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.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
