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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
Chicago Tribune
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Joseph Wambaugh, who brought street cops to life in his books and movies, dies at 88
If you were a child in the '50s or '60s, growing up with a TV set in your home, you knew some cops and those cops were not at all like real cops. That's because TV rarely reflected the world as it was, but rather provided strange figments of writers' imaginations, and those police officers who populated such shows as 'Dragnet' or 'Highway Patrol' … hello, Joe Friday. And then came Wambaugh, as in Joseph Wambaugh, a real police officer and detective in the Los Angeles Police Department, who pounded a beat and solved crimes and hit the keys of his typewriter so artfully that he published a 1971 novel titled 'The New Centurions,' which gave the audience a real and gritty world that changed forever the way we think of cops and robbers. This is similar to what Chicago's Scott Turow did to the legal profession with his first novel, 'Presumed Innocent,' published in 1987. As I recently wrote, he 'helped invigorate the 'legal thriller,' taking it from the relatively staid hands of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and making a more modern, emotionally nuanced and sophisticated place.' There have been millions of words written about all these changes, but I give you this, something Wambaugh told the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper in 2019: 'All I did was turn things around. Instead of writing about how cops worked the job, I wrote about how the job worked on the cops.' And he did it first and as well as it has ever been done and now that's over. Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh died on Feb. 28 as the result of esophageal cancer at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 88. Though he had not published a new book in decades, his stature and influence are immense and assured. (I have just reread three of his novels and they hold up well). As bestselling crime writer Evan Hunter put in reviewing Wambaugh's 1981 novel 'The Glitter Dome,' 'Let us forever dispel the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books. This would be tantamount to saying that Jack London was first and foremost a sailor. Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality, who has chosen to write about the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.' Such praise was common, with most critics agreeing and the public making him among the country's best-selling authors and a wealthy man. He was born an only child, on Jan. 22, 1937, to Anne, a homemaker, and Joseph, a steel worker and for a short time the police chief of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wambaugh attended Catholic school there until he was 14 and moved with his parents to Fontana, a small town west of Los Angeles. After high school, he served in the Marine Corps and married his high school girlfriend (Dee Allsup was at his bedside when he died after almost 70 years of marriage). Aiming to be a teacher, he earned two college degrees in English before being lured by the higher salary available to one opting for a police career. When not on duty, he wrote and wrote and wrote. Rather than offering heroics, his novel 'The New Centurions' focuses on the psychological changes and stresses that affect three young police officers. It spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a movie with George C. Scott. Though he wanted to remain on the force, Wambaugh's burgeoning celebrity — he was a frequent if reluctant talk show guest — made that impossible. Suspects (some of them guilty of crimes) asked him for autographs. Suspects wanted to talk about movies. Some asked him to introduce them to stars, get them movie roles. Strangers reporting crimes asked for him to be assigned to investigate. Before he left the force, he published what many consider his finest book — 'The Onion Field.' It was about the 1963 abduction of LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger. To research and write, Wambaugh is said to have taken a six-month leave of absence from the force to interview more than 50 people and peruse 40,000-some pages of transcripts from one of the longest murder trials in California history. The resulting book, written in the fashion of 'In Cold Blood,' drew favorable comparisons with Truman Capote's 1966 masterwork. 'I was put on Earth to write 'The Onion Field,'' Wambaugh once said on NPR. He retired after 14 years on the force in 1974 and wrote, producing 16 novels and five nonfiction books. He created the TV series 'Police Story' (1973-78) and 'The Blue Knight' (1975-76), wrote screenplays for the movie versions of 'The Onion Field' (1979) and 'The Black Marble' (1980), and a forgettable CBS mini-series, 'Echoes in the Darkness' (1987), and an NBC film, 'Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert' (1993), both also based on his books. Four other Wambaugh books were adapted by others into Hollywood films, television movies and mini-series. Wambaugh did not have many Hollywood friends and led a relatively quiet life. He negotiated his own deals. He is said to have been friendly but no back-slapper. He enjoyed playing golf alone. He is survived by his wife, a son David, daughter Jeanette, two grandchildren and two great grandchildren; son Mark died in an auto accident in 1984.
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
