Ticket 2 Ride

Joseph Wambaugh retired from the Los Angeles Police Department as a detective sergeant. He gained great popularity as a writer of crime novels, mostly centered on LAPD officers and detectives. In all, Wambaugh penned 16 novels and five nonfiction crime books.

Wambaugh passed away at age 88. I’ve read a few of his books, some of which were made into films, plus the terrific television show, Police Story, which ran for five seasons, was developed with his participation.

Wambaugh joined the LAPD in 1960 and stayed 14 years, during which he wrote the bestsellers The New Centurions, The Blue Knight and The Choir Boys. Fame led him to retire early and turn his attention to writing full time.

Wambaugh’s cops were not cardboard heroes: they drank, cursed, had marital problems and had issues like everyone else. He was credited with showing police work honestly and without sentimentality. He knew the pressures and dark side of the job; cops were human beings and came from the same pool that all of us swim in. Wambaugh was unapologetic for showing cops much differently than the traditionally squeaky clean portrayal.

Times were changing, the attitudes and social freedoms of the 1970s offered writers like Wambaugh a ready audience for the realism, frankness and dark humor found in his books and characters. Hollywood bought up his material for television and feature films. He didn’t create the crime thriller genre, but he opened the floodgates to a new generation of writers who used Wambaugh’s success to widen the genre. Changing standards allowed for more graphic violence, saltier language and mature themes. Certainly writers like Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane had been churning out crime novels with hard-boiled characters bending the law, bedding dames and cracking skulls. Wambaugh’s realism tempered his stories with believability and vulnerability.

Not all of Wambaugh’s books centered on cops, and not all were fiction. His first non-fiction book, The Onion Field, about the kidnapping of two LAPD officers and the murder of one of them. The book spent 14 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List and earned a prestigious Edgar Award. Later, The Onion Field was make into a successful and praised feature film.

Unfortunately, not every adaptation was praised or commercially accepted. After The Choir Boys film disappointed many, especially Wambaugh (who sued the studio), he bought the film right back to several of his books, and pledged to remain as much control over future film adaptations as possible.

Wambaugh wrote his first three books while an LAPD detective, drawing fire from Police Chief Ed Davis, who threatened to fire him. Dragnet producer Jack Webb, a friend of Chief Davis, offered his assistance by reading his first manuscript and identifying potentially troublesome material.

“My homicide partner and I drove to Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills and dropped off the manuscript,” Wambaugh recalled in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Quarterly.

Webb marked 500 passages, each with a paper clip. The novel was published anyway and Wambaugh saved the paper clips as a memento. He and Webb never worked together, or even met, said Wambaugh.

Joseph Wambaugh didn’t compromise. He saw the world through a realistic and kaleidoscopic-type lens, where cops were often very flawed, but interesting people.