Joseph Wambaugh

Joseph Wambaugh (1937 -- ) is a former policeman who transformed the sub-genre of the police novel into serious literature of a hard-boiled nature. His first four books and his work on the Police Story television series in the 1970s set standards of realism, dialogue, and character development for subsequent writers or turned them in new directions.

The son of a policeman, Wambaugh was born in East Pittsburgh, joined the Marines at seventeen, and married at eighteen. After an Associate degree from Chafee College, he joined the police and rose through the ranks from patrolman to detective sergeant (1960-74). While working as a policeman, he attended Cal State University Los Angeles, receiving his B.A. and M.A. From his Catholic faith to his young marriage and Marine service, Wambaugh epitomized the police force. But then he began to "moonlight," as he said, writing about that life and his colleagues.

When he published The New Centurions in 1971 the acclaim was instant and unanimous. "Let us dispel forever the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books," wrote Evan Hunter in the New York Times Book Review: "This would be tantamount to saying that Jack London was first and foremost a sailor.

Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality who has chosen to write about police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general." The novel traces young men through the police academy, the streets of their first assignments, and into the Watts riots of 1968. From idealistic beginnings they evolve into hardened and corrupted warriors who feel they have been sent to the trenches to fight a Leviathan. John Greenway wrote in National Review that the novel was "incomparably the best revelation of the lives and souls of policemen ever written."