Joseph Wambaugh, who wrote the gripping, true-crime bestseller "The Onion Field" and numerous gritty but darkly humorous novels about day-to-day police work drawn from his own experiences as a Los Angeles police officer, has died at 88.
As popular as Wambaugh’s first two books were, they were eclipsed by his next one, “The Onion Field,” a real-life account of the abduction and killing of a Los Angeles police officer in 1963.
After the book was published, Wambaugh returned to fiction with the wildly funny, although sometimes tragic look at a group of Los Angeles police officers he called “The Choirboys.”.
The son of a police officer, Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr. had planned to become a teacher after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from California State University, Los Angeles.
The prolific author, who initially planned to be an English teacher, had been with the Los Angeles Police Department 11 years and reached the rank of sergeant when he published his first novel, “The New Centurions,” in 1971.
