The mischief of The Choirboys has been put into the reader's mind by such certified authorities as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his Little Sir Echoes on the New York Times. The slender dozen titular choirboys of Wambaugh's novel give unintended credence to the popular view: they are psychopathically introspective, irresponsible, and dubiously moral Los Angeles night-shift policemen who call a "choir practice" around a slimy duck pond in MacArthur Park whenever one of them suffers an unusually traumatic psychological shock of the sort every dedicated police officer experiences daily. But these choirboys feel more deeply than they think, so their probings deteriorate into an alcoholic stupefaction just short of such paralysis that they cannot cry Ite, missa est before gangbanging two megamammalian police groupies named Ora Lee Tingle and Carolina Moon.

I do not deny Wambaugh's thesis that every police department has its choirboys. To some extent every real police officer is a choirboy. Police work is a terrible profession, subject to physical and psychological strains undreamt of in the ordinary citizen's philosophy….

But I do quarrel with Wambaugh's contention that sensitive policemen express themselves in weepy debauches. Police are silent sufferers who rarely expose their souls, and then only to a trusted partner. (p. 343)

To understand the worlds of Steinbeck and Wambaugh one must read all their writings. Remember that Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath finally became Stonebreaker of The League of Noble Christians. Wambaugh's four novels must be read as an integrated tetralogy. His first book, The New Centurions, is incomparably the best revelation of the lives and souls of policemen ever written, giving in one paragraph the theme of the hardly conceived tetralogy—when two police officers, seeing the whole world starting its Armageddon in the chaos of Watts, wonder one to the other whether, two millennia ago, two centurions like themselves prepared to die in a losing battle against the mad militants of Christianity painted a thousand years later in El Greco's saints…. To see Wambaugh's tetralogy in the purest form of the word (three tragic pieces balanced by one humorous one), The Choirboys completes the opus. Without the last two chapters it is the comic novel of the season.

Some readers will not like the rough humor, but policemen for their own survival are rough men. (pp. 343-44)