Born in Pennsylvania, Wambaugh’s family moved to southern California when he was a teen; his father was a police officer. After a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the Los Angeles Police Dept. in 1960. He was no dumb cop: during his career, he earned bachelor and Masters degrees from Cal State Los Angeles, and rose to Detective sergeant.
During that time, Jack Webb’s Dragnet and Adam-12 TV shows portrayed cops at LAPD as smart, hard-working, and — if not perfectly straight-laced — quickly put in their place, or even arrested, to atone for their sins. Wambaugh was a bit more realistic: he wrote a novel, The New Centurions [*], published in 1971, where he revealed the stress cops face on the job, focusing on three fictional cops who went to the academy together. It explores police adultery, alcoholism, racism, and even suicide as they negotiate the job stresses and career advancement, culminating with the real-life 1965 Watts Riots, based on his own experiences during that uprising. The book not only hit the New York Times Best Sellers List, it stayed there for 32 weeks, and was adapted into a 1972 feature film.
It almost didn’t happen. When LAPD Chief Ed Davis heard about the book, which was still pending publication, he threatened to fire Wambaugh. The ACLU offered to protect his freedom of speech. Jack Webb himself said he’d help if Wambaugh’s story was “worthy.” Wambaugh, who by then worked in homicide, drove with his partner to Webb’s office in Beverly Hills to drop off the manuscript. A few weeks later, Webb said to come get it: he had stuck a paper clip on every portion that might offend the department brass. “I kept the paper clips,” Wambaugh said — about 500 of them — “and never met Webb.” His book, he said, simply “turned things around. Instead of writing about how cops worked the job, I wrote about how the job worked on the cops.”
Wambaugh quickly followed with another book, The Blue Knight, about an older cop trying to get through his last week before retirement. It was not only made into a TV miniseries aired in 1973, it inspired the 1975-76 TV series of the same name. The success of the books and adaptations afforded Wambaugh the opportunity to take a six-month leave of absence from LAPD to research a True Crime book about two real-life LAPD officers who were kidnapped in 1963 by two robbers the officers had pulled over. They were driven more than two hours away to an onion field. The robbers shot one officer, and the other ran and escaped, but suffered horrible psychological injuries. Wambaugh read 40,000 pages of court transcripts and interviewed 63 people over three months, then wrote for the second three months. “I was put on Earth to write The Onion Field,” published in 1973. “That’s how I felt about it. It was such an emotional experience for me.” It was for the readers, too; I was one of them. The book was another best-seller, and again adapted into a successful film. (The incident was also adapted into a 1973 episode of Adam-12, but it was apparently not based on Wambaugh’s book.)
Wambaugh returned to work at the end of his leave, and was surprised that other officers revered him for revealing the realities of their jobs, rather than resent him. That same year he created a successful TV series for NBC, Police Story, which ran 96 episodes over 6 years. For that, Wambaugh “insisted on two nonnegotiable conditions: that the show be as realistic and down-to-earth as possible, and that the show be an anthology series so that it would be possible to show protagonists who are imperfect, unlikable, and even doomed,” wrote reviewer Victor Valdivia when the series came out on DVD in 2011. He wrote multiple novels and more non-fiction books, with the last novel in 1996.
Wambaugh stopped writing for awhile, but was lured back when he wanted to tell the story of an arson investigator that turned out to be a serial arsonist himself; one fire killed four, so that man is now in prison for multiple murders. That 2002 book was the last until he returned to write the “Hollywood Station” series of five more novels, ending in 2012. Meanwhile, two other books were made into films, Wambaugh was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2004, and he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award three times (1974, 1981, 2003). He died February 28 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., from esophageal cancer. He was 88.