Created by Joseph Wambaugh
(1937-2025)
Mostly because it’s not that great.
Whereas his previous books tended toward gritty, just-the-facts, ma’am non-fiction and gritty, two-fisted fiction set in the nasty little corners of police life, Fugitive Nights is a relatively light-hearted little romp set in sunny, swanky Palm Springs, the desert playground for the rich and bored.
Classy, forty-something lady cop BREDA BURROWS, recently retired from the LAPD after putting in her twenty, has decided to set up a P.I. shop, “Discreet Inquiries,” in Palm Springs. But a pretty routine domestic case takes a weird hop and she decides she needs a little back-up..
She calls in LYNN CUTTER, a Palm Springs cop currently on leave, biding time waiting for his disability pension to kick in, figuring he wouldn’t say “No” to a few bucks under the table. But then the fun starts. Breda may be a little flaky at times, tooling around town on her $2500 racing bike desperate to keep in shape (she has a college-age daughter), but she’s also one tough cookie, a level-headed, no-nonsense businessperson,
Lynn, on the other hand, is a cynical, out-of-shape boozer with bad knees and two ex-wives. He hangs out at a local dive, “The Furnace Room”, with a lot of has-beens and never-weres. He doesn’t even have a place to live. He’s been housesitting for various acquaintances lately, but he’s running out of places to crash.
Needless to say, Lynn and Breda tend to be a rather uneasy mixture. Complicating the matter is the fact that there may be a little mutual attraction going on, and that the routine domestic case turns out to be a rather loopy affair involving a mysterious sperm sample, a couple of bored rich folks, an over-eager cop called Dirty Hareem, the Bob Hope Celebrity Golf Tournament, a suspicious fugitive who may be a middle-eastern terrorist and… Sonny Bono.
As I said, it’s not great or essential Wambaugh — not by a long shot. Still, as fluff goes, it’s an affable enough a shaggy dog tale, a little cringey at times, but mildly amusing.
It was also made into a so-so made-for-television movie,Fugitive Nights: Danger In The Desert. The subtitle added nothing, although Teri Garr and Sam Elliot were relatively well-cast as Breda and Lynn and, as these things go, it was relatively faithful to the book. Then again, Wambaugh wrote the teleplay, and executive produced the whole thing.
It’s still fluff.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Wambaugh, forever known as the cop-turned-author, was a LAPD patrolman and detective for years before ever setting pen to paper, but went on to become the bestselling and acclaimed author of numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, including The Choirboys, The Onion Field, The Glitter Dome, The New Centurions, The Blooding. His new-found celebrity, however, soon clashed with his career in law enforcement, and the story goes that when his longtime detective partner held their squad car door open for him one day in 1974, he knew it was time to go. Later in his career, the Hollywood Station series of five novels took on the consent decree, that allowed federal officials to monitor and oversee reforms, after the Rampart Scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when dozens of L.A.P.D. officers were implicated in the so-called Rampart Scandal, suspected and in many cases convicted of the planting of false evidence, drug deals, unprovoked shootings, beatings and homicide, and the resulting cover-up .
In his review of The Glitter Dome (1981), Ed McBain, the author of the 87th Precinct police procedural series, wrote in a New York Times review “Let us forever dispel the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books… This would be tantamount to saying that Jack London was first and foremost a sailor. Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality, who has chosen to write about the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.”
THE EVIDENCE
- “Well, if I could dance, I’d try ballet but crime and crooks are all I know.”
— Breda, after being asked why she decided to become a P.I.
UNDER OATH
- “While poking fun at the Palm Springs lifestyle, Wambaugh offers plenty of his trademark cop humor, including a funny but essentially irrelevant prologue skewering President Bush and Sonny Bono. But in this case, the whole equals less than the sum of its parts.”
— Publishers Weekly - “This is at heart a comic novel (though not as antic as a Donald Westlake) that depends mostly on vulgar police humor for its laughs… The thuggish jokery does not endear. Wambaugh cannot write a total wipeout but this is not among his strongest or more durable works.”
— Kirkus Reviews - “Teri Garr is good-looking enough, and about the right age to portray any one of the many female PI’s that have cropped up in recent years, and Sam Elliott has become scruffy enough to become her assistant while he’s waiting for his disability retirement to come through. If this is a pilot for a TV series, though, I think they’d better start hunting up some stories, since in this whole two-hour introductory affair, there’s only about 15 minutes worth of plot. Lots of byplay between the characters can fill up big chunks of time, that’s for sure, but it left me hungry for some meatier fair in nothing flat… Opinion: forget it.”
— Steve Lewis (Mystery*File) on the film
NOVELS
- Fugitive Nights (1992) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
TELEVISION
- FUGITIVE NIGHTS: DANGER IN THE DESERT
(1993, NBC)
2-hour made-for-television movie
Originally aired November 19, 1993
Teleplay by Joseph Wambaugh, based on his novel
Directed by Gary Nelson
Executive Producers: Vahan Moosekian and Joseph Wambaugh
A TriStar Television Production
Starring Teri Garr as BREDA BURROWS
and Sam Elliot as LYNN CUTTER
Also starring Thomas Haden Church, Raymond J. Barry, Barbara Babcock, Geno Silva, Juan Fernandez, Warren Frost, Tony Jay, Sharon Bark, Danny Goldman, T.J. Castronovo, Larry Coven,David Keith Miller, Mark Pfau, Larry Sellers, D. Elliot Woods
Cameo by Sonny Bono
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
