Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood novels are getting less enjoyable as they go along. Hollywood Station was excellent, a fun and informative look at how the L.A.P.D. works, particularly the ridiculous rules and restrictions put on them by politically correct bureaucrats who value looking fair on paper ...
It must be years, decades even since I read anything by Joseph Wambaugh, but I got "Hollywood Hills" in a jumble sale and its pretty good. It is, of course, about American cops - here LAPD and the Hollywood Station. It is also and I did not realise it until after I finished it, one of a series. H...
Joe Wambaugh is best known for his brutally honest early works centered on the LAPD -- The Blue Knight, The New Centurions and some of his other 1970s novels. This isn't one of those. More's the pity.Winston Farlowe, the protagonist -- it's impossible to call him "the hero" -- is drinking his dis...
Wambaugh, Joseph. Fire Lover (2002) ****Extraordinary case, well documentedI first became aware of this strange and startling case several years ago via a PBS documentary, probably a Frontline production. I was just stunned: a fire captain exposed as a pyromaniac. Obviously the man had some ser...
I cannot improve on the blog post that prompted me to read it, so I'll repost a lengthy excerpt: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/20...Which brings me to what really made my blood boil: the review-fate of one particular book -- "Hollywood Station," the new novel by Joseph Wambaugh.A quick word ...
I have been reading this author's books (mostly) in chronological order. He is always good and sometimes great. "Fugitive Nights" finds him at the top of his form, once again returning to his familiar ground of cops and criminals. Great colorful/multi dimensional characters, fast paced story with...
Serge Duran, Gus Plebesly, and Roy Fehler are classmates at the police academy and take to the streets after graduation. But will being police officers be as they thought?The New Centurions follows the lives of three young men for five years, starting from their police academy days and into the ...
Joseph Wambaugh's writing has changed. Finnegan's Week more resembles Carl Hiaasen. It's very cynical, filled with dark humor. The plot's not terribly suspenseful: two truck drivers for a corrupt toxic waste hauler steal some shoes from a U.S. Navy warehouse to sell in Mexico. Their truck co...
Fortney and Leeds are two harbor patrol cops in San Diego. Blaze is a hooker enlisted by Ambrose, the Keeper of the Cup, to engage in a scheme to thwart the New Zealanders likely win of the America Cup. It’s a complicated plan involving making one crane operator sick so another can arrange for t...
Written by Bernie Weisz Historian Pembroke Pines, Florida e mail addresS:[email protected] of Review: "The Choirboys: An Authentic 1975 Predawn Nightmare!"In 1975, a Los Angeles Police Department officer-turned-novelist named Joseph Wambaugh wrote the controversial novel "The Choirboys". Stil...
In San Diego, one has a definite sense of living on the line. That line is the international border that separates the affluence of Southern California from the poverty and despair of Tijuana. Every day, people from Mexico and Central America who want to break out of the cycle of Third World de...
Fiction could not be stranger than this true crime tale of the "Main Line Murders". It is so convoluted that it will have you shaking your head when you are finished.....it is the naivete and basic stupidity of the persons involved that is so hard to believe. The story can't be summarized in a re...
This is the true story of the first widespread use of blood samples for genetic fingerprinting in a murder case. The English villages involved were shocked by the rape and death of two young women and the police went all-out to find the killer. A new technique called genetic fingerprinting was av...
After a slow start, Wambaugh gets really fun with his usual cynicism mixed with humor style. Sgt. Valnikov, a world weary cop, has been paired with Natalie in the burglary squad and they wind up investigating the theft of a potential Westminster Show winner. (If you haven’t seen Best in Show, yo...
Colorful satisfying mysteryAt first the racist characters got in the way of my enjoyment of this well written novel, but I recognized their banter as in good fun for bonding between cops. I don't like drunks spouting racist viewpoints jokingly in real life, but it's a good way for the author to q...
A good solid piece of police fiction and is arguably one of Joseph Wambaugh's most famous works. Bumper Morgan is a career L.A.P.D. police officer. A twenty-year man who has never done anything, but work patrol. While over-invested in his work ,and not above taking free meals from restaurants in ...
Joseph Wambaugh was strongly influenced by Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ when he wrote his first non-fiction work, ‘The Onion Field’, and one can immediately see similarities in his writing style, and although it is slightly more graphic than that of Capote, it shows a similar attention to deta...
Seventeen months ago the California desert revealed the remains of Jack Watson. The rich man's son was found incinerated in a Rolls-Royce, a bullet in his head. Now, a year and a half later, Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Sidney Blackpool is called into the desert to take on the...
HRF Keating claims this as Wambaugh's finest work of fiction in his rundown of the best 100 works of crime and mystery; the former policeman turned author famed for his realistic portrait of the boys in blue as something less than heroic being something of a literary sensation in the 70s when cop...
When he was finished it was more than shipshape. In fact, he’d never lived in a place as clean and orderly as his was that morning. He phoned his mother to tell her he was going out to look for a job. He told her he was thinking about selling sailboats, and that she shouldn’t worry about him; he’...
Ronnie wanted to know if Bix had fallen off the wagon and been drinking on duty the night before, and Nate wanted to know what the hell Bix Ramstead was doing up on Mt. Olympus at the home of Margot Aziz. But neither had the nerve to ask him. That morning, Ronnie and Bix were tasked to do follow-...