Joseph Wambaugh

• Born: January 22, 1937
• Place of Birth: East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; historical

Contribution

Joseph Wambaugh, the Los Angeles police officer who became a best-selling novelist, began writing out of a need to describe the Watts riots of the 1960s from the perspective of the police officers assigned to restore order there. He wanted to describe “what it was like for young men, young policemen, to grow up, on the streets, in that dreadful and fascinating era.” His work concerns American police procedure and the lives of those who belong to what has been called the “maligned profession.” It is a world of frustrating, counterproductive rules and regulations drawn up by police administrators who have not been on the streets for years, a world where brutality mixes with courage, corruption with dedication, and evil with honor.

Although occasionally criticized for lengthy philosophical discourses and an undeveloped style, Wambaugh is more often praised for thoughtful and realistic storytelling, and he has been regarded as one of the “few really knowledgeable men who try to tell the public what a cop’s life is like.” Beginning with his first novel, The New Centurions (1970) positive popular response has led to the reproduction of Wambaugh’s stories in other media such as film, television, and audio cassettes. His police officers were violent, afraid, foul-mouthed, and fallible. “Do you like cops? Read The New Centurions,” a New York Times reviewer wrote, “Do you hate cops? Read The New Centurions.”

Critical acclaim for his writing began in 1974, when he received the Herbert Brean Memorial Award for The Onion Field (1973), which, according to The New York Times reviewer James Conaway, is equal to ’s In Cold Blood (1966) and placed Wambaugh in the tradition of and . He also received the 2004 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and the 2012 Strand Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award. His later works of nonfiction include Lines and Shadows (1984), Echoes in the Darkness (1987), The Blooding: The True Story of the Narborough Village Murders (1989), and Fire Lover: A True Story (2002), which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime in 2002.

Wambaugh’s books, gritty, hyperrealistic, and nonlinear, typically interweave several storylines at once. His characters are composites of real-life cops and criminals; his dialogue is praised and reviled as “outrageously colorful.” What Wambaugh brought to detective fiction was actual life on the beat from a cop’s perspective: the gallows humor, the ugliness, the drugs and booze, the boredom, and the raw fear. “I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I was turning the procedural around,” Wambaugh told an interviewer. “The procedural is a genre that describes how a cop acts on the job; I was showing how the job might act on the cop...how it worked on his head.”

Wambaugh shows that investigations can be mishandled and that police officers, who can be bigots, alcoholics, and hard cases, make bad errors of judgment. However, he believes that most Americans are unwilling to grasp the reality, the human cost, of police work. Wambaugh’s books are enormously popular among cops as well as civilian readers because of their accuracy. “Police work is still, in my opinion, the most emotionally hazardous job on earth,” he said in 2000. “Not the most physically dangerous, but the most emotionally dangerous.”

From 2006 to 2012, Wambaugh published his five-book Hollywood Station series featuring Officer Nathan "Hollywood Nate" Weiss, which began with Hollywood Station (2006). Other novels include Hollywood Crows (2008), Hollywood Moon (2009), Hollywood Hills (2010), and Harbor Nocturne (2012).

Biography

The only child of Anne Malloy and Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr., was born on January 22, 1937, in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The German surname accounts for one-quarter of his ethnic heritage; the other three-quarters is Roman Catholic Irish. His was a family of hard workers, many of whom labored in the Pittsburgh steel mills.

Wambaugh’s California settings originate from his personal experience. His father had been police chief in East Pittsburgh before the family moved to California in 1951. Three years later, Wambaugh left high school to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. During his service time in 1956, he and Dee Allsup, his high school sweetheart, were married. They had three children; their son Mark would later die at the age of twenty-one. On Wambaugh’s discharge from the Marines in 1957, the couple returned to California, where Wambaugh worked at different jobs while earning an associate degree in English from Chaffey College in 1958.

In 1960, Wambaugh graduated from California State College, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree and joined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a burglary detective. However casually he came to police work (he once told an interviewer that he joined the police department because he had “nothing better to do” and because the money was more than he had ever earned), he soon found himself deeply involved. He was a solid, commonsense investigator who cracked more than his share of tough cases. He has said that police work relaxed him and soothed his soul.

Wambaugh began writing after he became involved in helping to control the Watts riot. On August 11, 1965, six days of rioting began in the Watts section of South Central Los Angeles following a routine traffic stop. African Americans were tired of abusive treatment from white police officers in the cities, which included the use of water cannons, clubs, and cattle prods. In the ensuing violence, thirty-four people were killed and 856 injured. Nearly four thousand people were arrested, and 209 buildings were destroyed. It was a difficult time for citizens and police alike.

