LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joseph Wambaugh, who wrote the gripping, true-crime bestseller “The Onion Field” and numerous gritty but darkly humorous novels about day-to-day police work drawn from his own experiences as a Los Angeles police officer, has died at 88.
A family friend, Janene Gant, told The New York Times that Wambaugh died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, and the cause was esophageal cancer.
The prolific author, who initially planned to be an English teacher, had been with the Los Angeles Police Department 11 years and reached the rank of sergeant when he published his first novel, “The New Centurions,” in 1971.
It took a hardened, cynical look at the lives of police officers and the stresses they face patrolling the often mean streets of Los Angeles.
He followed it with a similar novel, “The Blue Knight,” in 1972.
“If he didn’t invent the police novel, he certainly reinvented it,” Michael Connelly, author of the bestselling cop novels featuring LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, told The Associated Press in 2007.
As popular as Wambaugh’s first two books were, they were eclipsed by his next one, “The Onion Field,” a real-life account of the abduction and killing of a Los Angeles police officer in 1963.
Moments after making a routine traffic stop in Hollywood, Officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger were disarmed by the vehicle’s occupants and driven to an onion field near Bakersfield. Campbell was shot to death and Hettinger escaped.
After the book was published, Wambaugh returned to fiction with the wildly funny, although sometimes tragic look at a group of Los Angeles police officers he called “The Choirboys.”
Like his first two novels, it included fictionalized accounts of first- and second-hand experiences, and explored the back stories of cops, the people they were sworn to protect and even some they arrested.
Police in Wambaugh’s books struggled with such issues as alcoholism, racism and adultery, much of which was triggered by job stress. They sometimes engaged in brutality, and their targets were not always criminals. Some were poor or powerless people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Wambaugh’s fictional cops were human beings, with all the same quirks and fears any of us have. His enormous insight changed the way all of us who came after him approach our work,” bestselling detective writer Robert Crais said.
The son of a police officer, Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr. had planned to become a teacher after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from California State University, Los Angeles. He said he chose law enforcement instead when he learned police were paid better.
He had used his G.I. bill benefits to pay for college after serving in the Marine Corps following high school.
He earned a master’s degree in 1968 while working as a detective sergeant, about the same time he began what he called his “scribbling.” The scribbles, initially shown only to his wife, Dee, described his police experiences.
After publishing them as “The New Centurions,” Wambaugh tried to balance careers as a writer and police officer. He gave up after publication of “The Onion Field,” saying the fame the book brought him made it impossible.
“People would call the station with bogus crimes and ask for Sgt. Wambaugh to solve them. Suspects he arrested asked for acting roles in film adaptations,” the bio on his website stated.
The final straw came after his longtime detective partner began opening the door of their patrol car for him. He resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1974.
Turning his attention to writing full time, he published 18 books over the next 40 years. Several were novels, although his 1992 bestseller “Echoes in the Darkness” was the true-crime story of the killings of Philadelphia schoolteacher Susan Reinert and her two children.
“Lines and Shadows” looked at the lives of police officers who patrol the U.S.-Mexico border seeking to protect illegal immigrants from criminals. “The Blooding” examined a landmark British case in which DNA was used to capture a killer.
“Echoes in the Darkness” brought Wambaugh his own share of controversy when one of the defendants in the Reinert slaying maintained he was framed and spent six years on death row for the killings before his conviction was overturned.
Jay C. Smith filed a lawsuit claiming that Wambaugh conspired with police to conceal evidence in his favor and fabricate evidence linking him to the killings to make money from his book and a television miniseries. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.
Several Wambaugh books were made into movies, and he was also one of the creators of the popular 1970s television show, “Police Story.”
For a time, he moved away from writing about police, producing novels like 1978’s “The Black Marble,” which satirized dog shows; 1985’s “The Secrets of Harry Bright,” which took a harsh look at wealthy Southern Californians; and 1981’s “The Glitter Dome,” which examined the porn industry.
In 2006 he returned to police tales with “Hollywood Station,” based on stories he said he gained from informal drinking and dinner sessions with police officers. He held those sessions, Wambaugh said, partly because he missed hanging out with cops and partly because he’d run out of his own stories to tell.
In 2012, he published “Harbor Nocturne,” the fifth book in the Hollywood Station series.
Those later books were set in an LAPD that had been tarnished by the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the department’s so-called Rampart station scandal, in which members of an elite anti-gang unit based in the city’s tough Rampart neighborhood beat and framed suspected gang members.
In a 2007 interview with The Associated Press, Wambaugh said he believed the department’s real-life bad cops amounted to no more than a handful. But he added that their behavior made it harder for all officers.
“They’re scared of everything now,” he said. “The good cop is the one who’s proactive, the one that could get complaints. But the good cop takes that risk.”
He is survived by his wife, Dee Allsup, whom he married in 1955. They had three children, David, Jeannette and Mark. Mark died in a highway accident in 1984.
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Associated Press Writer Robert Jablon contributed to this story.
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