Joseph Wambaugh, Ex-Calif. Police Officer Turned Best-Selling Writer, Dies at 88

SAN DIEGO — Joseph Wambaugh, a former police officer who became an acclaimed bestselling author, introducing audiences to the gritty, stark realities faced by fellow street cops, died Friday. He was 88.

The longtime San Diego resident died of esophageal cancer in his second home in Rancho Mirage, said close friend Janene Gant.

Wambaugh’s characters shed the clean-cut image common of police procedurals and instead mirrored real, flawed people facing the aftershocks of making complex calls.

Gant said he used to say his goal “was to not tell the story about what the cops do on their job. I want people to know what the job does to the cops.”

In a 1996 interview with the New York Times, Wambaugh said the same as he talked about pioneering the approach, a departure from familiar crime dramas. “I put people in the cops’ skin, and that shocked people,” he said.

Of his 21 books, 16 were fiction, the rest nonfiction. In 2019, he told the Union-Tribune he tended to view the fictional novels with more affection because he “birthed” them. The nonfiction works, he said, were more like “foster children.”

Asked in that interview how he’d like to be remembered, his answer came quick: “Cop writer.”

Wambaugh started writing novels while still working as a Los Angeles police officer, rising over 14 years from patrol to detective sergeant while also earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.

In 1971, still on the job for more than a decade, he published his first book, “The New Centurions,” which followed fictional rookies. The next year, the book became a movie starring George C. Scott.

More hits followed, including “The Onion Field,” a nonfiction telling of the kidnapping of two police officers one of whom was killed — a work that also became a movie. In 1984, he published “Lines and Shadows,” a nonfiction book about a San Diego police border crimes task force. It documented the exploits of undercover officers posing as undocumented immigrants to root out robbery and violence targeting migrants in the city’s border canyons. It became a No. 1 bestseller.

“Lines and Shadows” started with a simple contract scratched out on yellow sticky notes strung together, recalled retired San Diego police Lt. Ernie Salgado, a member of the Border Area Robbery Force, known as BARF, profiled in the book. Wambaugh was “upfront, honest and personable,” Salgado said.

“He was a police officer first,” said Salgado. “We knew that in talking to him, he knew where we were coming from. Of course, he was a Marine also.”

Wambaugh began researching the book about four years after the team had been disbanded, meeting for countless hours one-on-one with the police officers and also in small groups, notepad in hand.

Retired Sgt. Carlos Chacon, a team member, recalled one dinner at a popular Tijuana restaurant, where Wambaugh had a bottle of tequila set out in front of each guest.

“He’d get the conversations going, the booze was always overflowing, then he’d just sit there and listen to guys telling war stories,” Chacon said.

However, the team wasn’t all that pleased with the published product initially, shocked at their escapades and personal lives laid bare. But most came to accept it and respect the story Wambaugh told.

“He made the team cohesive after we had lost that brotherhood thing,” Chacon said. “He would still bring us together periodically for dinners and lunches and make us realize what we had accomplished post-BARF.”

In the mid-1990s, former San Diego Harbor Police Officer David King was invited, along with a sergeant and lieutenant, to have dinner with Wambaugh in Bankers Hill. King recalled Friday that the author “just wanted to hear their stories.” During the meal, King talked about recovering decaying bodies from the bay. He and other officers called them “floaters.” At that, for the only time that evening, Wambaugh pulled out a notebook and started writing.

In 1996, Wambaugh released “Floaters,” a police novel set in San Diego during the America’s Cup yacht race. He sent King a signed copy.

Journalist and Point Loma Nazarene University professor Dean Nelson said he was gripped by “Lines and Shadows,” the first Wambaugh book he read. “It was so engaging and brutal and funny and awful all at the same time.”

When he learned Wambaugh lived nearby, the professor reached out — via a gushing fax — to ask if the author would talk to Nelson’s students about the craft. Nelson says the author faxed back. No, he didn’t do public events. Didn’t like to talk about writing. But in a bit of an afterthought in the same note, Wambaugh wrote that if someone just wanted to ask him questions, he would do that.

Nelson — who then raced to read all of Wambaugh’s books — said the subsequent interview spawned the format that became the school’s annual Writer’s Symposium, which celebrated its 30th anniversary last week.

About 25 years ago, award-winning crime writer T. Jefferson Parker met Wambaugh when he just showed up at one of Parker’s book signings — but Parker has been a fan of his since reading “The New Centurians” decades ago.

“That book and Joe’s others opened up the idea in my mind — confirmed in my mind — that contemporary crime writing could be of distinct literary value,” said Parker, a Fallbrook resident who published his first book in 1985.

“Joe lived the life,” Parker said. “He was an L.A. cop for a long time, and he also studied writing, and he also worked really hard at it. He turned himself from a very perspicacious and witty cop into a really, really concise and funny writer, and he just became really, really good. He’s among our best.”

Born Jan. 22, 1937, in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wambaugh was the son of the city’s police chief. He later moved with his parents to Southern California. Gant said that, with parental permission, he joined the Marines at age 17. Married at age 18, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1960 and left as a celebrity author in 1974.

Gant said Wambaugh moved to San Diego around 1989. He lived in a few different places around the region and about 30 years ago moved into a Point Loma home with what Gant called “a sweeping, gorgeous view of San Diego.”

“We would always say he was pregnant with a book when he was writing something,” Gant said. “He would disappear for like, six months. Once he was on a book, it was the only thing he could do. He was that deeply passionate about it.”

She said Wambaugh was “really proud … that cops really loved his writings.”

“He would get fan letters, and he would write back a letter to everyone,” she said. And, she said, he’d written his books on a typewriter.

Gant’s daughter, Loxie Gant, said the man she called “Uncle Joe” didn’t much like to chat, preferring to send emails — although he would call her mother to tell her to check the email he’d just sent. “He would say, ‘I’m a writer, not a talker,’” Loxie Gant said.

Gant said Wambaugh is survived by his wife — and high school sweetheart — Dee Wambaugh, son David Wambaugh, daughter Jeannette Wambaugh, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His son Mark Wambaugh died in a car crash in 1984.

No memorial services are expected.

_____________

Visit sandiegouniontribune.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.