an explicit answer to a puzzle within all of his books—indeed, to a puzzle about police inside or outside the covers of a book. Why would they want such a job? Wambaugh’s answer is that they are caught up as the players in a national myth:They gave their nightly performance and almost everyone applauded. They did it the only way they knew—not ingeniously, merely instinctively—by trying to resurrect in the late twentieth century a mythic hero who never was, not even in the nineteenth century. A myth nevertheless cherished by Americans beyond the memory of philosophers, statesmen, artists and scientists who really lived: the quintessentially American myth and legend of the Gunslinger, who with only a six-shooter and star dares venture beyond the badlands.

The Glitter Dome

Those who recognize the myth and how they have been used by it clearly have great difficulty continuing to play their parts. Yet these are the most likable and most interesting police officers in Wambaugh’s fiction—Martin Welborn, for example (The Glitter Dome, 1981). He is a ploddingly thorough detective, with a penchant for orderliness in his police work and in his personal life. Glasses in his kitchen cupboard rest “in a specifically assigned position.” Drawers display dinner and cocktail napkins “stacked and arranged by size and color.” Neither can he leave “out of place” an unsolved case or the memory of a mutilated child. He depends on two universals: People always lie and, with less certainty, the devil exists (because “life would be unbearable if we didn’t have the devil, now wouldn’t it?”). What happens, then, when one of the universals is taken away? Yes, people always lie, but there is no evil and, consequently, no good. All that happens happens accidentally. With that realization, detecting who committed a crime and bringing the criminal to justice loses significance. So, too, does life, and Marty Welborn ends his by driving over a mountain cliff as he recalls the one perfect moment in his life. At the time, he had been a young, uniformed police officer, and he had just heard an old cardinal deliver a solemn High Mass. As he kneeled to kiss the cardinal’s ring, Welborn saw, in one perfect moment, the old priest’s “lovely crimson slippers.”

The Black Marble

Although Martin Welborn is the totally professional police officer, a winner who nevertheless takes his life, Andrei Milhailovich Valnikov (The Black Marble, 1978) is a loser, a “black marble” who endures. Like Welborn, he has his reveries, usually drunken ones, of past-perfect moments. Yet they come from a czarist Russia Valnikov never personally experienced. Such an absence of reality works perfectly with the constant losses in the detective’s work. He cannot, for example, find his handcuffs; he gets lost on the streets of Los Angeles; and he is all the more touchingly comical for both the reveries and the misadventures. In Valnikov, Wambaugh demonstrates his ability to develop a memorable character.

The Choirboys

As good as Wambaugh is at occasional character development, he is even better at telling amusing stories, as in The Blue Knight and The Black Marble. The Glitter Dome, The Delta Star (1983)—which was described by one reviewer as “Donald Westlake meets Ed McBain”—and The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985) are also amusing. None of these novels, however, measures up to the humor in The Choirboys. All that has been said about Wambaugh’s humor in this book is true: It is “sarcastic and filled with scrofulous expletives”; it is “scabrous”; and it is often “intentionally ugly.” Indeed, the reader may believe that laughing at The Choirboys is giving in to an adolescence long outgrown.

Wambaugh would be offended by none of this. He lists among his literary influences both Joseph Heller and Truman Capote, on one hand, and humorists P. J. O’Rourke and Dave Barry, the Pulitzer-winning humor columnist, on the other. “I wanted to use the tools of gallows humor, satire, hyperbole, all of that, to make people laugh in an embarrassed way,” Wambaugh told an interviewer. “I reread [Heller’s] Catch-22 and [ Kurt Vonnegut’s] Slaughterhouse-Five to see how it was done in war novels. . . . I couldn’t find anybody who’d done it in a police novel.”

Typical of Wambaugh’s humor is Officer Francis Tanaguchi’s impression of Bela Lugosi in The Choirboys:For three weeks, which was about as long as one of Francis’s whims lasted, he was called the Nisei Nipper by the policemen at Wilshire Station. He sulked around the station with two blood dripping fangs slipped over his incisors, attacking the throat of everyone below the rank of sergeant.

The jokes in The Choirboys are sandwiched between a prologue, three concluding chapters, and an epilogue filled with terror and insanity. Wambaugh’s novel illustrates well an idea popularized by Sigmund Freud: Beneath a joke lies the most horrific of human fears.

However, Wambaugh’s works became more light-hearted following The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985). “As I mellowed with age, or got farther from day-to-day police work, I wrote books that were more consciously entertaining,” he said. “Harry Bright was the exception. I happen to like that book better than any of the other novels, but that one was so dark, I think I had to lighten up, it was all about fathers and sons and death.”

His novels of the 1990’s were broadly comical—The Golden Orange (1990), a tale of an alcoholic cop among the millionaires of the Gold Coast of Orange County; Fugitive Nights (1992), in which another alcoholic cop teams up with a female private eye to handle a drug-smuggling case, depending, as one reviewer said, “mostly on vulgar police humor for its laughs;” Finnegan’s Week (1993), a funny and witty thriller about toxic waste comparable to the works of Carl Hiaasen; and Floaters (1996), a romp concerning racing spies, saboteurs, scam artists, and hookers swarming around San Diego Bay, the site of the America’s Cup international sailing regatta, into which two Mission Bay patrol-boat cops of the “Club Harbor Unit” get dragged out of their depth.

Several of Wambaugh’s novels were adapted to film. The New Centurions (1972) starred George C. Scott; more successful was The Black Marble, directed by Harold Becker as a romantic comedy and produced by Frank Capra, Jr., and starring James Woods and Harry Dean Stanton. The Choirboys (1977) was disappointingly directed by Robert Aldrich; it is understandable why Wambaugh filed suit when he saw the results. The Blue Knight was filmed as a television miniseries of four one-hour installments in 1973; lead actor William Holden and director Robert Butler both received Emmy Awards for their work.

A second Blue Knight television movie, filmed in 1975 and starring George Kennedy as seasoned cop Bumper Morgan, served as the pilot for a short-lived television series (1975-1976). The Glitter Dome (1985) was filmed for cable television and starred James Garner, John Lithgow, and Margot Kidder. Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert aired on television in 1993, with Teri Garr as leading lady. The nonfictional novels The Onion Field (motion picture) and Echoes in the Darkness (made-for-television miniseries re-released as video) were also filmed in 1979 and 1987, respectively. Wambaugh’s fast-paced, violent, and funny writing continues to attract the attention of Hollywood.

Wambaugh, however, was dissatisfied with these adaptation projects—except for ones to which he contributed. Television’s regular series Police Story (1973-1980) was “based on his memoirs” and focused on the LAPD. A particularly interesting project was The Learning Channel’s series Case Reopened, in which Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Wambaugh were asked to host hour-long segments about notorious unsolved crimes. Wambaugh’s turn came with “The Black Dahlia,” which aired October 10, 1999. The murder of Elizabeth Short had occurred when Wambaugh was ten, and during his rookie years on the beat he heard many anecdotes about the sensational manhunt. Despite his vow not to return to true-crime writing, Wambaugh reviewed the evidence and offered his own solution.

Of the crime committed as documented in Echoes in the Darkness, Wambaugh wrote, “Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with sociopathy, that most incurable of human disorders because all so afflicted consider themselves blessed rather than cursed.” The fate of a police officer who becomes a best-selling author as a representative of the police to the rest of the human species might be considered both a blessing and a curse. Certainly Wambaugh’s insights into the follies and struggles of humanity have proved a blessing for crime fiction.