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...

Advance Le Carre, Wambaugh Praise Of First Novel Revealed as Fake Two days after announcing a hefty advance payment of over $900,000 for a first novel supposedly endorsed by bestselling authors John le Carre and Joseph Wambaugh, officials at Simon & Schuster and...

Police work provides a skewed -- if not positively warped -- outlook on the human pageant. A cop assessing civic life on the basis of professional experience is rather like a doctor assessing the physical health of society on the basis of an...

Jimmy Lee Smith, the lifelong criminal whose role in the 1963 kidnapping and killing of a police officer inspired Joseph Wambaugh's true-life crime novel "The Onion Field," has died in jail at age 76, a state prisons official said.Smith died Friday at the Pitchess Detention...

Today is Sunday, Jan. 22, the 22nd day of 2007. There are 343 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Jan. 22, 1917, President Wilson pleaded for an end to war in Europe, calling for "peace without victory." (By April, however, America also was...

[In "Black Marble" Joseph Wambaugh] has created a detective, Andrei Mikhailovich Valnikov, who is almost as touching, variable and bravely idiotic as Nabokov's Professor Pnin…. Valnikov isn't one of Wambaugh's familiar "centurions," "choirboys," or "blue knights." He's the "black marble," the loser, the bad-luck piece. (p. 11)