Joseph Wambaugh

Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh Jr. (born 22 January 1937) is an American crime writer and former LAPD detective who, beginning with The New Centurions (1971), revolutionised the police procedural novel by bringing to it something no previous crime writer had possessed: fourteen years of actual police experience. His novels depict cops not as the noble heroes of Jack Webb’s Dragnet or the hardboiled loners of Raymond Chandler but as flawed, exhausted, frequently drunk, often traumatised human beings doing a job that systematically destroys them. He is the most important police writer in American fiction.

Life

Wambaugh was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of a steelworker. After serving in the Marines, he joined the LAPD in 1960 and served as a detective in the Hollenbeck Division and later in Hollywood Division. He earned a master’s degree in English from California State University while working as a police officer and published his first novel while still on the force.

The success of The New Centurions made him famous — and made his position in the department untenable. He retired from the LAPD in 1974 with the rank of detective sergeant and became a full-time writer, producing novels and non-fiction at a steady pace for the next four decades.

The New Centurions (1971)

Wambaugh’s debut follows three LAPD officers from their graduation from the police academy through their first years on the street, culminating in the Watts riots of 1965. The novel’s power lies in its accumulation of daily police experience — the tedium, the sudden violence, the dark humour, the progressive disillusionment. The officers are not heroic; they are ordinary men ground down by a job that offers no adequate preparation for what it demands.

The novel was an enormous bestseller, adapted into a 1972 film starring George C. Scott, and established the template for the modern police procedural as it would be practised by writers from Ed McBain to Michael Connelly.

The Blue Knight (1972)

A single day and night in the life of Bumper Morgan, an old-school LAPD beat cop working his final days before retirement. The novel is a love letter to the vanishing world of the foot-patrol cop — Morgan knows every storefront, every hustler, every prostitute on his beat — and an elegy for a kind of policing that was already disappearing in the era of patrol cars and computer dispatch.

The Onion Field (1973)

Wambaugh’s first non-fiction book — a true-crime account of the 1963 kidnapping and murder of LAPD officer Ian Campbell by two small-time criminals, and the devastating psychological aftermath for Campbell’s surviving partner, Karl Hettinger. The book examines how the LAPD and the justice system failed Hettinger, who was treated as a coward rather than a trauma victim. It is one of the finest true-crime books in American literature, distinguished by its empathy for all parties — including the killers — and its analysis of how institutions compound individual tragedy.

The Choirboys (1975)

Wambaugh’s darkest and funniest novel. A group of LAPD officers hold nightly drinking sessions — “choir practice” — in MacArthur Park to decompress from their shifts. The novel’s structure is episodic, its tone veers between slapstick and horror, and its portrait of police culture — the racism, the alcoholism, the sexual exploitation, the desperate camaraderie — is unflinching. It is Wambaugh’s Catch-22: a novel about how an institution drives its members insane while demanding that they function as if sane.

Later Work

Wambaugh continued writing prolifically:

• The Black Marble (1978) — a police comedy-romance involving a dog show and Russian opera
• Lines and Shadows (1984) — non-fiction account of an LAPD unit patrolling the US-Mexico border
• The Blooding (1989) — the story of the first criminal case solved through DNA fingerprinting, set in England
• Fire Lover (2002) — non-fiction about an arson investigator who was himself a serial arsonist
• Hollywood Station (2006) — a return to LAPD fiction after a long absence

Critical Standing

Wambaugh is the most important police writer in American fiction. Before him, the police novel was either the genteel puzzle (Ed McBain’s early 87th Precinct books) or the hardboiled detective story. Wambaugh brought the reality of police work — its boredom, its horror, its gallows humour, its institutional dysfunction — to the novel with an authority that no civilian writer could match.

His influence extends far beyond fiction. The television series Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, The Shield, and The Wire all owe debts to Wambaugh’s depiction of police work as inherently corrupting and psychologically devastating. He made the damaged cop — the officer who drinks too much, beats his wife, and still goes to work — the central figure of American crime fiction.

Collecting Wambaugh

The New Centurions (1971, Little, Brown) in first edition with dust jacket brings $50–$150. The Onion Field (1973, Delacorte) first editions bring $30–$75. The Choirboys (1975, Delacorte) is desirable. Later titles are readily available.