to shield themselves from the sheer terror and pain intrinsic to their jobs, they exude cynicism and disgust with nearly everything and everybody, even themselves. They respond to the daily brutality they encounter, and that they must occasionally employ, with gallows humor, sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, and, far too often, “eating their pieces”—suicide. Only in his later novels, after his hiatus from fiction in the late 1990’s, does Wambaugh’s evident compassion for streetwise cops permit a celebration of the profession. Indeed, his later fiction evidences his own reinvestigation of the police procedural itself—he shifts his attention from the intricacy of investigation and the dogged pursuit of solution and the focus on a single complex criminal act to a more character-driven narrative with embedded anecdotes that reflect less Wambaugh as a seasoned cop and more Wambaugh as a gifted storyteller.

The New Centurions

Wambaugh’s first novel, The New Centurions, follows the progress of three rookies from their training at the Los Angeles Police Academy in the summer of 1960 to their accidental reunion during the Watts riots of August, 1965. Serge Duran is a former athlete and former marine who has attempted to escape his Chicano heritage, Gus Plebesly is an undersized overachiever who is exceedingly afraid of failure, and Roy Fehler thinks of himself as a liberal intellectual making merely a temporary detour from an academic career in criminology. In their development as police officers, all three face situations that force them to examine their beliefs about themselves. Initially assigned as a patrolman in a barrio precinct, Duran meets a Hispanic woman who teaches him not to be ashamed of his ethnic identity. Under the tutelage of a veteran patrolman, Kilvinsky, Plebesly gains the professional and personal assurance to become a competent officer. Fehler, however, fails to reconcile his intellectual views with the emotional realities of race relations on the street: He blinds himself to his own prejudices, tying himself into a psychological knot. His failure is dramatically symbolized at the end of the novel, when he is shot and dies.

The plot of The New Centurions develops chronologically and in episodes focusing on each of the rookies in turn. As Duran, Plebesly, and Fehler receive new assignments, Wambaugh takes the opportunity to display the operational peculiarities of the various divisions within the police force—street patrols, vice, homicide, juvenile, and narcotics—as well as to introduce a host of minor characters, both police and civilians, who reveal all the quirks and propensities of their world. Whenever a new character appears, Wambaugh adds believability and depth by interrupting thenarrative to discuss some incident that has shaped this person’s life and attitudes. These brief digressions are often darkly humorous and also allow Wambaugh to illustrate further the vicissitudes of life in the LAPD.

It is apparent that Wambaugh regards the Watts riots as a kind of watershed for civilized society and the rule of law. Until the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles police force generally dealt with specific crimes committed by and against individuals. The Watts riots, however, represented a fundamental rejection of the structures of lawful authority by almost the entire black community, and the department was astonished and overwhelmed by the senseless violence of mobs of ordinarily law-abiding citizens. At the end of the book it is clear that, though a few officers seem to have guessed that some sort of qualitative change in social attitudes has occurred, most assume that the situation will soon return to normal.

The Blue Knight

One of the main themes of The Blue Knight, Wambaugh’s second novel, is that the situation did not, in fact, return to normal. Hostile media coverage of the riots focused on the LAPD’s lack of community-relations efforts, incompetence, and alleged brutality, while government investigations reported widespread racism and corruption throughout the department. Stung by criticism, department executives became increasingly image-conscious and ordered significant changes in training and operational procedures. One result was that the time-honored tradition of the individual policeman walking his beat was replaced by the two-person patrol-car unit. In the past, officers generally had been granted a large amount of latitude in dealing with situations on their beats and were usually trusted to keep order as they saw fit. The wise policeman developed a commonsense attitude, allowing certain kinds of violations to slide while dealing with others immediately and often severely. The new breed of patrol officer, however, was supposed to stay close to his unit, maintain constant radio communication with his precinct, and limit his activities to those precisely within the law. The new policy was intended to ensure both the safety and the good behavior of officers, whose individual initiative was drastically curtailed.

The Blue Knight takes place in the midst of the transition from the old to the new; its main character is a traditional beat officer, William H. “Bumper” Morgan, a twenty-year veteran on the brink of retirement. Wambaugh examines Bumper’s last three days on the police force, using the first-person viewpoint to help the reader perceive events directly through Bumper’s eyes and ears. Though Bumper has been forced to trade walking his beat for driving a police unit, he insists on working alone and spends most of his shift out of his car and out of radio contact with his precinct.

