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Otago Daily Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Obituary: Joseph Wambaugh, writer
American writer Joseph Wambaugh, January 1980. Behind him is a poster for his work The Onion Field. Joseph Wambaugh put his life on the printed page, a former Los Angeles police officer who turned his day-to-day work into gripping, true-crime bestsellers. The Pittsburgh-born son of a police officer, Wambaugh moved to California as a teenager and, despite having ambitions to be an English teacher, ended up following his father into uniform. He had been in the LAPD for 11 years and reached the rank of sergeant when his debut novel, The New Centurions, was published. It was a critically acclaimed best-seller, and Wambaugh used to joke that suspects he had arrested would ask him for autographs. Wambaugh was also heavily involved in the production of 1970s TV series Police Story. Wambaugh's second novel, The Blue Knight, was another hit but it was his third book, The Onion Field, which cemented his reputation as a leading novelist. A non-fiction account of a kidnapping and murder, it was adapted into both a TV series and film and led to Wambaugh becoming a full-time writer. He published 18 books over the next 40 years. Wambaugh won crime writing's premier award, the Edgar, three times, and was also named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Joseph Wambaugh died on February 28, aged 88. — APL/agencies
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Yahoo
Privacy laws make it too difficult to learn outcomes when and if police are disciplined
To the editor: The article about the LAPD and the racist comments that were made by some officers is disturbing but not surprising ("Secret recordings reveal LAPD cops spewing racist, sexist and homophobic comments, complaint alleges," March 10). Yet the public will never find out what happened to these officers because of privacy laws. So we have accomplished nothing — just another report with no conclusion. Luis Cruz, La Mirada .. To the editor: The history of racist remarks at the LAPD is clearly illustrated in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh, a former police officer who was prolific in the 1970s. 'The New Centurions," 'The Blue Knight' and 'The Choirboys' all sound exactly like the recordings described in the article. Obviously, little or nothing has changed in the ensuing years. Noel Park, Rancho Palos Verdes This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
22-03-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Privacy laws make it too difficult to learn outcomes when and if police are disciplined
To the editor: The article about the LAPD and the racist comments that were made by some officers is disturbing but not surprising ('Secret recordings reveal LAPD cops spewing racist, sexist and homophobic comments, complaint alleges,' March 10). Yet the public will never find out what happened to these officers because of privacy laws. So we have accomplished nothing — just another report with no conclusion. Luis Cruz, La Mirada .. To the editor: The history of racist remarks at the LAPD is clearly illustrated in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh, a former police officer who was prolific in the 1970s. 'The New Centurions,' 'The Blue Knight' and 'The Choirboys' all sound exactly like the recordings described in the article. Obviously, little or nothing has changed in the ensuing years. Noel Park, Rancho Palos Verdes
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- The Guardian
Joseph Wambaugh obituary
Joseph Wambaugh, who has died of cancer aged 88, was one of the most important US crime writers of his generation. Beginning with his novels The New Centurions (1971) and The Blue Night (1972), and the nonfiction The Onion Field (1973), Wambaugh's books and their screen adaptations were built around the inner tensions of police work. Wambaugh, himself a Los Angeles cop for 14 years, knew well the challenges officers faced in maintaining some sort of normality while trapped in the messy realities of their brutal and often irrational jobs. He revealed the strains this put on their lives, and the sometimes extreme means they took to relieve that pressure. He also dealt unflinchingly with corruption, both personal, among cops, and structurally, within the politics of the police department and the city the officers were sworn to protect and serve. 