The Choirboys (ISBN 0-440-11188-9), a novel, is a controversial 1975 work of fiction written by Los Angeles Police Department officer-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh.

A group of ten patrol officers on the nightwatch conducts end-of-shift get-togethers they euphemistically call "choir practices" (possibly to hide their true nature from superiors but actually a sardonic reference).

These "choir practices" almost always involve heavy drinking, complaints about their superior officers, and war stories (and, occasionally, group sex with a pair of lusty, overweight barmaids).

Each of the officers is disillusioned, to varying degrees, that many of the people they're paid to protect are not unlike the suspects they arrest, and that the ridiculous regulations of their department are onerously enforced on them while their commanders (without skills in police work) indulge themselves hypocritically.

The theme of police officer suicide (also known as "eating your gun"), which runs through many of Wambaugh's books, provides a grim undercurrent to the black humor of the novel and suggests a sub-conscious motivation for their activities.

With The Choirboys he "found his voice," and thereafter his novels were stylistic lampoons of not only the Los Angeles police world but the Hollywood lifestyle, and often filled with black comedy.

The Choirboys is also significant in that Wambaugh turned to the bizarre anecdotes of others (which he terms "cop talk") to provide the grist for his writing after previously drawing from his own experience.

However, unlike Roscoe Rules, he isn't "an insufferable prick," although he has the same contempt for most "civilians, police brass and station supervisors, and all members of the Civil Service Department."

Baxter Slate, almost 27, is a handsome cynic with a baccalaureate in classical literature, which he considers worthless; can tell dirty jokes in Latin; and amuses himself by confounding Roscoe Rules with his advanced vocabulary.

Outwardly, Slate appears to be the most stable of the officers, but he is tormented by inner demons, particularly emotional scars from working child abuse cases, and is driven to suicide because of his shame in inadvertently being caught by Sam Niles in a humiliating encounter with a dominatrix.

Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard, both 26, are, like many police officers of the era, Vietnam veterans, former Marines who were trapped together in a North Vietnamese Army cave during their tour.

At 40, Spencer Van Moot is the second-oldest of the Choirboys and their "great provider", taking the fullest advantage of free meals, cigarettes, and other gratuities offered to uniformed officers by businesses within the division's jurisdiction.

His guilt-driven, drunken sermons over the evils of drink and marital infidelity, despite the fact that he frequently engaged in both, earned him the moniker "Father" Willie Wright.

Francis Tanaguchi, 25, is a third-generation Japanese-American who was raised in the barrios of Los Angeles, and "unquestionably, the biggest pain in the ass on the nightwatch at Wilshire Station".

In 1977, The Choirboys was adapted into a film starring Charles Durning, Perry King, James Woods, Louis Gossett Jr. and Randy Quaid.