JOSEPH WAMBAUGH: R.I. P.

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 on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88.

Joseph Wambaugh won 3 Edgar awards, as well as the MWA Grand Master Award. 

In 1971, eleven years after joining the LAPD, Wambaugh saw his first novel, The New Centurions, published by Little, Brown and Co. The story of rookie LAPD cops in the early 1960s became his first bestseller and, the following year, the first movie based on his work. The film adaptation starred George C. Scott and Stacy Keach.

In The Glitter Dome, Officers Gibson Hand and Buckmore Phipps consider it a joy “to kill people and do other good police work.” In The Black Marble, Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman and Sgt. A.M. Valnikov are in love, but it can’t last. In The Onion Field, his first work of nonfiction, Mr. Wambaugh wrote of what happened to Officer Karl Hettinger when his partner was slain by thugs: He suffered impotence, nightmares and suicidal thoughts, and his body shrunk.

Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.
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efore Mr. Wambaugh’s era as a writer, which began in 1971, police dramas like the television series “Dragnet” were implausible stories about clean-cut heroes doing good

Read more in the NYT Here.