Cop Hater – Ed McBain, 1956 ★★★

City on the Edge of Forever

Police detectives had been crime-fiction heroes for decades, but in 1955 young writer Evan Hunter got an idea: Instead of one guy, build a story around an entire squadroom of detectives. Thus began a 49-year series of books, the 87^th Precinct novels. Cop Hater came first.

Being first can make something harder to judge on its own merits. As a seasoned 87^th reader, I can’t help but register the comfortable click of a familiar formula, a tone, and characters. But how does Cop Hater stand up as a book?

We open on a police detective gazing down at his sleeping wife before exiting his apartment for the midnight shift. He winds up shot to death just three blocks away from the 87^th Precinct station house where he works. The dead man’s colleagues investigate motive. Gang hit? Vengeful ex-con? When other detectives at the 87^th are also targeted, a more dangerous possibility emerges: Cop killer.

“If you read the newspapers, and you start believing them, you’ll know that cops hate cop killers,” the detectives’ commander, Lieutenant Byrnes, tells his men. “The newspapers are full of crap if they think any revenge motive is attached. We can’t let a cop be killed because a cop is a symbol of law and order. If you take away the symbol, you get animals in the streets. We’ve got enough animals in the streets now.”

That pep talk sets the tone for the book; perhaps for the series, too. Bad people are out there. It’s up to us to protect the city from them. Don’t expect any thank-yous. Don’t even count on getting back home alive.

Cop Hater is pure police procedural. We see lab reports, hear witness testimony, follow a pair of detectives over the course of several pages tying up an insignificant loose end. McBain explains in detail the science of blood-typing and what chemical compounds cause fingerprints. He counts the risers on the stationhouse stairwell.

This might not have been so different from other police procedurals, notably the “Dragnet” radio series that had made the leap to television five years before Cop Hater was published. Like other writers of police procedurals, McBain took pride in his research. Cop Hater immerses you in investigatory and departmental detail.

Evan Hunter, a. k. a. Ed McBain, early in his career. In a new introduction to a 1989 edition of Cop Hater, he noted his using a pseudonym was due to a misapprehension crime novels "weren't serious enough. I now know they are very serious indeed." Image from https://www.mysteryscenemag.com/.

At the same time, Cop Hater’s hard tone and streetwise sensibilities were quite removed from Jack Webb’s stolid “Dragnet” series. McBain’s past lay in the world of pulp fiction, not to mention what remains the most famous of all Evan Hunter novels, 1954’s The Blackboard Jungle. From its first page, Cop Hater was a different kind of cop story:

From the river bounding the city on the north, you saw only the magnificent skyline. You stared up at it in something like awe, and sometimes you caught your breath because the view was one of majestic splendor...

Sounds nice, no? Like Whitman, perhaps. Then he continues:

The city lay like a sparkling nest of rare gems, shimmering in layer upon layer of pulsating intensity.

The buildings were a stage set.

They faced the river, and they glowed with manmade brilliance, and you stared up at them in awe, and you caught your breath.

Behind the buildings, behind the lights, were the streets.

There was garbage in the streets.

Boom, there it is. The whole 87^th Precinct concept has just been laid out for you, and the author is barely two pages in.

If the rest of Cop Hater doesn’t live up to the promise of that opening, it doesn’t need to. You have this mystery about someone killing detectives, but most of the time McBain is establishing setting and characters. The series is set in Isola, a fictionalized version of New York City. McBain spells out the borders of the 87^th precinct, where the good and bad neighborhoods are, the uneasy peace between the police and youth gangs, and a corner bar in a street dominated by brothels:

A man could hang his hat at Jenny’s, and a man could have a drink there, and a man could pretend that he was on a fraternity outing there, and with the third drink, he was ready to rationalize what he was about to do. Jenny’s was something necessary to the operation of the Street.

The rest of McBain’s attention is spent on individual detectives. We are told early on that the 87^th Precinct has 16 detectives; six get profiled in some detail in Cop Hater. Most notable is Steve Carella, the lead character throughout the run of the series:

He would never get used to staring death in the face. He had been a cop for twelve years now, and he had learned to stomach the sheer, overwhelming physical impact of death – but he would never get used to that other thing about death, the invasion of privacy that came with death, the reduction of pulsating life to a pile of bloody, fleshy rubbish.

