Former LAPD detective Joseph Wambaugh, whose 16 novels and five nonfiction crime narratives transformed the portrayal of cops in America, died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., according to Janene Gant, a longtime family friend. He was 88.
The cause of his death was esophageal cancer, Gant told the Los Angeles Times. He had learned about his illness about 10 months ago. His wife of 69 years, Dee, was at his side, Gant said.
His bestselling novels included “The New Centurions,” “The Glitter Dome,” “The Choirboys” and “Black Marble.” The best known of his nonfiction works was “The Onion Field,” a chilling story that starts with a routine stop for an illegal U-turn and quickly leads to the execution of a Los Angeles police officer in a Kern County field.
Michael Connelly, a former Los Angeles Times police reporter who became an author of acclaimed crime novels, said he came to think of Wambaugh as a mentor 25 years before actually meeting him and becoming his friend.
Before Wambaugh, crime novelists often focused on “the loner detective who works outside the system he distrusts and even despises,” Connelly wrote in a preface to the 2008 edition of Wambaugh’s first novel, “The New Centurions.”
“It fell to Wambaugh to take the story inside the police station and patrol car where it truly belonged, to tell the story of the men who did the real work and risked their lives and sanity to do it. And to explore a different kind of corruption — the premature cynicism and tarnished nobility of the cop who has looked too often and too long into humanity’s dark abyss.”
Former POLICE Magazine Senior Editor Dean Scoville conducted an in-depth interview with Wambaugh in 2007.
Wambaugh told POLICE: "I was born to be a writer. I suppose it's not something you can really learn. You can learn some fundamentals, but I think it comes from DNA and from reading books all of one's life. It was in my genes to write; it probably wasn't in my genes to be a cop."