Bumper’s long experience has made him something of a sociologist and philosopher, and his observations represent Wambaugh’s slightly irreverent tribute to the old police view of the world. As he makes his rounds, Bumper recalls for the reader many of the events of his twenty years on the force, as well as what he learned from them. Through these recollections, he reveals the essence of his approach to successful police work: Never give or accept love, and always remain impersonal and uninvolved on the job. Unfortunately, Bumper’s philosophy is a self-delusion. The excitement and danger of police work isolate him from everything and everyone outside his beat, the only environment in which he is truly in control. In fact he is so completely involved that his life is nothing but his job. Thus, at the end of the story, despite postretirement plans for marriage and a cushy position as a corporate head of security, Bumper decides that he cannot give up his badge.

Though Bumper is clearly meant to be a sympathetic character, Wambaugh also endows him with flaws. He is overweight and indulges himself in vast feasts provided free by the restaurateurs on his beat. He is crude and flatulent, angry and vengeful, egotistical and very expansive in interpreting his powers as a representative of the law. He imbibes copious amounts of liquor and is certainly no paragon of sexual morality. Sometimes, despite his experience, he even makes stupid mistakes, such as allowing himself to be drawn alone into a dangerous confrontation with student demonstrators. Bumper is softhearted but also tough, violent, and often frustrated. Ultimately, he appears as a tragic figure, unable to break with a career that casts him as a permanent outsider.

The Choirboys

After leaving the LAPD in 1974, Wambaugh apparently felt the need to give free rein to some of the anguish and bitterness he felt about his career as a police officer. These emotions are expressed in his third novel, The Choirboys, which differs significantly from his previous works in both style and substance. In its structure, grim humor, and overall feeling of hopelessness, The Choirboys resembles Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), with the LAPD substituted for Heller’s Army Air Corps. Like the military officers in Catch-22, the ten officers who make up the choirboys are losers and misfits: several alcoholics, a sadist, a masochist, a violent racist, and the like. Each chapter introduces a new character and relates a series of especially harrowing incidents that lead to the calling of a “choir practice,” in which the group meets in a park to get drunk and vie for the sexual favors of two overweight waitresses. Choir practice allows the officers to let off steam and serves as a coping device against the horrifying realities they have faced. The sessions frequently get out of hand, however, and eventually lead to the unintended death of a civilian and the suspension of several of the group.

With its uninhibited street language, unrestrained cynicism, emotional violence, and unrelieved sense of futility, The Choirboys is saved only by the brutal hilarity of its bumblingprotagonists and the ironies they suffer. The situations into which Wambaugh’s policemen stumble are so outrageous that the reader cannot take them very seriously. Thus, even though Wambaugh’s characters are incisive and believable, the world in which they operate is so impossibly awful that the reader maintains the objectivity necessary for laughter

The Black Marble

After The Choirboys, Wambaugh’s novels became both more conventional in structure and more sentimental in tone. His main characters are still losers, and the sense of blind fate and the prominence of coincidence continue to dominate his plots, but, in the end, his protagonists seem to be at least somewhat redeemed; the climaxes always result in some kind of catharsis. Each of his succeeding books revolves around a single case, a kind of puzzle that is resolved not through brilliant police work but through dogged determination and serendipitous accidents. An excellent example is his next novel, The Black Marble, whose hero is Sergeant Andrei Mikhailovich Valnikov, an absentminded, broken-down alcoholic who is also a consummate and very touching gentleman. Valnikov was once a top homicide detective, but after he investigated a string of cases of sexually abused and brutally murdered children, he developed constant nightmares and started drinking to forget. Eventually, he suffered a breakdown and was reassigned to the robbery division.

Valnikov is paired with Natalie Zimmerman, an ambitious female detective who is bitter generally about the discriminatory attitude of the LAPD toward women and specifically about being stuck with Valnikov. She believes that her Russian-born partner is not only a drunk but crazy as well, especially when he begins to devote all of his still-considerable abilities to the solution of a case she regards as ridiculous: the theft of a prize schnauzer. Wambaugh follows their misadventures in discovering that the dog has been stolen by a trainer seeking to extort money from the owner, a formerly wealthy divorcée now unable to pay the ransom. As always in a Wambaugh novel, along the path to the solution of the case the reader becomes acquainted with a cast of wacky police officers and civilians, until Valnikov finally catches the criminal and wins the love and respect of his partner.