Wambaugh intended to maintain both careers, as writer and police officer, but his status as a “celebrity cop” would not permit that option. In 1973, for example, he was presented with California State University’s first Outstanding Alumni award. Interrupting police calls and visits at the Hollenbeck Station were one problem, but great tension developed from the changed relationships inside the department: “The other cops were starting to treat me differently—sort of like a star—and I couldn’t bear being different.” On March 1, 1974, he left the force.

As a production consultant for the television series adapted from his novel The Blue Knight (1972), Wambaugh fought to maintain authenticity in the scripts. Indeed, his insistence has become legendary. He filed and won a lawsuit over violations committed against the text when The Choirboys (1975) was made into a film. Indeed, his literary career has been plagued with litigation. “I’ve been under continuous litigation for my writing since 1974,” Wambaugh once told an interviewer. “There’s a million ambulance chasers who say, ’Let’s sue him!’”

The most famous case concerned the murders forming the basis of Wambaugh’s Echoes in the Darkness (1987). On September 14, 1994, Philadelphia’s Upper Merion High School principal Jay C. Smith, convicted of the murders of a schoolteacher and her two children, filed suit against Wambaugh, claiming that he had conspired with police investigators to conceal exculpatory evidence and to fabricate evidence linking Smith to the murders, in order to make money from the book and a television miniseries. Smith lost the case, although his conviction was overturned.

After being sued over The Onion Field, Lines and Shadows, and Echoes in the Darkness, Wambaugh swore off writing nonfiction. The Blooding (1989) was the only true-crime book he wrote that was not the subject of a defamation lawsuit. Wambaugh attributed this to the fact that it dealt not with Americans but with an English murder case.

Wambaugh eventually left Los Angeles for a house in Palm Springs and an estate overlooking the San Diego harbor and Coronado Island, he made his fortune with many bestsellers. In 2004, Wambaugh received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Analysis

It is not the subject matter (crime and police work) or the types of characters (police officers, criminals, and victims) that distinguish Joseph Wambaugh’s books. It is the intimacy he develops between the reader and the police officers. Like a trusted partner, the reader is privy to others’ baser qualities—including vulgarity, bigotry, and cruelty. Yet the reader also comes to know human beings, and that knowledge allows for affection, sometimes admiration, and always a shared fatalism about police work: It is an after-the-fact effort—after the robbery, after the rape, after the child abuse, after the murder.

This fatalistic outlook does not develop from book to book; it is present in full measure from Wambaugh’s first novel:

It is the natural tendency of things toward chaos...It’s a very basic natural law Kilvinsky always said, and only the order makers could temporarily halt its march, but eventually there will be darkness and chaos.

The point is convincingly dramatized through the police confrontations during the 1965 Watts riots.

Even the survivors—those police officers who finish enough shifts to reach retirement and the prized pension—pay with a piece of their souls. The wise Kilvinsky in The New Centurions learns all the natural laws and then shoots himself. Bumper Morgan, the blue knight in the book of that title, is the kind of police officer who radicals had in mind when shouting “pig.” He is a fat, freeloading womanizer (teenage belly dancers preferred), and the reader would probably turn away in disgust if, beneath the crudity, loneliness and depression were not detectable.

The Onion Field

Victimization of police officers is one of Wambaugh’s recurring themes. They are victimized by the dislike of those they swear to protect and by the justice system they swear to uphold. Two of his books make this premise particularly convincing. Writing for the first time in the genre of the nonfiction, or documentary, novel, Wambaugh in The Onion Field painstakingly reconstructed the 1963 kidnapping of two fellow officers, the murder of one, and the trial that followed. During that trial, the surviving officer became as much a defendant as the two killers.

To Wambaugh’s credit, however, he stays out of the story. Here, for example, are none of the intrusions found in The New Centurions. Nowhere does one officer turn to another and inquire about psychological-sociological implications, such as “Gus, do you think policemen are in a better position to understand criminality than, say, penologists or parole officers or other behavioral scientists?” The questions and answers have not disappeared, however. They are simply left either for the reader to ask and answer in the course of reading the book or for one of the forces to understand as an integral part of the story. “I don’t fudge or try to make it [a true-crime story] better by editorializing or dramatizing,” Wambaugh said, “I try to be a real investigative reporter and write it as it happened as best I can.”

Lines and Shadows

The realization of Dick Snider in Lines and Shadows (1984) is a case in point. After watching San Diego cops chase illegal aliens through the city’s San Ysidro section, Snider knows that the crime of illegal entry and the various authorities’ efforts to stop it are simply shadows hiding the truth. Illegal entry is, in fact, only about money: “There is not a significant line between two countries. It’s between two economies.”

