultimately selling more than two million copies. It was made into a film the following year.
When Wambaugh's second novel, The Blue Knight, appeared in 1972, the New York Times noted approvingly that it 'abounds in vivid vignettes of police life and the Los Angeles streets'. It recounted disgraced patrolman Bumper Morgan's last days on the force, told, as another critic remarked, 'with great gusto, rough, tough language, affection and even reverence for Bumper and the law-and-order school he represents.'
His third book, The Onion Field (1973), was Wambaugh's first non-fiction novel, written with the encouragement of Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood (1965) set the gold standard for true crime books for the second half of the 20th century. Wambaugh considered his first two books to have been practice runs for 'the story that made me want to be a writer'.
He took a six-month leave of absence from the LAPD to write it, spent a small fortune securing the co-operation of the chief protagonists and in legal and research fees, ploughed through 65,000 pages of court transcripts and interviewed more than 60 people.
Even so, Wambaugh finished the book in five months flat and was already back on the beat when his leave ended.
Shortly afterwards, Wambaugh retired from the police, finding it impossible to continue working as a 'celebrity cop' and, to the dismay of his former bosses in the LAPD, wrote The Choirboys (1975), with its roistering portrayal of the thin blue line. In 2006 he returned to the LAPD for Hollywood Station, the first in a series of five novels, the last being Harbor Nocturne in 2012.
In the 1990s after writing the script for a television film of The Blooding, Wambaugh was appalled (but scarcely surprised) to be asked if he could rewrite it and make the story happen in Kansas rather than rural Leicestershire.
In 1955 Joseph Wambaugh married his high school girlfriend Dee Allsup; they had three children, one of whom died in a car crash in 1984.
Joseph Wambaugh, born January 22 1937, died February 28 2025
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