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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
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
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.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Joseph Wambaugh, cop-turned-best-selling-author, dies at 88
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." Read more: Roberta Flack, timeless R&B singer who made 'Killing Me Softly With His Song' a hit, dies at 88 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. Read more: G. Ray Hawkins, gallerist who championed photography as fine art, dies at 80 '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.' Read more: Counterculture author Tom Robbins, known for his irreverent bestselling novels, dies at 92 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. Sign up for Essential California for the L.A. Times biggest news, features and recommendations in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