In studying so closely the ruined careers, marriages, and lives of the Border Alien Robbery Force, the BARF Squad, as it became known, Wambaugh also provides an explicit answer to a puzzle within all of his books—indeed, to a puzzle about police inside or outside the covers of a book. Why would they want such a job? Wambaugh’s answer is that they are caught up as the players in a national myth:

They gave their nightly performance, and almost everyone applauded. They did it the only way they knew—not ingeniously, merely instinctively—by trying to resurrect in the late twentieth century a mythic hero who never was, not even in the nineteenth century. A myth nevertheless cherished by Americans beyond the memory of philosophers, statesmen, artists, and scientists who really lived: the quintessentially American myth and legend of the Gunslinger who, with only a six-shooter and star, dares venture beyond the badlands.

The Glitter Dome

Those who recognize the myth and how they have been used by it clearly have great difficulty continuing to play their parts. Yet these are the most likable and most interesting police officers in Wambaugh’s fiction—Martin Welborn, for example (The Glitter Dome, 1981). He is a ploddingly thorough detective with a penchant for orderliness in his police work and in his personal life. Glasses in his kitchen cupboard rest “in a specifically assigned position.” Drawers display dinner and cocktail napkins “stacked and arranged by size and color.” Neither can he leave “out of place” an unsolved case or the memory of a mutilated child. He depends on two universals: People always lie and, with less certainty, the devil exists (because “life would be unbearable if we didn’t have the devil, now wouldn’t it?”). What happens, then, when one of the universals is taken away? Yes, people always lie, but there is no evil and, consequently, no good. All that happens happens accidentally. With that realization, detecting who committed a crime and bringing the criminal to justice loses significance. So, too, does life, and Marty Welborn ends his by driving over a mountain cliff as he recalls the one perfect moment in his life. At the time, he had been a young, uniformed police officer, and he had just heard an old cardinal deliver a solemn High Mass. As he kneeled to kiss the cardinal’s ring, Welborn saw, in one perfect moment, the old priest’s “lovely crimson slippers.”

The Black Marble

Although Martin Welborn is a totally professional police officer, a winner who nevertheless takes his life, Andrei Milhailovich Valnikov (The Black Marble, 1978) is a loser, a “black marble” who endures. Like Welborn, he has his reveries, usually drunken ones, of past-perfect moments. Yet they come from a czarist Russia Valnikov never personally experienced. Such an absence of reality works perfectly with the constant losses in the detective’s work. He cannot, for example, find his handcuffs; he gets lost on the streets of Los Angeles, and he is all the more touchingly comical for both the reveries and the misadventures. In Valnikov, Wambaugh demonstrates his ability to develop a memorable character.

The Choirboys

As good as Wambaugh is at occasional character development, he is even better at telling amusing stories, as in The Blue Knight and The Black Marble. The Glitter Dome, The Delta Star (1983)—which was described by one reviewer as “Donald Westlake meets ”—and The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985) are also amusing. None of these novels, however, measures up to the humor in The Choirboys. All that has been said about Wambaugh’s humor in this book is true: It is “sarcastic and filled with scrofulous expletives”; it is “scabrous,” and it is often “intentionally ugly.” Indeed, the reader may believe that laughing at The Choirboys is giving in to an adolescence long outgrown.

Wambaugh would be offended by none of this. He lists among his literary influences both and Truman Capote, on one hand, and humorists P. J. O’Rourke and Dave Barry, the Pulitzer-winning humor columnist, on the other. “I wanted to use the tools of gallows humor, satire, hyperbole, all of that, to make people laugh in an embarrassed way,” Wambaugh told an interviewer. “I reread [Heller’s] Catch-22 and [ ’s] Slaughterhouse-Five to see how it was done in war novels...I couldn’t find anybody who’d done it in a police novel.”

Typical of Wambaugh’s humor is Officer Francis Tanaguchi’s impression of Bela Lugosi in The Choirboys:

For three weeks, which was about as long as one of Francis’s whims lasted, he was called the Nisei Nipper by the policemen at Wilshire Station. He sulked around the station with two blood-dripping fangs slipped over his incisors, attacking the throat of everyone below the rank of sergeant.

The jokes in The Choirboys are sandwiched between a prologue, three concluding chapters, and an epilogue filled with terror and insanity. Wambaugh’s novel illustrates well an idea popularized by : Beneath a joke lies the most horrific of human fears.

However, Wambaugh’s works became more light-hearted following The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985). “As I mellowed with age, or got farther from day-to-day police work, I wrote books that were more consciously entertaining,” he said. “Harry Bright was the exception. I happen to like that book better than any of the other novels, but that one was so dark, I think I had to lighten up, it was all about fathers and sons and death.”

