History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 6/10

• Plot: In a stifling summer, someone starts shooting detectives from the 87th Precinct, and the squad has to work its own dead.
• Clues: Plausible and procedural, from ballistics to door-knocking, but short on genuine surprise.
• Reveal: The motive is smaller and more personal than the title suggests. That is partly the point and partly a letdown.

Evan Hunter, already known for The Blackboard Jungle, wrote Cop Hater as Ed McBain, as a paperback original. Its importance is hard to exaggerate. It introduced the 87th Precinct of Isola, a fictional city closely modelled on New York, and a squad that would carry more than fifty novels.

The case is simple. Someone is shooting detectives with a .45, and each killing sends the squad back into the streets in a heat wave. Steve Carella leads the investigation. His girlfriend Teddy Franklin, who is deaf and does not speak, is the book’s warmest presence.

What was new was the texture. McBain printed lab reports, fingerprint records and police forms on the page. He showed interrogations, informants and routine checks as tedious work, not flashes of genius. The city, with its weather, slums and shifting neighbourhoods, is treated as a character. Television procedurals and Scandinavian crime series alike owe something to this template.

As a novel, though, Cop Hater is an early sketch of what the series became. Several detectives are thin. Dialogue lurches between hardboiled banter and earnest speeches about policing. A newspaperman’s subplot feels like padding, and the late threat to Teddy depends on a convenient chain of events.

The 6 is for the book, not the legacy. For the 87th Precinct at full strength, go to later entries such as Lady, Lady, I Did It! or Ice. But anyone curious about how the police procedural took its modern shape should read this first.