Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2006 by Joseph Wambaugh

Excerpt from Hollywood Crows copyright 2008 by Joseph Wambaugh

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company

First eBook Edition: April 2008

ISBN: 978-0-446-53637-0

THE BLUE KNIGHT

A bang-up job... Wambaugh has captured the excitement, terror, pity, and occasional tedium of police work.

Boston Globe

Hard-hitting, tough-talking, utterly realistic.

Publishers Weekly

Beyond the adventure, beyond the revelation of daily life, there is another kind of suspense; the gradual and surprising tale of a human being emerging from a stereotype.

Los Angeles Times Calendar

THE NEW CENTURIONS

Unsparing and powerful!

Los Angeles Times

A smashing story... informative, gripping, poignant.

Boston Globe

As explosive as a gunfight!

National Review

Do you like cops? Read The New Centurions. Do you hate cops? Read The New Centurions... This novel performs one of the essential and enduring functions the noveland the novel alonecan perform. It takes us into the hearts and minds, into the nerves, and into the guts of other beings.

New York Times Book Review

Wambaughs great and enviable accomplishment is that he has made his police come alive as human beings.

Los Angeles Times

A rattling good narrative of life on a big city police force, the gutsy chronicle of how a cop is made.

Boston Globe

Wambaugh puts the readers down there on the firing line with the copsgiving it to them like it really is with his stomach-twisting, fascinating novel.

Associated Press

Youll never forget it!

Pittsburgh Press

HOLLYWOOD STATION

Exhilarating... blisteringly funny... colorful... a pleasure... It has all the authority, outrage, compassion, and humor of the great early novels.

New York Tlmes Book Review

Astonishing, wildly funny, poignant, and horrifying... hands down the best crime fiction Ive read this year.

Boston Globe

Highly entertaining... outrageous and hilarious... all of Wambaughs trademark jet-black humor is intact.

Washington Post Book World

Cops just want to have fun! As you turn the pages of Wambaughs newest offering on the subject of the foibles and ferocities of the LAPD, you are going to have quite a good time yourself.

San Francisco Chronicle

Sharp characterization, fine plotting, and irreverent humor that mark Joseph Wambaughs best work.

Dallas Morning News

Hollywood Station is Mr. Wambaughs comeback novel, and it is more than impressive; it is memorable, a flawless ride through the streets of L.A. with a crew of cops as colorful as the bad guys they pursue... if this dark, funny, poignant, and realistic stunner of a novel doesnt get an Edgar nomination, we will be witnesses to the crime of the year.

Otto Penzler, New York Sun

Offers all the characteristic Wambaugh magic: unlikable and conflicted characters we grow to love; a perfect mix of good guys and bad; and small vignettes that tie together seamlessly by the end.

Atlantic Monthly

Even after a ten-year break, Wambaugh can still write an enlightening and entertaining novel.

Philadelphia Inquirer

A deeply felt paean to those who protect and serve that also proves that theres one veteran of the LAPD crime scene who can still run with the best of them.

Los Angeles Times

The freedom to imagine allows a writer to create truer pictures than do portraits of real people and factual eventsat least when the writer is a wise and masterful storyteller like Joseph Wambaugh.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Shows Wambaugh in perfect form.

Seattle Times

[Wambaughs] is the rare police procedural less fixated on the central crime or the criminals... than on, well, police procedure: the day-to-day lives of cops.

Entertainment Weekly

Required reading... Its clear that the author of The Onion Field has lost none of his talent for keen observation.

New York Post

[Wambaughs] voice is subtler; more ironic than it used to be. Enough art has been added to the mixture (magically, without taking away any of the savage humor) to justify the major awards that have been fired at Wambaughs head recently by his Mystery Writers of America peers.

Chicago Tribune

Reading Wambaughs latest may not be the most fun youve ever had, but it will come close.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

An excellent ear for dialogue and a telling eye for detail... Hollywood Station continues the award-winning authors longtime exploration of the Los Angeles Police Department... a master at work in the milieu he knows better than almost anyone else.

Baltimore Sun

A triumphant return... high-voltage suspense drives the tale, and as always Wambaughs characters, language, and war stories exude authenticity... Terrific.

Booklist (starred review)

FICTION

The New Centurions

The Blue Knight

The Choirboys

The Black Marble

The Glitter Dome

The Delta Star

The Secrets of Harry Bright

The Golden Orange

Fugitive Nights

Finnegans Week

Floaters

Hollywood Station

NONFICTION

The Onion Field

Lines and Shadows

Echoes in the Darkness

The Blooding

Fire Lover

To my parents

And to

Upton Birnie Brady

I often remember the rookie days and those who had discovered the allure of the beat. Then I thought them just peculiar old men. Now I wish they were all still here and that they might approve of this book.

WHOEVER FIGHTS MONSTERS
AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH WAMBAUGH

THERE IS A BEDROCK TRUTH that resides in the heart of this book. And that is that the best crime stories are not about how cops work on cases. They are about how cases work on cops. They are not about how the cops work the streets. They are about how the streets work the cops. Procedure is window dressing. Character is king.

This is a truth we learn when we read the work of Joseph Wambaugh. No assessment of this novel or the other work of this policeman turned writer can conclude that he is anything other than one of the great innovators of the crime novel. Wambaugh brought the truth with him when he left the police department for the publishing house.

A century after its first inception the crime novel had moved from the hands of Edgar Allan Poe to the practitioners of the private eye novel. More often than not, these tomes told the story of the loner detective who works outside of the system he distrusts and even despises, who must overcome obstacles that often happen to be the corrupted police themselves. It fell to Wambaugh, with his stark and gritty realism, to take the story inside the system to the police station and the patrol car where it truly belonged. To tell the stories of the men who did the real work and risked their lives and their sanity to do it. And to explore a different kind of corruptionthe premature cynicism and tarnished nobility of the cop who has looked too often and too long into humanitys dark abyss.