The New Centurions (novel)
1st edition cover
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| Author | Joseph Wambaugh |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Detective novel |
| Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
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Publication date
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January 30, 1971 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 384 pp |
| ISBN | |
The New Centurions, written by Joseph Wambaugh, is a 1971 novel depicting the stresses of police work in Los Angeles, California in the early 1960s. The author wrote the novel, his first, while a working member of the Los Angeles Police Department. The novel became a film starring George C. Scott and Stacy Keach.
The novel is basically without plot, instead episodically depicting the psychological changes in three LAPD officers caused by the stresses of police work, and particularly police work in minority communities of Los Angeles. The three officers—Serge Duran, Gus Plebesly, and Roy Fehler—are classmates at the police academy in the summer of 1960, and the novel examines their lives each August of succeeding years, culminating in their on-the-job reunion during the Watts riots of August 1965.
The New Centurions is likely the most autobiographical of Wambaugh's novels and is a straightforward narration of events with little use of flashback. Each chapter is written third-person from the point of view of one of the three protagonists, who realistically have no contact with each other once they graduate from the academy but whose paths are at once both parallel and converging. Like Wambaugh, his protagonists move from a few years of uniformed patrol in minority districts to plain clothes assignments in juvenile and vice work, experiences which so impacted Wambaugh that they appear repeatedly in all his fiction.
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