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. .
The cause was esophageal cancer, said Janene Gant, a longtime family friend.
In “The Glitter Dome,” Officers Gibson Hand and Buckmore Phipps consider it a joy “to kill people and do other good police work.” In “The Black Marble,” Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman and Sgt. A.M. Valnikov are in love, but it can’t last. In “The Onion Field,” his first work of nonfiction, he 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.
Mr. Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.
Before Mr. Wambaugh’s era as a writer, which began in 1971, police dramas like the television series “Dragnet” 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.
Readers discovered an intimacy with Wambaugh’s cops, taking in the gallows humor, the boredom and sudden dangers; being privy to a partner’s bigotry and cruelty, but tagging along for the action and a share of the fatalism about the job — the inevitability of a murder, a rape or a child molested tonight — and then moving on to another sunset shift out of Hollywood Station.
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