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Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88. <\/strong><\/p>\n The cause was esophageal cancer, said Janene Gant, a longtime family friend.<\/p>\n In \u201cThe Glitter Dome,\u201d Officers Gibson Hand and Buckmore Phipps consider it a joy \u201cto kill people and do other good police work.\u201d In \u201cThe Black Marble,\u201d Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman and Sgt. A.M. Valnikov are in love, but it can\u2019t last. In \u201cThe Onion Field,\u201d his first work of nonfiction, Mr. Wambaugh wrote of what happened to Officer Karl Hettinger when his partner was slain by thugs: He suffered impotence, nightmares and suicidal thoughts, and his body shrunk.<\/p>\n Mr. Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.<\/p>\n Before Mr. Wambaugh\u2019s era as a writer, which began in 1971, police dramas like the television series \u201cDragnet\u201d were implausible stories about clean-cut heroes doing good. He shattered the mold with portraits of officers as complex, profane, violent and fallible, sliding quickly from rookie illusions of idealism into the streetwise cynicism of veterans, who might have feared death but who feared their own emotions even more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Readers discovered an intimacy with Wambaugh\u2019s cops, taking in the gallows humor, the boredom and sudden dangers; being privy to a partner\u2019s bigotry and cruelty, but tagging along for the action and a share of the fatalism about the job \u2014 the inevitability of a murder, a rape or a child molested tonight \u2014 and then moving on to another sunset shift out of Hollywood Station.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a prolific four-decade career that overlapped with, and often drew upon, the obscenities and violence of his 14 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, Mr. Wambaugh wrote 16 novels and five nonfiction books. He also created two TV series, \u201cPolice Story\u201d (1973-78) and \u201cThe Blue Knight\u201d (1975-76), and wrote the screenplays for the movie versions of \u201cThe Onion Field\u201d (1979) and \u201cThe Black Marble\u201d (1980), as well as a CBS mini-series, \u201cEchoes in the Darkness\u201d (1987), and an NBC film, \u201cFugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert\u201d (1993), both also based on his books.<\/p>\n Four more Wambaugh books were adapted by others for Hollywood films or television movies and mini-series. He was draped with awards by the Mystery Writers of America and other groups, plus one from The Strand Mystery Magazine for lifetime achievement. His books were routinely best sellers, earning what publishing industry sources said was an average of $1 million each.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet he was a shy, prickly loner who rarely gave interviews, had few friends aside from police officers, didn\u2019t have a literary agent and even played golf alone. He sprinkled his books with cop scorn for the wealthy, especially for entertainment stars in Beverly Hills. His own Southern California homes were modest mansions in upscale places like Newport Beach, San Diego and Rancho Mirage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Many critics loved him. \u201cLet us forever dispel the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books,\u201d the crime and mystery writer Evan Hunter wrote<\/a> of \u201cThe Glitter Dome\u201d in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. \u201cThis 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 the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Hunter added: \u201cThe \u2018Glitter Dome\u2019 in this story is not solely the name of a Chinatown saloon in which payday policemen and the \u2018chickens\u2019 and \u2018vultures\u2019 who are their female counterparts meet to socialize and cruise; it is also the tinsel world of Hollywood, and by extension the sequined surface of America itself, the chaotic winking lights and leering neon messages that serve to blind us to the subterranean turbulence of a troubled nation.\u201d<\/p>\n The son of a small-town police chief who also worked in a factory, Mr. Wambaugh served three years in the Marines and had earned two college degrees by the time he was 23. He wanted to be a teacher, but in 1960 he joined the L.A.P.D. as a patrolman because the pay was better. He walked a beat for eight years while studying English for a master\u2019s degree and Spanish to help him speak in the barrios.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1965, he and hundreds of other police officers battled mobs and sniper fire in the Watts section of South Central Los Angeles when African Americans, sick of years of abusive treatment by the police, reacted to the traffic stop of a Black motorist and erupted in six days of rioting<\/a> that left 34 people dead, 1,032 injured, 3,952 under arrest and $40 million worth of property destroyed.<\/p>\n Promoted to detective in 1968, Mr. Wambaugh worked out of Hollywood Station, first on burglaries and later on robbery and occasional homicide details. Inspired by Truman Capote\u2019s so-called nonfiction novel, \u201cIn Cold Blood,\u201d which detailed the killings of four members of a Kansas farm family by two ex-convict drifters, Mr. Wambaugh wrote his first novel, \u201cThe New Centurions\u201d (1971), on the job.<\/p>\n \u201cThe New Centurions\u201d explored the lives of three young officers working in minority communities in the early 1960s; it also examined the traits of veteran officers and how rookies acquire them. The book was a Times best seller for 32 weeks, and was made into a film with George C. Scott and Stacy Keach in 1972.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Wambaugh hoped to keep both careers, as a cop and a writer, but his celebrity and his frequent appearances on television talk shows made police work untenable. Suspects wanted his autograph or his help getting a film role. People reporting crimes asked that he be the one to investigate. When his longtime detective partner held the squad car door open for him one day in 1974, he knew it was time to go.<\/p>\n His most ambitious and successful book was \u201cThe Onion Field\u201d (1973), which reconstructed the 1963 kidnapping of Officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger by two robbers, Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith, who drove them at gunpoint to an onion field near Bakersfield, Calif. Officer Campbell was shot dead; Officer Hettinger escaped into the darkness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nCritical Praise<\/h2>\n
\nHarper Collins<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nA Best-Selling Debut<\/h2>\n