Over my years of reading mysteries, I have often encountered writers who acknowledged their debt to Ed McBain, but somehow I've just never gotten around to going to the source of all that inspiration. I decided to remedy that chasm in my mystery-reading experience this summer, starting with the very first McBain entry in his 87th Precinct series. Cop Hater was first published in 1956 and the series ran all the way up until the year of McBain's death in 2005 with more than fifty entries overall. In the foreword to this re-publication of Cop Hater, McBain says that, when he started, his publisher was looking for someone to be a successor to Erle Stanley Gardner who was nearing the end of his long and productive writing career. It seems that the publisher struck gold when they selected McBain for that role.Among the first things that struck me about reading this book was the similarity between styles of McBain and the Swedish duo Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo who wrote the Martin Beck series that I've been reading this year. The Sjowall/Wahloo series started about ten years after the 87th Precinct one. They were among those writers who acknowledged their debt to McBain. They professed their admiration for his spare and straightforward way of telling his stories and sought to imitate it in their own writing. They succeeded very well.The second thing that hit me in the face in reading the book was the heat. The mythical city of Isola where the story is set is experiencing a terrible heat wave. It is July and all anyone can talk about is how hot it is. This novel was set contemporaneously with its time but now, 58 years later, that makes it a historical novel, taking place before the time of almost universal air conditioning. Sweat is a constant factor in the story. It runs off the characters and down the pages as we read.A third thing that is very arresting (pun intended) about the story is that it takes place before the Miranda decision of the Supreme Court. McBain describes a very different world of interactions between arresting officers and suspects. The suspects are never advised of their constitutional rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer to represent them, and the police have pretty much a free hand in browbeating the people they arrest and trying to get a confession, as well as sometimes actually beating them.The main story here involves the murder of cops - all detectives assigned to the 87th Precinct. The first two detectives that are killed, on two separate nights after they leave work, had been partners, and so the initial suspicion falls on cases that they might have been working on or had worked together. But then a third detective is killed, one who had not actively worked with the other two on anything. This leads that man's partner, Steve Carella, to begin to suspect that the killer of the men - the same gun was used to commit all three murders - was not a "cop hater" at all. Perhaps the motive for the killings has nothing to do with the fact that the men were policemen. This, ultimately, proves to be a very insightful analysis of the situation.As I was reading the book, I couldn't help thinking that, even as later authors paid homage to McBain, he himself was influenced by the old TV show "Dragnet." Indeed, he acknowledges as much in the story. As the detectives review possible suspects, one of those suspects turns out to be in Los Angeles, and a detective in the group comments that they "can leave him to Joe Friday!" This was an interesting reading experience, both for the obvious connections with other authors I have read and am currently reading and for the historical view it supplies on a time that wasn't really so long ago and yet is vastly different in perspective and in its approach to police work. I think it will be fascinating to continue reading the series and see how - and if - that changes over the years. After all, the series went on for another 49 eventful years after Cop Hater and I suspect that it must have evolved with the times in order to stay so popular for all those years.
COP HATER was published in 1956 and is the first in a long running series set in a fictional city resembling New York. At the time, the concept was unique. Rather than focusing on a single detective for his crime series, McBain featured the precinct itself as the main “character.” Through the continuity of the precinct, characters become familiar to the reader, then pass out of sight, or are glimpsed on their way in and out of the station, working on mundane daily cases. In this book, minor characters like rookie patrolman Bert Kling and lab technician Sam Grossman appear briefly only to play larger roles in subsequent books. Bert Kling is the main character in book #2.McBain captures the feel of the '50's. Relentless summer heat and humidity drain the detectives in an era when air-conditioning was confined to movie theaters and the occasional restaurant. He captures the grit of the city with its closely partitioned ethnic neighborhoods of Irish, Black and Puerto Rican poor. Urban decay, the smells of garbage and darkened airless hallways fill out the scene. The banter is crude, macho. The rhythm of the dialog, the blunt staccato exchanges, effectively supports the gritty backdrop. A suspect doesn't pan out. “'He's got an alibi as long as the Texas panhandle'” Detective Bush laments. The story opens with a gunshot murder. What makes this murder different is that the victim is a cop, Mike Reardon. Hank Bush and Steve Carella catch the call, and since Reardon was from their precinct, they conduct an active investigation parallel to the one conducted by the Homicide division. Bush is glum and cynical: “...I don't happen to think of cops as masterminds....All you need to be a detective is a strong pair of legs and a stubborn streak. The legs take you around to all the various dumps you have got to go to, and the stubborn streak keeps you from quitting. You follow each separate trail mechanically, and if you're lucky, one of the trails pays off. If you're not lucky, it doesn't. Period.”Bush