All of Wambaugh’s subsequent novels have followed the pattern established by The Black Marble: the often-coincidental solution of a crime by not-very-heroic police officers or former officers. Though he himself regards The Choirboys as his best work, it is not representative of his style. In later novels Wambaugh solidified his reputation as a master of the crime novel with stories featuring the flawed characters, dark humor, intricate plots, and dangerous constructions exhibited in his earlier works.

The Glitter Dome

Few Wambaugh novels reflect the dark urgency of his outraged moral sensibility (rooted in his Catholic upbringing) better than The Glitter Dome—this is a novel, as Wambaugh suggests in his own foreword, full of venom. As such, it holds a particular place in Wambaugh’s development: It is something of a nadir; from this point, his novels will follow a steady trajectory toward affirmation more appropriate to the procedural genre in which, traditionally, complex mysteries yield to resolution and a moral order is confirmed in the end.

The Glitter Dome, like other Wambaugh works, is a character-driven procedural, an ensemble narrative that traces four sets of partners who work the seedy districts of Hollywood. There, amid the world of the sordid and the kinky, officers struggle to assert a code of morality. It is Wambaugh’s conviction, however, that the police are at best a fragile stay against the moral confusions and brutality of the criminal element. Here police careers follow a grim trajectory from cockiness to compromise and ultimately to despair; successes are rare and often the result not of brilliant police work but rather of guesswork and luck. Indeed, the novel starts with a cold case, a killing that has eluded solution—a film studio executive has been shot in a bowling alley parking lot.

The narrative focus rests on partners Aloysius Mackey and Martin Welborn. Wambaugh again examines the psychological effects of police work: the two partners represent the extremes, the hard-souled survivor (Mackey) and the idealistic innocent (Welborn). The borderline alcoholic Mackey, at forty-three years old paying alimony to multiple ex-wives and living with a cat, toys with the idea of suicide but survives by virtue of his cynicism and his grim sense of humor (the Glitter Dome is a raucous bar where cops go to vent). Welborn, however, struggles in a moral miasma—a lapsed seminarian who finds the order and ritual of the Catholic Church comforting, he seeks that same order in the night-world of Hollywood. He is haunted by memories: of an informant whose name he accidentally revealed who is subsequently murdered; of a child abuse victim, a bed wetter, whose penis was cut off by his father. Like the elaborate contraption he uses to try to repair his back injury, Welborn sees police work as a way to correct failures that Wambaugh sees, with unsettling honesty, are uncorrectable parts of the twisted human psyche.

As Welborn and Mackey investigate, they stumble into a plan to make a so-called snuff film (a film of a real killing) in Mexico, and they become entangled in the seamiest reaches of Hollywood, coming into contact with child pornographers, drug dealers, and sadomasochists. Here, Mackey points out, there is no evil—evil has a dignity and grandeur. Rather, this is simple opportunism and garden-variety greed. By the same token, there are no noble forces of good—detective work here is the product of coincidence and chance executed by imperfect officers who struggle with demons of their own. Appropriately, the final break in the case is entirely capricious—as it turns out, the studio executive was the victim of a spontaneous burglary that had simply gone wrong, and that information only comes from the dying confession of one of the robbers after he is shot. The reader is then denied the satisfying feeling of a case solved—it is merely closed—and that is further complicated by Welborn’s suicide as he is overwhelmed by his own surrender to the amorality of the streets (the reader is given disturbing evidence that he may have participated in the robber’s shooting as a way to assert some viable moral force). Although the case is technically cleared, like the smog that hangs about the Hollywood streets, a pall of uneasiness hangs about the narrative.

The Golden Orange and Fugitive Nights

With The Golden Orange and Fugitive Nights, Wambaugh enters into the “ex-cop” phase of his work in the persons of Winnie Farlowe and Lynn Cutter, both former officers and heavy drinkers who become drawn into complicated crimes requiring considerable application of their skills. All the while they must strive to surmount the accumulation of personal demons engendered and nurtured by years of police work. In both novels the upscale settings—Newport Harbor in The Golden Orange and Palm Springs in Fugitive Nights—serve as effective foils for the trademark cop chatter and streetwise daring of the heroes.

