The Choirboys was published by Delacorte Press in 1975 and is Wambaugh’s most controversial novel — a brutally funny, savage portrait of police officers whose method of surviving their work is after-hours drinking, sex, and increasingly reckless behavior that eventually produces a death.
The “choir practice” is their term for the illicit gatherings — ten patrol officers meeting in MacArthur Park after their shifts, armed with coolers of beer and whiskey, to decompress through drinking, storytelling, practical jokes, and sexual encounters with women who are attracted to badges. These gatherings are both pathological (the officers are self-medicating untreated PTSD with alcohol) and necessary (they provide the only community where the officers can be honest about what the job does to them).
Wambaugh introduces each officer through a chapter showing his particular damage: one is impotent, one is suicidal, one is an alcoholic, one is a racist discovering his racism, one is a gentle man being brutalized by daily exposure to violence. Their stories are told with a humor so dark it becomes its own form of horror — the jokes are simultaneously hilarious and appalling, and the laughter is a sound of people falling apart.
The novel climaxes when a choir practice goes wrong and a man dies. The cover-up that follows — the department protecting itself rather than its officers — demonstrates Wambaugh’s recurring theme: that police institutions destroy their own people with the same efficiency they apply to criminals.
Collecting The Choirboys
First edition (Delacorte Press, New York, 1975): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $5–$12