Joseph Wambaugh -- Information

Well, like I said last night, to my mind the most interesting thing about Wambaugh is that Ellroy was influenced by him. Drop that tidbit the next time your book circle meets to discuss American Tabloid -- maybe you can get an extra brownie or something.

Here's the Wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wambaugh

I actually grew up in Western PA and I have no idea where "East Pittsburgh" is. According to this article Wambaugh's almost seventy years old -- which actually makes him a little older than my Dad, for Pete's sake. It's hard to believe, I think because he's always had such a boyish look. Google his image sometime and you'll see what I mean.

The wiki article is also interesting for pointing up Wambaugh's connections with "Police Story". Like I said, he's really a creature of the Seventies.

A fairly bland summing up from a site devoted to hardboiled fiction:

http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled/Wambaugh.html

Wambaugh isn't a hardboiled writer. I don't care how many Grandmaster awards he gets from the MWA, writing about crime doesn't in itself make you a hb writer. Even writing about sweaty urban crime doesn't do it, by itself. Writers are generally who they think themselves to be, and Wambaugh was clearly aiming for different sorts of stadiums. I rather suspect Joseph Heller, Paddy Chayefsky, and Truman Capote were more influential than Gold Medal paperbacks.

Okayish interview from CNN:

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/13/wambaugh.qanda/

Somebody needs to do a good comprehensive interview with Wambaugh talking about writing, not cops or crooks. There's a real dearth of information out there about what Wambaugh thinks about books and writers. (Wambaugh here singles out The Secrets of Harry Bright -- a'ight, that's on the list too.)

Amusing piece from CrimeTime about how much Wambaugh hated The Choirboys movie:

http://www.crimetime.co.uk/features/josephwambaugh.php

Probably he'd have been better off not to have done the screenplay.

That seems to be mostly it -- there's a couple of promotional interviews for a book I never read, and if you're interested in the case there's discussions of Echoes in the Darkness and whether Wambaugh got it wrong or messed about with justice -- the usual occupational hazards of the true crime writer. I have read Echoes, and it suffers from Wambaugh generally not liking anybody in the story but the cops. I agree with an Amazon reviewer: Wambaugh is generally just interested in cops. The reason The Onion Field worked so well is because the crime happened to cops.