In the ex-cop’s world, saloons serve as substitute offices where former officers and off-duty policemen congregate to conduct business and male bonding on the side. Wambaugh’s ex-cops are tough yet vulnerable, especially when they place their trust in others who, on the surface, seem worthy of it. In The Golden Orange, the moment arrives for one of the author’s gritty veterans to address what he terms the Cop’s Syllogism, a condition that could be applied to nearly all of Wambaugh’s fictional constructions. It simply states, “People are garbage. I am a person. Therefore——.” Once the syllogism is avowed, only something bad can happen. It “has led thousands of burned-out, overwhelmingly cynical members of the law enforcement business into alcoholism or drug addiction, police corruption, or suicide.” It affirms why, in an interview, the author took issue with the notion that his works are police procedurals. “I was the first person, I think, to write a book about cops that was not a police procedural,” he said. “A police procedural is a novel that attempts to show how a cop acts on the job. I wasn’t interested so much in that. So, I turned it around. I thought I’d like to show how the job acts on the cop.”

Finnegan’s Week

In Finnegan’s Week another of Wambaugh’s hero-detectives, Finbar Finnegan, teams up with Nell Salter, a district attorney’s office investigator, and Bobbie Ann Doggett, a navy law enforcement official, to solve a crime involving a stolen truck loaded with lethal pesticide. As usual, the drinks, jokes, sexual repartee, salty dialogue, and verbal and physical clashes flow freely. At times they almost careen out of control, whipsawing the reader to a conclusion that is judicious and sensible.

Floaters

Floaters features an aquatic theme, as Wambaugh pairs a couple of harbor cops and vice officers in an investigation of a scheme by a business tycoon to sabotage a competitor’s entry in the America’s Cup yachting race. As in previous works, the author demonstrates a knack for juxtaposing characters who are very different. In addition to the unlikely cops, the characters include a yachting enthusiast, an expensive call girl and masseuse, a vicious pimp, and a band of rowdy Australian crewmen. Though the plot is slow paced at the beginning, the events leading up to theclimax are vintage Wambaugh. In all his fiction, Wambaugh has explored essentially the same themes: the basic humanity of police officers and the pressures they face, the decline of traditional values in modern society, and the haphazard and accidental nature of fate.

Hollywood Station

After more than a decade working exclusively on documentary treatments of true crimes, a series of successful (and controversial) best sellers in the manner of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Wambaugh returned to fiction in 2006. It was less a return to form than a reinvention of it. Intrigued by requests from longtime fans and respected colleagues to revisit the LAPD in the wake of nearly a decade of scandals (very public investigations of botched procedures, coerced confessions, evidence tampering, excessive violence, racial profiling, and illegal searches), Wambaugh hesitated only because he was not sure he was still in touch with the psyche of the contemporary street cop. To reignite his fictional sensibility, Wambaugh hosted a series of dinners with a range of LAPD officers and listened to their conversations about life on the streets—he found the process cathartic as he gathered a wealth of vivid anecdotal material, and in the resulting novel, Hollywood Station, Wambaugh acknowledges the nearly fifty cops who participated.

Although on the surface Hollywood Station is a familiar Wambaugh novel—an ensemble novel set in the gritty underworld of Hollywood—it is a striking departure. It lacks a riveting central investigation: Here, a small-time criminal, a methamphetamine freak who is marginally competent as a thief, ends up tangling with a Russian crime lord (who is himself something of a clownish presence) and a succession of more daring and more dangerous thefts. It is a slender plot—Wambaugh is far more interested in creating the psychological lives of the investigating officers, a collection of vivid characters led by the Oracle, a fifty-ish captain who centers the novel with a steadying moral vision in a universe of chaos and absurdities. The anecdotes that the characters tell, full of streetwise humor, underscore Wambaugh’s Irish love of storytelling. Given the range of characters (each with defining interests and signature dialogue—one a new mother, another an aspiring actor, two others veteran surfers), the compelling humor, and the episodic vignettes of these officers struggling to assert some measure of dignity and order, the novel recalls less the traditional police procedural and more Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, by Wambaugh’s admission a seminal text in his evolution as a writer.

Wambaugh (like Heller) is motivated not only by an instinct for compelling stories but also by a caustic critique of what he sees as bureaucratic absurdities—specifically, a complex of federal regulations that tried to create a politically correct environment but that undercut the effectiveness of the street cops and made the old-school camaraderie of the force strained and artificial. Unlike his earlier fictions, however, in which cops are imperfect and at times overwhelmed by the insidious pull of the criminal world they patrol, Hollywood Station presents a clear endorsement not only of the LAPD but also of police work generally. Public scandals trained attention, Wambaugh argues, on a slender element of the LAPD—and, as the Oracle says, there is no work more fun than police work. It is that spirited endorsement of the profession that distinguishes Wambaugh’s return to fiction. Writing in his seventies, Wambaugh enthusiastically praises the work, determination, compassion, and moral authority of the cops he has chronicled for more than forty years.