Like a tightly wound watch ( )

Gritty, lean, and at times surprisingly romantic, the first entry in the 87th Precinct series remains one of the best. Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle and screenwriter for Hitchcock’s, The Birds, is better known today as Ed McBain because of the 87th Precinct series. He wrote Cop Hater in 1955 in hopes of filling a void being created at Pocket Books by the slightly diminishing output of the prolific Erle Stanley Gardner. The 87th Precinct novels not only filled that void, they broke new ground, creating the first and finest of all police procedurals.

It seems old-hat today, tagging along with Carella, Kling, Meyer Meyer, Hawes and the rest of the 87th Precinct cops as they try to solve multiple crimes so they can make it home to their sweethearts or go find one, but when Cop Hater was written, it stood alone as something unique. Elizabeth Linington, writing as Dell Shannon, took a different approach to the police procedural a couple of years later, and they became the King and Queen of police procedurals. Despite McBain's gritty approach and Dell Shannon's more domestic approach, both Ed McBain and Dell Shannon still stand out in the genre many decades later. Reading Cop Hater now, one needs to judge it from the perspective of how groundbreaking it was at the time, and how it influenced everything to come in the much lauded series. When you read it with that context in mind, Cop Hater really shines.

In Cop Hater we are introduced for the first time to Detective Steve Carella, a mainstay of the revolving rotation of cops working out of the 87th Precinct that we would come to know over the next few decades. Carella was in love with the deaf Teddy in this one, and she’ll end up playing a major role as the search for a cop killer turns very deadly and perhaps fatal for some members of the 87th Precinct.

Set in the fictional Isola, which mirrored New York City, Isola is its own character here, McBain giving it a pulse and a heartbeat. When one of their own is slain, the boys of the 87th doggedly pursue every avenue they can to discover who is out there killing cops. The tawdry and seedier aspects of Isola’s underbelly is shown while we follow Carella and the boys as they augment police procedures with hunches and persistence. But two more cops are slain before Carella figures out almost too late, that this particular cop hater is hiding a lot more than a .45.

McBain doesn’t cheat the reader during the fast and involving narrative. We see everything the cops do, including an intimate scene we read as wrong as one of the cops does. Filled with humor and grit, and more than a bit of tenderness, Cop Hater is one of McBain’s finest, despite some outdated police techniques. Like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series and Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series, McBain always gets right into the story, and in no time you’re in Isola with Carella and the boys. You don’t have to start with Cop Hater to enjoy this series, but you don’t want to miss it either. A real winner. ( )

This first book in the 87th Precinct series is a landmark in the mystery genre. It was the first mystery in which the hero wasn't an individual cop but a whole precinct & it was also the first to be set in a realistic but fictional city. This series paved the way for many other novels and also TV shows such as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and others.

Given that significance, I was a bit generous with my rating. The actual plot was engrossing but I was able to figure out the solution about 3/4 of the way through -- although if I had been reading it in 1956 I might not have! One feature I have not run across before was the images of police forms and documents -- that was cool!

Oh, and this Kindle edition had a hilarious typo, when in the autopsy report of the first victim says "Approximate weight 210 pounds; height 28.9 cm." (my underlining) This makes Michael Reardon about 11 inches tall!!! It is a strange typo too as it couldn't be 289 cm as that would make him over 8 feet tall! Either a humunculus or a giant it would seem - LOL! ( )

4,0 ( )

Hard to explain that this was kinda' fun to read, even though I would consider it somewhat poorly written. ( )