Joseph Wambaugh, the Los Angeles police officer who became a best-selling novelist, began writing out of a need to describe the Watts riots of the 1960’s from the perspective of the police officers assigned to restore order there. He wanted to describe “what it was like for young men, young policemen, to grow up, on the streets, in that dreadful and fascinating era.” The body of his work concerns American police procedure and the lives of those who belong to what has been called the “maligned profession.” It is a world of frustrating, counterproductive rules and regulations drawn up by police administrators who have not been on the streets for years, a world where brutality mixes with courage, corruption with dedication, and evil with honor.

Although occasionally criticized for lengthy philosophical discourses and an undeveloped style, Wambaugh is more often praised for thoughtful and realistic storytelling, and he has been regarded as one of the “few really knowledgeable men who try to tell the public what a cop’s life is like.” Beginning with his first novel, The New Centurions (1970), positive popular response has led to the reproduction of Wambaugh’s stories in other media such as film, television, and audio cassettes. His police officers were violent, afraid, foul-mouthed, and fallible. “Do you like cops? Read The New Centurions,” a New York Times reviewer wrote. “Do you hate cops? Read The New Centurions.”

Critical acclaim for his writing began in 1974, when he received the Herbert Brean Memorial Award for The Onion Field (1973), which, according to The New York Times reviewer James Conaway, is equal to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and placed Wambaugh in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell.

Wambaugh’s books, gritty, hyperrealistic, and nonlinear, typically interweave several story lines at once. His characters are composites of real-life cops and criminals; his dialogue is praised and reviled as “outrageously colorful.” What Wambaugh brought to detective fiction was actual life on the beat from a cop’s perspective: the gallows humor, the ugliness, the drugs and booze, the boredom and the raw fear. “I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I was turning the procedural around,” Wambaugh told an interviewer. “The procedural is a genre that describes how a cop acts on the job; I was showing how the job might act on the cop . . . how it worked on his head.”

Wambaugh shows that investigations can be mishandled and that police officers, who can be bigots, alcoholics, and hard cases, make bad errors of judgment. However, he believes that most Americans are unwilling to grasp the reality, the human cost, of police work. Wambaugh’s books are enormously popular among cops as well as civilian readers because of their accuracy. “Police work is still, in my opinion, the most emotionally hazardous job on earth,” he said in 2000. “Not the most physically dangerous, but the most emotionally dangerous.”

In addition to several nonfiction works, including The Onion Field (1973), Echoes in the Darkness (1987), and Fire Lover: A True Story (2002), Joseph Wambaugh (WAHM-baw) has written screenplays for the film adaptations of his works The Onion Field (1979) and The Black Marble (1980) and teleplays for Echoes in the Darkness (1987) and Fugitive Nights (1993). He has also served as creative consultant for the television production of his novel The Blue Knight and for the television series Police Story.

Joseph Wambaugh is widely regarded as an outstanding storyteller and the most respected and prolific American novelist in the field of police procedure novels. All of his fiction and nonfiction works have been best sellers, and, given his cinematic feel for character...