The New Centurions
Joseph Wambaugh
 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 Riot 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. The significance of this structure is that while Wambaugh began his career writing entirely about police officers, he experimented with method until in his fourth book, The Choirboys, he "found his voice," using satirical black humor in a style he openly attributed to the influence of Joseph Heller but which is entirely absent in The New Centurions, The Blue Knight (first-person fiction), and The Onion Field (non-fiction in a novelistic style). Many of the characters of The New Centurions are the first appearances of police officer character types repeatedly found in Wambaugh's LAPD novels. The atavistic beat officers Andy Kilvinsky and Whitey Duncan can be seen again in Bumper Morgan (The Blue Knight), Spermwhale Whalen (The Choirboys), and Rumpled Ronald (The Delta Star). Serge Duran is Detective Sergeant Mario Villalobos (The Delta Star) as a rookie, and Gus Plebesley working Wilshire Vice is indistinguishable from Harold Bloomguard (The Choirboys) working Wilshire Vice. Roy Fehler has much in common with Baxter Slate (The Choirboys), Sgt. A.M. Valnikov (The Black Marble), and Sgt. Al Mackey (The Glitter Dome). A character type not portrayed in The New Centurions is the brutal street cop. Known in the LAPD vernacular as a "black-glove cop" and epitomized by Roscoe Rules in The Choirboys and The Bad Czech of The Delta Star, Wambaugh only hints at the type in several vignettes. Wambaugh's apparent reluctance to portray police brutality in his first work is balanced however by his frankness in depicting adultery, alcoholism, racism and suicide as rampant in the ranks of the LAPD. Police officer suicide in particular is a theme Wambaugh explores in nearly all of his books. A major theme explored throughout the book is what traits characterize a veteran officer, and how a rookie acquires them. Wambaugh consistently compares the attitudes of the new officers (one is not considered a veteran in the LAPD until one's fifth anniversary on the job) to those of the older entrenched men.