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| Joseph Wambaugh | |
Joseph Wambaugh, "the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality," died February 28, the New York Times reported. He was 88. In novels like The Glitter Dome and The Black Marble, as well as nonfiction works like The Onion Field, "Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides."
Wambaugh wrote 16 novels and five nonfiction books, including The New Centurions, The Choirboys, The Delta Star, The Secrets of Harry Bright, Echoes in the Darkness, and The Blooding. Among his honors were awards from the Mystery Writers of America and a lifetime achievement award from the Strand Mystery Magazine.
He also created two TV series: Police Story and The Blue Knight, and wrote screenplays for movie versions of The Onion Field and The Black Marble, along with a CBS mini-series, Echoes in the Darkness, and an NBC film, Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert (1993), both also based on his books. Four other titles were adapted by others into films, TV movies, and miniseries.
The son of a small-town police chief who also worked in a factory, Wambaugh served three years in the Marines and had earned two college degrees by the time he was 23. The Times wrote that he "wanted to be a teacher, but in 1960 he joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrolman because the pay was better. He walked a beat for eight years while studying English for a master's degree and Spanish to help him speak in the barrios." He was promoted to detective in 1968.
Inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Wambaugh wrote his first novel, The New Centurions (1971), while still on the job. It was a bestseller and was later adapted into a film starring George C. Scott and Stacy Keach.
Eventually, Wambaugh's celebrity and frequent appearances on TV talk shows made police work untenable. "Suspects wanted his autograph or his help getting a film role. People reporting crimes asked that he be the one to investigate. When his longtime detective partner held the squad car door open for him one day in 1974, he knew it was time to go," the Times noted.
His most ambitious and successful book was The Onion Field (1973), which author James Conway, writing in the Times Book Review, compared with In Cold Blood, placing Wambaugh in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell.
Wambaugh told the Los Angeles Times in 1989: "I'm very interested in the concept of the sociopath, very interested, because my conscience has bothered me all my life. Talk about regrets--I have about 20 every day. I was educated in Catholic schools, and they did that to me. So I have to cope with a conscience all the time. And I'm interested in a creature who has none of that."
In the late 1990s, after many LAPD officers were implicated in a war-on-gangs scandal, the city "settled with the government in a consent decree that allowed federal officials to monitor and oversee reforms," the Times wrote, describing it as "a red flag" for Wambaugh.
Outraged by federal interference in local policing, he devoted his last five novels--Hollywood Station, Hollywood Crows, Hollywood Moon, Hollywood Hills, and Harbor Nocturne, collectively known as the "Hollywood Station" series, to criticizing federal interference in local policing.
In a 2020 phone interview for his Times obituary, Wambaugh was asked if he intended to write another book. "Hell no," he replied. "I'm too old." When asked to evaluate his influence on generations of writers, he said, "I'll just leave others to judge my legacy."