Word: wambaugh
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...Onion Field, Wambaugh...
...Tony Musante as Toma (ABC), a narc whose specialty is disguises. The latter style was best exemplified by last week's The Blue Knight (NBC), a four-hour special strung out over four consecutive evenings. Based on the novel by the Los Angeles policeman and bestselling author, Joseph Wambaugh, it gave William Holden a solid TV dramatic debut as a patrolman who has been on the same beat for 20 years and decides to bail...
...Detective Sergeant Joe Wambaugh revealed in two bestselling novels, The New Centurions and The Blue Knight, the life of a Los Angeles police officer is tough. Now it is even tougher for Wambaugh, the celebrity cop. Prisoners keep asking for his autograph. The guys at the precinct are forever drilling him about which character in what book is actually who in real life. That is perhaps one reason why Wambaugh this time chose a "factual novel"−real names and all−in the manner of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood...
Hettinger's decline, Wambaugh suggests, parallels the erosion of justice in a case that dragged through the courts for more than seven years after the killers were finally caught. Mowed by technicalities and changes in the laws of admissible evidence, their trial amassed 45,000 pages of transcript, the longest in California court history. Wambaugh's narrative tends to plod whenever he plays the tireless gumshoe, hauling in facts that are, in the clarion cry of the myriad lawyers on the case, irrelevant and immaterial...
Detective Wambaugh is thorough. But he leaves, in fact, few clues as to his prime motive for re-creating what he calls "the most maddening case of any detective's life." One clue is buried midway in the book when Wambaugh tells of a certain "young vice officer" who strongly opposes the department's do-or-die dictum on survival as suicidal. However, that anonymous cop, who undoubtedly is Wambaugh, refuses to challenge his superiors at the time because "he lacked that kind of courage and he knew it." Now, with the courage of a rich...