A former detective sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, Joseph Wambaugh is the author of five best-selling novels about cops. Wambaugh's first three books, written while he was a policeman, are serious, straightforward, and realistic accounts of police work; the third is a nonfiction novel modeled on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965). Wambaugh's last two books, written after his retirement from the LAPD, continue to portray police work realistically, but Wambaugh brings to these books a dark and comic vision. Each of Wambaugh's novels portrays not only the action of police work, but also the psychological toll such work takes on policemen.

Wambaugh was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the only child in an Irish Catholic family; his father was a small-town police chief and, later, a steelworker. The family moved to California in 1951, when Wambaugh was fourteen; and three years later he joined the U.S...