Joseph Wambaugh: The Blue Knight

© 1972

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.

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 corruption-the premature cynicism and tarnished nobility of the cop who has looked too often and too long into humanity’s dark abyss.

Wambaugh used the crime novel and the lives of his character cops as the lens with which he examined society. Within the ranks of his police officers he explored the great socio-economic divide of our cities, racism, alcoholism and many other facets of the rapidly changing world. He used cops to make sense of the chaos. And he did it by simply telling their stories. The episodic narrative of this book and those that followed became his signature. And along the way he gave us looks into the lives of characters like Serge Duran, Roy Fehler and Bumper Morgan, full blooded and flawed, and placed them on the sunswept streets of Los Angeles. His first two books, The New Centurions and The Blue Knight, are perfect bookends that offer the full scope of police life and Wambaugh’s power. The former traced three officers through the police academy and their early years on the job. The latter traced a veteran officer’s last three days on the job. No one had ever read books like these before. They were the mark of a true innovator.

It is important to note that Wambaugh wrote his first books while still on the job. The detective sergeant did the real work by day while pounding out the made up stuff at night on a portable Royal typewriter. His family had to sleep through the clatter. The results were uncontested as some of the most vivid police prose ever put on paper. Wambaugh opened up a world to the reader, a world no one outside of those who did the real work had ever seen before. Cop novelist Evan Hunter called it right on the money in the New York Times when he said, “Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit, and originality who has chosen to write about police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.”

A hundred years ago the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned us that whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself. He reminded us that when we stare into the abyss that the abyss stares right back into us. So then these are the poles that hold up the Wambaugh tent. These are the battle lines that every cop faces and Wambaugh so intimately delineates in this book and others. He writes about how cops shield themselves, medicate themselves and distract themselves from the view of the abyss. Think of it in terms of a physics lesson. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So then if you go into darkness then darkness goes into you. The question is how much darkness has gotten inside and what can be done about it. How can you pull yourself back from the edge of the abyss. In this book, and all of his books, Joseph Wambaugh tells us the answers.

– Michael Connelly

THE WHEEL HUMMED and Rollo mumbled Yiddish curses as he put rouge on the glistening bronze surface.

“There ain’t a single blemish on this badge,” he said.

“Sure there is, Rollo,” I said. “Look closer. Between the s in Los and the big A in Angeles . I scratched it on the door of my locker.”

“There ain’t a single blemish on this badge,” said Rollo, but he buffed, and in spite of his bitching I watched bronze change to gold, and chrome become silver. The blue enameled letters which said “Policeman,” and “4207,” jumped out at me.

“Okay, so now are you happy?” he sighed, leaning across the display case, handing me the badge.

“It’s not too bad,” I said, enjoying the heft of the heavy oval shield, polished to a luster that would reflect sunlight like a mirror.

“Business ain’t bad enough, I got to humor a crazy old cop like you.” Rollo scratched his scalp, and the hair, white and stiff, stood like ruffled chicken feathers.

“What’s the matter, you old gonif, afraid some of your burglar friends will see a bluesuit in here and take their hot jewelry to some other crook?”

“Ho, ho! Bob Hope should watch out. When you get through sponging off the taxpayers you’ll go after his job.”

“Well, I’ve gotta go crush some crime. What do I owe you for the lousy badge polishing?”

“Don’t make me laugh, I got a kidney infection. You been free-loading for twenty years, now all of a sudden you want to pay?”

“See you later, Rollo. I’m going over to Seymour’s for breakfast. He appreciates me.”

“Seymour too? I know Jews got to suffer in this world, but not all of us in one day.”

“Good-bye, old shoe.”

“Be careful, Bumper.”

I strolled outside into the burning smog that hung over Main Street. I started to sweat as I stopped to admire Rollo’s work. Most of the ridges had been rounded off long ago, and twenty years of rubbing gave it unbelievable brilliance. Turning the face of the shield to the white sun, I watched the gold and silver take the light. I pinned the badge to my shirt and looked at my reflection in the blue plastic that Rollo has over his front windows. The plastic was rippled and bubbled and my distorted reflection made me a freak. I looked at myself straight on, but still my stomach hung low and made me look like a blue kangaroo, and my ass was two nightsticks wide. My jowls hung to my chest in that awful reflection and my big rosy face and pink nose were a deep veiny blue like the color of my uniform which somehow didn’t change colors in the reflection. It was ugly, but what made me keep looking was the shield. The four-inch oval on my chest glittered and twinkled so that after a second or two I couldn’t even see the blue man behind it. I just stood there staring at that shield for maybe a full minute.

Seymour’s delicatessen is only a half block from Rollo’s jewelry store, but I decided to drive. My black-and-white was parked out front in Rollo’s no parking zone because this downtown traffic is so miserable. If it weren’t for those red curbs there’d be no place to park even a police car. I opened the white door and sat down carefully, the sunlight blasting through the windshield making the seat cushion hurt. I’d been driving the same black-and-white for six months and had worked a nice comfortable dip in the seat, so I rode cozy, like in a worn friendly saddle. It’s really not too hard to loosen up seat springs with two hundred and seventy-five pounds.