'If he didn't invent the police novel, he certainly reinvented it,' said the writer Michael Connelly, whose cop Harry Bosch confronted many of the same issues. Certainly, Wambaugh's world was a far cry from the squeaky-clean image of the LAPD detective Joe Friday in the TV show Dragnet. Wambaugh was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his father, Joseph, a steelworker and cop, was a small-town police chief and his mother, Anne (nee Malloy), was a housewife. They joined the postwar exodus to California when Joe was 14; he graduated from high school in Ontario, California at 17, in 1954, and joined the Marines. The following year, he married his high-school sweetheart, Dee Allsop. Discharged in 1957, he worked in a steel mill while taking night classes in English at Los Angeles State College (now California State University Los Angeles). He received his BA in 1960 and joined the LAPD. He continued studying at night while walking a beat, and in 1968 received his master's degree and was promoted to detective. His early short stories were all rejected, but one editor advised he try longer form. His first novel, The New Centurions, spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It tracks three 1960 graduates of the police academy as they learn their jobs, culminating in the Watts riots of 1965. The 1972 film of the novel gave George C Scott one of his best roles. By then Wambaugh had retired from the LAPD; he was arresting criminals who asked for his autograph, or for referrals to publishers or movie producers. The Blue Knight told of a career beat cop, Bumper Morgan, in his last days before retirement. The 1973 TV miniseries based on the book produced an Emmy award for William Holden as Bumper, and a Golden Globe for Lee Remick as his wife, and spun off a TV series starring George Kennedy. Wambaugh followed with The Onion Field, an account of the kidnapping by petty criminals of two LA cops, one of whom was killed while the other was able to escape. In a work often compared to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Wambaugh contrasted the way one of the two killers learns the veneer of respectability during the course of the trial, while the surviving cop struggles with the trauma of his experience. 'I'm most interested in characters who have no conscience,' he explained, referencing his own Catholic upbringing. The book won a special Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America; Wambaugh wrote the screenplay for Harold Becker's excellent 1979 film, which starred James Woods and John Savage. In 1973 he co-created the TV anthology series Police Story, episodes of which won Edgars in 1974 and 1975, and spun off another hit series, Police Woman, starring Angie Dickinson. Each of Wambaugh's next three novels quickly transitioned to film. The Choirboys (1975) became a vehicle for one of the director Robert Aldrich's most anarchic efforts, in 1977, for which Wambaugh wrote the screenplay; he won another Edgar for the script for Becker's adaptation of The Black Marble (1978). The Glitter Dome (1980) was set in a Chinatown bar by that name where police officers romanced 'chickens and vultures', drawing a moral parallel with the police investigation into pornography. The 1984 HBO production starred James Garner and Margot Kidder. After ranging into politics and Nobel prizes in Delta Star (1983), Wambaugh returned to true crime in 1984 with two books, Lines and Shadows, and Echoes in the Darkness. The latter became a TV miniseries with Stockard Channing, Peter Coyote and Treat Williams. It dealt with the murder in suburban Philadelphia of a schoolteacher and her two children, for which the school principal was one of two men convicted. When his conviction was later overturned, it emerged Wambaugh had paid the lead investigator $50,000, contingent on the principal's arrest. Though the payment was not part of the overturning of the verdict, Wambaugh was sued by the principal, but won the case. By now, his influence on police dramas had been widely absorbed, in everything from Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue to The Shield. But Wambaugh's own writing switched focus as he moved out of LA to Orange County and to San Diego: five novels between 1985 and 1996 dealt more with the shadow-lives of the rich elites in exclusive communities. The Blooding (1989) was the true crime story of the Leicester murderer Colin Pitchfork, who was one of the first people convicted via DNA evidence. Wambaugh won his third Edgar for his next true crime story, Fire Lover (2002), about Frank Orr, America's most prolific serial arsonist, who worked as a fire investigator. Two years after his fourth Edgar, a lifetime achievement award in 2004, he returned to fiction, prompted by the federal government's oversight of the LAPD following the Rampart corruption scandal. Hollywood Station (2006) was the first of five novels in six years, all with Hollywood in the title, starring the detective 'Hollywood Nate' West and featuring a pair of detectives called Flotsam and Jetsam, shades of Connelly's Crate and Barrel. They recalled the stories of his own early days on the force. 'Once I create the characters,' he said, 'I let [them] take me [where they are going]'. Wambaugh is survived by his wife, son, David, and daughter, Jeanette. Another son, Mark, died in 1984. Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, writer, born 22 January 1937; died 28 February 2025
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Yahoo
Joseph Wambaugh, LA cop turned author of bestsellers including The Onion Field and The Choirboys
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 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
