DETECTIVE SERGEANT JOHN V. "JACK" MULLEN

BADGE 116 & 686, ID 1665

SDPD 07/07/1961 - 05/19/1979

07/07/1934 - 04/04/2026

Retired detective sergeant John Vincent “Jack” Mullen died April 4, 2026, at his home in Laguna Woods, California. He was 91.

Jack was best known for his years as a San Diego Police Department homicide

sergeant, during which he won the respect and admiration of fellow officers, of

prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, and for his post-retirement career as a novelist. He was most proud of his police department service, and his years in the U.S. Marine Corps, including 17 months in Korea.

After a medical retirement in 1979, Jack was in charge of hotel and hospital security, and worked as an investigator for the late attorney Milton Silverman. He moved from San Diego to Bandon, Oregon, where he resided for several years before moving to Orange County.

In Bandon, Jack began his novel writing career, ultimately authoring three police-related novels, two of them classed as “police procedurals” and one as an “epistolary” novel – a series of letters written home over the years by an SDPD officer, tracing the character’s evolving maturity and reflecting the changing times both in policing and in society as a whole.

Jack was a world-class storyteller. Some of his fireside stories or tales in his novels were based on his police cases – or a personal shenanigan or two, as likely as not to have earned him some time on the beach.

Jack was predeceased by his wife, Lynn, and is survived by their two children,  

Bill Mullen and Jean Niemann. 

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