His novels of the 1990s were broadly comical—The Golden Orange (1990), a tale of an alcoholic cop among the millionaires of the Gold Coast of Orange County; Fugitive Nights (1992), in which another alcoholic cop teams up with a female private eye to handle a drug-smuggling case, depending, as one reviewer said, “mostly on vulgar police humor for its laughs;” Finnegan’s Week (1993), a funny and witty thriller about toxic waste comparable to the works of ; and Floaters (1996), a romp concerning racing spies, saboteurs, scam artists, and hookers swarming around San Diego Bay, the site of the America’s Cup international sailing regatta, into which two Mission Bay patrol-boat cops of the “Club Harbor Unit” get dragged out of their depth.

Several of Wambaugh’s novels were adapted into film. The New Centurions (1972) starred George C. Scott; more successful was The Black Marble, directed by Harold Becker as a romantic comedy and produced by Frank Capra, Jr., and starring James Woods and Harry Dean Stanton. The Choirboys (1977) was disappointingly directed by Robert Aldrich; it is understandable why Wambaugh filed suit when he saw the results. The Blue Knight was filmed as a television miniseries of four one-hour installments in 1973; lead actor William Holden and director Robert Butler both received Emmy Awards for their work.

A second Blue Knight television movie, filmed in 1975 and starring George Kennedy as seasoned cop Bumper Morgan, was the pilot for a short-lived television series (1975-1976). The Glitter Dome (1985) was filmed for cable television and starred James Garner, John Lithgow, and Margot Kidder. Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert aired on television in 1993, with Teri Garr as the leading lady. The non-fictional novels The Onion Field (motion picture) and Echoes in the Darkness (made-for-television miniseries re-released as video) were filmed in 1979 and 1987, respectively. Wambaugh’s fast-paced, violent, and funny writing continues to attract Hollywood attention.

Of the crime committed as documented in Echoes in the Darkness, Wambaugh wrote, “Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with sociopathy, that most incurable of human disorders because all so afflicted consider themselves blessed rather than cursed.” The fate of a police officer who becomes a best-selling author as a representative of the police to the rest of the human species might be considered both a blessing and a curse. Certainly, Wambaugh’s insights into the follies and struggles of humanity have proved a blessing for crime fiction.

Wambaugh was dissatisfied with these adaptation projects—except for the ones to which he contributed. Television’s regular series Police Story (1973-1980) was “based on his memoirs” and focused on the LAPD. A particularly interesting project was The Learning Channel’s series Case Reopened, in which Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Wambaugh were asked to host hour-long segments about notorious unsolved crimes. Wambaugh’s turn came with “The Black Dahlia,” which aired on October 10, 1999. The murder of Elizabeth Short had occurred when Wambaugh was ten, and during his rookie years on the beat, he heard many anecdotes about the sensational search. Despite his vow not to return to true-crime writing, Wambaugh reviewed the evidence and offered his own solution.

Bibliography

Cooper, Lori. "A True Legend: Joseph Wambaugh Interview." Blue, 23 June 2022, www.thebluemagazine.com/new-blog/2022/6/21/joseph-wambaugh-a-cop-creative-writing-genius-and-award-winning-book-television-and-movie-screenplay-writer-and-consultant-on-his-career-and-policing-in-america-today. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Hitt, Jack. “Did the Writer Do It?” GQ 68, no. 7, July 1998, p. 172.

Jeffrey, David K. “Joseph Wambaugh: Overview.” In St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by Jay P. Pederson. 4th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996.

“Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr.” In Current Biography Yearbook: 1980, edited by Charles Moritz. New York: H. H. Wilson, 1981.

Kaminsky, Stuart. Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery Writers. Hot House Press, 2005.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001.

Meisler, Andy. “Paranoid Among the Palms.” The New York Times, 13 June 1996, p. C1.

Powell, Steve. "An Interview with Joseph Wambaugh." Venetian Vase, 15 Jan. 2019, venetianvase.co.uk/2019/01/15/an-interview-with-joseph-wambaugh. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Centurions, Knights, and Other Cops: The Police Novels of Joseph Wambaugh. San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 1995.

Wambaugh, Joseph. “Ship to Shore with Joseph Wambaugh: Still a Bit Paranoid Among the Palms.” Interview by Andy Meisler. The New York Times, 13 June 1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/06/13/garden/ship-to-shore-with-joseph-wambaugh-still-a-bit-paranoid-among-the-palms.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Wambaugh, Joseph. The Joseph Wambaugh Omnibus. Quercus, 2008.