Joseph Wambaugh, age 88, RIP

What's your favorite Wambaugh book?

Mar 01, 2025

The Los Angeles crime novel has been one of the big leagues of genre fiction at least since Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) 80+ years ago.

But how do you learn about crime as a man of letters? Being a crime beat reporter, like Cain, is a common path, while James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) got to know cops by being a derelict addict who was frequently rousted by them. (I still don’t know how my favorite Chandler, who was a failed Bloomsbury literati turned L.A. oil company office manager, pulled off the trick.)

In 1971, Joe Wambaugh made a huge splash in both the worlds of publishing and movies/TV by being an LAPD cop with a decade’s experience as a flatfoot and then detective who wrote the excellent The New Centurions. It turns out that having the taxpayers compensate you for spending 40 hours per week dealing with criminals and their victims provides outstanding background.

Wambaugh returned with The Blue Knight the next year and the great true crime The Onion Field a year later.

He finally retired from the force in 1974 as being a cop and a brand name celebrity got to be too anomalous.

What’s your favorite Wambaugh book? Here’s his bibliography with comments about the books I’ve read.

Fiction
The New Centurions (1971) — Excellent quasi-autobiographical page-turner about three cadets in the LAPD Academy Class of 1960. In it, Wambaugh introduced one of his recurrent characters, the Ambiguous Latino. All of Wambaugh’s books were written after the invention of affirmative action in 1969, which the Nixon Administration immediately extended to Hispanics. While accepting that blacks were a reasonable racial category for quotas, Wambaugh appeared skeptical about how exactly a Hispanic is defined. In this novel, one of the new cops is a blond half-Scandinavian and half-Mexican. He’s not happy about anybody mentioning his Latin American side, but in the end he marries a Mexican girl and acquiesces to his not unsatisfactory fate of being a working-class Latin paterfamilias. Wambaugh introduced variations on this theme in many of his books.
The Blue Knight (1972) — This may have introduced the plot driver of the old cop with a few days left to qualify for his pension, which was reused in Lethal Weapon and countless other works. Immediately made into a miniseries with William Holden and then a TV series with George Kennedy.
The Choirboys (1975) — A literarily ambitious novel in the mode of Catch-22 crossed with, perhaps, Fear and Loathing Las Vegas. Initially brilliant, but its scabrousness eventually wore me down. Still, a lot of people find this to be his masterpiece. Me, I’m voting for his 1973 true crime book The Onion Field.
The Black Marble (1978) — By now, after four books, Wambaugh had used up most of his killer material from his 14 years on the LAPD, so he had to start researching. Fortunately, detectives are good at that. This is one of his better later novels, combining his new upscale milieu of old money Pasadena dog shows with a cop from West Hollywood’s then tiny community of White Russian refugees from 1917.
The Glitter Dome (1981)
The Delta Star (1983) — A murder mystery involving physicists competing for the Nobel Prize, with a good solution that you can figure out ahead of time but probably won’t.

I long recalled Wambaugh’s appreciative description of the tiny faculty-only bar at Caltech as a jewel. Years later, I got to visit it, and, yeah, he was right.
The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985)
The Golden Orange (1990)
Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert (1992)
Finnegan's Week (1993)
Floaters (1996)

As he got older, Mr. and Mrs. Wambaugh, who’d married in 1955, spent more and more time in upscale suburbs. Although Wambaugh was a big name in Hollywood, he wasn’t the type of guy who’d be comfortable in Malibu, so they lived in more bourgeois, less bohemian places in Orange County, San Diego, and Rancho Mirage in the desert. Wambaugh satirized his new social stratum, but he lost momentum.

Then his fan James Ellroy talked him into a late career revival. Wambaugh wrote five more cop novels by interviewing current LAPD officers to get their war stories.

Hollywood Station (2006) — I wrote in 2007 in VDARE:
LA is the world's most absurd large city, and Hollywood is its funniest neighborhood. After each shift, the cops swap stories to determine who was called out on the evening's most memorable BHI (Bizarre Hollywood Incident). Example: being summoned to the famous courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where street people garbed in movie legend costumes pose for tourists' cameras, by an ersatz Marilyn Monroe (6'-3" and with a five-o'clock shadow), who witnessed, in a dispute over tourist-hustling turf, Batman cold-cocking Spiderman. While they're at it, the cops also haul in, on cocaine charges, Tickle Me Elmo.
Wambaugh's cop-heroes aren't saints. When bored one night, two aging surfer dude officers drive down to an apartment building full of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang members to play "pit bull polo." The Salvadoran gang-bangers let their vicious dogs run wild, terrorizing all the children in the neighborhood. So the partners cruise slowly around the building a few times until the beasts are in a frenzy. Then they play a few chukkers of pit bull polo, leaning out the police car windows and swinging their batons like mallets.
Hollywood Station is mellower, less despairing than Wambaugh’s early masterpieces. As he reflects: "Doing good police work is the most fun these cops will ever have in their entire lives." And he's finally learned to appreciate the female half of the human race.
Still, Hollywood Station has a serious, even angry side. Wambaugh is disgusted by the demeaning and debilitating federal civil rights consent decree the once-proud LAPD has been forced to operate under since the Ramparts scandal of the late 1990s. He notes it "subjects [cops] to mountains of paperwork, mind-numbing audits and oppressive oversight."
Wambaugh points out the great irony, utterly lost on the liberal LA Times, which relentlessly hyped the brouhaha leading to federal interference: the handful of criminal-cops at the heart of the Ramparts "racism" scandal were all minorities. (Indeed, Denzel Washington's Oscar-winning performance as a murderous rogue policeman in the 2001 movie Training Day is largely modeled on Rafael Perez, the Puerto Rican gangsta-policeman who set off the scandal by framing his fellow cops to reduce his sentence—a transparent tactic that the L.A. Times, in its fervor to tar the LAPD as racist, fell for hook, line, and sinker.)
Under the consent decree, to show they aren't racially profiling, LA cops in each division must stop whites as much as they stop blacks or Latinos … "even though there were none around." Wambaugh explains that, to provide the politically-correct paperwork demanded by the Department of Justice,
"LAPD officers were inventing white male suspects … In one inner-city division, there was a 290 percent increase in non-Hispanic white male nighttime pedestrian stops, even though nobody had ever seen a white guy walking around the 'hood at night. Even with a flat tire, a white guy would keep riding on the rims rather than risk a stop."
Hollywood Crows (2008) — A decent sequel.
Hollywood Moon (2009) — Another OK sequel.
Hollywood Hills (2010)
Harbor Nocturne (2012)
Non-fiction
The Onion Field (1973) — Peak Wambaugh. Inspired by Truman Capote’s groundbreaking New Journalism In Cold Blood, but Wambaugh knew vastly more about crooks and cops. James Ellroy claimed that while sleeping in a Good Will drop box so he could better afford his Benzedrix inhaler addiction, he shoplifted three copies of The Onion Field. He was impressed that if Mr. Wambaugh could make the effort to be both a cop and a great writer, Ellroy reasoned, then he at least could be a great writer.
Lines and Shadows (1984) — Mexican-American cops shooting it out with Mexican traffickers of illegal immigrants on the border between San Diego and Tijuana. Worth a read if interested in The Border.
Echoes in the Darkness (1984)
The Blooding: The True Story of the Narborough Village Murders (1989)
Fire Lover: A True Story (2002) — A police arson investigator who is much praised for frequently phoning in to 911 the first reports of fires in stores where my mother shopped turns out to be arsonist. A memorable portrait of evil.