and Carella pursue several trails of dubious promise. Several scenarios are proposed. Did Reardon stumble on a crime being committed? Was he targeted due to a personal grudge? Or was this the work of a serial cop killer? The thinnest of evidence — word of someone in the area packing a gun of the same caliber, for example — governs the direction of the investigation. It is an era before “Miranda” and suspects are readily hauled in and pressured even if physical measures are not employed. A break will come from information on the streets, not forensics, and the hit or miss nature of the leads make the detectives particularly suspicious of even the most remote suspect: A vociferous loud-mouth venting against cops, or a resentful collar Reardon might have nailed.Threaded into the crime narrative are glimpses of the personal lives of the detectives. Carella is wooing a woman named Teddy Franklin. Conspicuously, Teddy is deaf, highlighting her vulnerability and Carella's sensitivity. Bush meanwhile reflects on his own wife Alice as he conducts the requisite interview with Reardon's grieving widow.One of the more curious procedures described in the book is “the lineup.” An assortment of cops from the area precincts are required to view everyone placed in holding over the last 24 hours. The goal is not to identify a suspect. It's to familiarize the cops with a cross-section of the “usual suspects.” The reinforcement of a personal encounter will train them to recognize criminal cliques and MO's, a snapshot of street life.Despite its age, this book is still entertaining. I read it mainly for its historical place in crime fiction writing. NOTE:Two reviews of this book are worth looking at. WARNING. The second site contains significant spoilers.http://www.crimefictionlover.com/2013... https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/2015/...
What do You think about Cop Hater (1987)?
Excellent police procedural from 1956, i thought it was a little dated in the early pages but it got better after a while,more impressive.Cop Hater hits all the notes i want from a good police procedural,good dialouge,characters,the usual work tracking witness,interviewing suspects,leads that go nowhere,forensic analyses. I liked it most that it wasnt about just a heroic cop that is smarter than all the others, it was about normal cops,different cops. That made it the most realistic police book i have read and even made the ending surprising,shocking.
—Mohammed
My to-read pile is completely out of control these days. So why would I make a special effort to check out the first book of a series that has over 50 (50!) books in the series? It’s all Lawrence Block’s fault. He raved so much in The Crime of Our Lives about Evan Hunter who wrote this 87th precinct series under the McBain pen name that I started feeling guilty about never having read any of them. In fact, as a mystery fan I was ashamed to realize that the only Hunter/McBain I could recall checking out was the Hard Case Crime reprint of The Gutter & the Grave.Plus, I just so happened to have picked a copy of this up at a used book store a few years back, and it’s pretty short so I figured I should give it a shot. It’s got a simple enough premise. During a brutal heat wave in a big city a police detective is shot on his way to work one night, and his partner is gunned down shortly after that. With few clues, the other detectives of the 87th precinct including Steve Carella scramble to track down the killer.It’s easy to see how this would appeal to fans of police procedurals even though it was written back in the 1950s. McBain manages to create some interesting cop characters and puts them through the routines that make readers feel like they’re getting an inside view of how the police work, and that’s a formula that still attracts people today according to CBS’s ratings. It’s a quick story that is deftly told, and I particularly liked the scenes where McBain breaks away from the police work to outline how the heat is making everyone in the city miserable.However, while it’s kinda fun to read about an era of police work that depends on looking at file cards of recently released felons or getting fingerprint results back from the FBI via special delivery, it obviously feels dated, and the story doesn’t do anything particularly tricky. I had figured out who was responsible for the murders very early on, and even the supposedly jaded cops seem kind of naïve to a reader in 2015.So it was worth checking out for the respected place McBain holds in crime fiction, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to read the rest of the 50-some books.
—Kemper
Originally published in 1956, this is the first novel in Ed McBain's long-running 87th Precinct series. It introduces Steve Carella, who would be the most prominent of the detectives that McBain created to populate his mythical precinct; it also introduces the large mythical city where the books are set and which is based loosely on New York City. As the book opens, a plain clothes police detective is shot and killed as he is walking to work. The investigation into the killing has barely begun when two other detectives are killed by bullets fired from the same gun. The obvious conclusion is that someone hates cops and has decided to start killing them off. While the city swelters though a stifling heat wave, Steve Carella and his fellow detectives sort through every scrap of evidence while dealing with other assorted criminals, juvenile delinquents and pain-in-the-ass newspaper reporters. But they're getting nowhere fast until Carella comes up with an alternate theory of his own about the killer's possible motive, and before long, Carella may find himself squarely in the killer's sights.Now over fifty years old, this book is clearly dated and doubtless doesn't pack the same punch that it delivered in the middle 1950s. It's also not as entertaining as many of the books that would follow it. But readers who like classic crime fiction or who would like to go back to see how this venerable series started will certainly enjoy it.
—James Thane