Carella has a woman who loves him, Teddy. We learn early on that Teddy is hearing-impaired, making her both deaf and dumb in the parlance of that time. For a book written in 1955, there aren’t too many trigger warnings needed for the culturally sensitive; yet some will cringe at the way McBain plays up Teddy’s reliance on Carella. Still, the time McBain spends on the couple gives Cop Hater some needed heart, and as it turns out, a peg for the main plotline.

In 1958, two years after Cop Hater was published, it was adapted into a movie. One cast member, seen above, was a young Jerry Orbach, who would go on to play a cop in another long-running, highly-successful police procedural, the "Law & Order" television series. In Cop Hater he plays a tough street-gang leader. Image from http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.com/2008/11/cop-hater-1958.html. 

Readers more familiar with later 87^th Precinct fare will find Cop Hater requires a bit of an adjustment. McBain is plenty hard-boiled here, but most of the profanity and frank sex talk was still to come. The kids carry blades and zip guns; their drug of choice is marijuana. Some key members of the 87^th Precinct cast have yet to arrive, e.g. Cotton Hawes, Andy Parker, Meyer Meyer, and Eileen Burke.

The 87^th wasn’t ready for a female detective yet, but did have a black one, not series regular Arthur Brown but another guy, David Foster, who while processing a punk wonders “what it would be like to be stationed in a precinct where carving was something you did to a turkey.”

A couple of homicide detectives we meet near the beginning of the novel may be Monoghan and Monroe – they certainly suggest the same snarky sensibility – but are not named. We do get a first appearance by lab technician Sam Grossman and stool pigeon Danny the Gimp, who downplays one murder suspect Carella is investigating: “But this guy ain’t a killer, take it from me. He don’t even know how to kill time.”

While Carella gets most of the attention, the detective who makes the strongest impression is his partner in this novel, Hank Bush. A sour sort with an unhappy life, Bush is prone to venting his spleen at the more mild-mannered Carella about how much he hates his job:

“Look, this detective thing is a bunch of crap, and you know it as well as I do. 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 to go to, and the stubborn streak keeps you from quitting.”

Carella may be more representative of the series’ future direction, but Bush’s attitude permeates Cop Hater as it would the series going forward. Throughout the novel, you get these cleverly cynical descriptive touches about everything from the walls of a tenement sweating off the exhalations of residents to the oppressive summer heat that dominates the novel and makes tempers short. An apartment door has a plaque reading “IN GOD WE TRUST,” and behind it, quite probably, a floor-mounted police lock fastened tight.

Or take this exchange between a suspect at a police lineup and a chief of detectives:

“We’re trying to find out what possessed you to do a damn fool thing like shooting at light fixtures.”

“I was high. What the hell, you never been high?”

“I don’t go shooting at lampposts when I’m high,” the Chief said.

“Well I do. That’s what makes horse races.”

A funny thing about Cop Hater: It’s more enjoyable reading material like that than it is following the main plot. The police killings are laid out in an almost perfunctory way, come together somewhat haphazardly, and don’t quite make sense when finally explained.

McBain also throws in some clunky subplots. The worst of these involves a tabloid journalist who causes problems by asking too many questions. The character feels shoehorned in to give McBain a different sort of antagonist for his characters to play off of, and while he earns their hostility, he never comes across as believable.

But so much of the background McBain builds here is good enough to appreciate on its own. And McBain manages to give his main story a wow finish in what became the 87^th’s signature white-knuckle style, a beautiful set-up leading to a smart payoff.

The true test of Cop Hater’s worth was that it left readers with an appetite for more. How much more? Over 50 more books for starters, and a slew of movies and television adaptations. Many books are better than this; but hardly any as fertile.

A shameless plug...

Want to follow the 87th Precinct series in order? Check out this team of highly-motivated British readers doing just that – and podcasting observations about each book. “Hark! The 87^th Precinct Podcast” employs humor and a deep-dish approach to detail that McBain fans are sure to enjoy. I know I do!