It must be said from the start that Joe Wambaugh, who passed away on 28 February at the age of 88, was not the first cop to turn his professional experiences into fiction.
Way back in the 1930’s, Basil Thomson, a former Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, wrote eight books about a London Met policeman named Richardson (no first name is ever mentioned) who in eight books, enjoys a meteoric rise from rookie police constable to chief constable of the CID.
Thomson was followed by cops from other parts of Britain like Maurice Procter, of the Halifax Borough Police; John Wainwright, of the West Riding County Constabulary; Peter Walker, of the North Riding County Constabulary; Hamilton Jobson of the Southend-on-Sea Borough Constabulary; among others.
In the Netherlands, Albert Cornelis Baantjer’s novels about Detective Inspector DeCock (“DeKok” in English-language editions), which began in 1964, became international best-sellers.
In the US, Wambaugh was preceded by LA County DA’s Investigator Leslie T. White, FBI Agent Gordon Gordon (who collaborated with his wife Mildred), collaborating NYPD officers John P. Connors and Paul Glaser, LA County Deputy Sheriff William Camp, and NYC Transit Authority Police Detective Dorothy Uhnak.
And yet, despite all those antecedents, when Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions (Little, Brown, 1970) appeared in bookstores, it somehow seemed to be unprecedented.
To a degree, this was less because of the book, excellent though it was, than because of how it was marketed. Previous cop-written novels were consigned to the literary ghetto of “category mysteries,” published by imprints like Doubleday’s Crime Club, or Simon and Schuster’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries.
Centurions, a comparative “door-stopper” at 376 pages, was marketed as straight fiction. Charting the career paths of three young cops, from their academy training, through their field training, following them through their first few years on the Job, and culminating in the 1965 Watts riots, it got featured reviews in publications like the New York Times and made all the major best-seller lists. A high-budget movie followed in 1972, starring George C. Scott as a veteran beat cop, and Stacy Keach as the rookie he’s training.
Wambaugh followed with The Blue Knight (Little, Brown, 1972), another door-stopping novel, but a more intimate character study, it follows veteran foot patrolman William “Bumper” Morgan, a cop on the verge of retirement as he approaches his 20th anniversary on the job, who hopes to make one more major league bust before he pulls the pin. This became an award-winning TV-movie starring William Holden, shown on NBC in 1973 in four parts on four consecutive evenings, leading to the coining of the term “mini-series.” A regular weekly series, starring George Kennedy as Bumper, followed a few years later on CBS.
Between the Blue Knight mini-series and the follow-up regular weekly series, Wambaugh created an award-winning anthology TV show, Police Story (NBC, 1973-80). Wambaugh described the show as, being, like his books, “less about how cops work on the Job, then how the Job works on cops.” Using a different cast every week, the show was able to depict a wide variety of law enforcement activities.
It also made it possible to use specific episodes as, essentially, pilots for additional series, and Police Woman (NBC, 1974-78), Joe Forrester (NBC, 1975-76), and Man Undercover (NBC, 1978-79) were all spun off from Police Story episodes.
The same year that Police Story and The Blue Knight mini-series debuted, Wambaugh released his third, and most ambitious book, The Onion Field (Delacorte, 1973). This was his first piece of non-fiction, describing the kidnapping of two LAPD officers, leading to brutal murder of one, and the hairbreadth escape of the other. More importantly, it described the emotional toll that Officer Karl Hettinger paid for being the “one who got away.” This book got Wambaugh his best notices to that point, and, many books later, it was still the one in which he took the most pride. It was the most praised and admired true-crime book since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (Random, 1965).
Oddly, it did not win the Edgar for Best Fact Crime. Instead, the Mystery Writers of America gave it a Special Edgar, the Herbert Brean Award, probably thinking that it sucked so much air out of the room, no other true-crimer had a chance. This would be the first of five Edgars the MWA would award Wambaugh, including a Grand Master.
I’ll spare you a book-by-book description of the rest of his corpus. Suffice it to say that Wambaugh rarely hit anything less than a home run.
Aside from triumphing across several different mediums, books, screenplays, and television, fiction and non-fiction, Wambaugh’s success opened the doors for other cops-turned-writers, like NYPD’s William Caunitz, New Orleans PD’s O’Neil de Noux, the US Secret Service’s Gerald Petievich, LAPD’s Dallas Barnes, LAPD’s Connie Dial, the FBI’s Paul Lindsay, Wright County, MN, Sheriff’s Office’s Christine Husom, Portland PD’s Frank Zafiro, and, quite literally, hundreds of others, including your obedient servant. There is now an organization of crime writers, the Public Safety Writers Association (formerly the Police Writers Association) made up primarily of law enforcement professionals who’ve been inspired to get their stories written and published. Wambaugh, by his success, was the root of this explosion of cops-turned-writers. What had been a trickle before Wambaugh became a tidal wave after him.
That may be his greatest legacy.
And, I think because he knew this, he was always encouraging to new writers. When my first book, Just the Facts (Deadly Serious, 2004) a collection of true-crime articles (most of which had first appeared in Janet’s Mystery Readers Journal) was being prepared for publication, I contacted Sergeant Wambaugh and shyly asked if he’d be willing to provide a blurb. He invited me to send some of the chapters, and, after reading them, sent the following comment.
“This is a well researched, addictive collection of true case studies, some sensational, others little known, all intensely interesting. And one, ‘The Mad Doctor and The Untouchable,’ will no doubt become a terrific movie.”
The year after the book came out, one of the chapters won a WWA Spur for Best Short Non-Fiction. That was a wonderful moment.
But getting that blurb from Wambaugh was, all by itself, almost as terrific.
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