by Ed McBain
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Product Description
THE HEROES OF THE CITY'S STREETS BECOME THE HUNTED -- IN THIS CRIME FICTION CLASSICED MCBAIN'S FIRST 87th PRECINCT NOVEL Swift, silent, and deadly -- someone is knocking off the 87th Precinct's finest, one by one. The how of the killings is obvious: three .45 shots from the dark add up to one, two, three very dead detectives. The why and the who are the Precinct's headaches now. When Detective Reardon is found dead, motive is a big question mark. But when his partner becomes victim number two, it looks like open-and-shut grudge killings. That is, until a third detective buys it. With one meager clue, Detective Steve Carella begins his grim search for the killer, a search that takes him into the city's underworld to a notorious brothel, to the apartment of a beautiful and dangerous widow, and finally to a .45 automatic aimed straight at his head....
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 McBain Saw Something New, 2008-10-04
Visionaries are those people who look at nothing and see something. They are inventors of things, pioneers of the possible. Our history is teeming with visionaries: larger-than-life figures who stepped onto the stage and made a difference. You might even argue that they knew that they would be remembered. Pulp writers are not usually associated with this type of forethought. I don't think Edgar Allan Poe consciously thought he was creating a new genre when he wrote his August Dupin stories. I don't think Mark Twain thought he was creating something new when he wrote Huckleberry Finn. The same holds true for Hammett, Chandler, or any of the other pioneers of crime fiction.
Ed McBain seems to be different. I have a 1989 edition of his first 87th Precinct novel, Cop Hater, and he writes a new introduction. He remembers that in 1956 he looked at the landscape of crime fiction and saw a hole, a blank spot. No author was writing fiction that focused on a group of detectives. The large majority of crime fiction featured single-character series many of whom were PIs. PIs or lawyers are not supposed to investigate a murder, McBain thought, detectives are. Then he got an idea: why not feature a series of books about a group of detectives. One detective would take center stage in one book and another guy who step up in the next book. Thus was born the 87th Precinct, the precursor to Hill Street Blues, Patricia Cornwall, Law and Order, CSI, The Wire, Joseph Wambaugh, and others.
And it all started with Cop Hater. In my review of The Postman Always Rings Twice, I wrote that James Cain, in two pages, sets up the entire novel. Well, it takes McBain only three pages. And it's a wallop. McBain shows Mike Reardon, regular guy, getting up for work, kissing his wife, seeing his kids sleeping, sipping coffee, and slipping quietly out of the house. Next thing you know, half his face has been blown away from a .45. That's not the coup de grace. The last sentence of the chapter is: "Mike Reardon was a cop." If that doesn't wake you up and grab you by the collar, I don't know what does.
With the murder of one of their own, the detectives--or "bulls" as they are known by the criminal element--attack the case with the gumption of a cop. Steve Carella and Hank Bush emerge as this story's lead characters. And they do their cop thing. Anyone who has read the books or watched any of the `real' cop shows on TV know what I'm talking about. Carella and Bush talk to bar owners, youth gangs, snitches, a woman who thinks alien cockroaches are invading Earth (seriously). Reardon's murder was bad but it got worse when Reardon's partner was also gunned down. Now, they had something more on their hands. A cop killer, a cop hater, and each man on the squad--and their loved ones--started wondering if they'd be next.
The prose style of this book is unlike anything I've read to date in my exploration of crime fiction. It's quick, terse even, a direct contrast to the plodding nature of the 87th's investigation. In certain interrogation scenes, there are two, three pages of mere dialogue. No prose except the occasional attribution just to help the reader. These scenes clipped along, rapid fire, just like guys in the old movies. It's not unlike Erle Stanley Gardner's use of continuous paragraphs by the same speaker without any prose to get in the way. It works well.
One thing that did not work well was the narrator. Ed McBain, as most everyone knows, is a pen name for a, what, pen name? The man who was born Salvatore Albert Lombino had, by 1952, officially changed his real name to one of his pen names, Evan Hunter. Got all that? Anyway, Cop Hater has a narrator and he sticks his authorial nose in the middle of the prose often. The narrator needs to but in when talking about procedural stuff that the characters would know by heart. But other times, the narrator literally shows up and comments on the action, like a Greek chorus. For example, after a page and a half description of a bar Carella and Bush are going to in order to ask some questions, McBain writes this: "So what did those two big jerks at the end of the bar want?" It was weird because most of the action and thought stay in the head of whatever character leads off the chapter or section.
And speaking of character, the City is a character. Many folks have commented that Pelecanos's DC, Lehane's Boston, Connelly's LA, or Hunsicker's Dallas are characters in their own books. Yes, they are, but the city of Isola--a fictionalized version of New York--seems to breathe on its own. There were numerous sections where McBain started off a chapter with what Isola was doing or what its citizens were doing. It was the prose equivalent of a wide screen shot. It was almost like McBain was playing tour guide for us in his own town. Regarding the fictionalizing of NYC, with just one book under my belt, I didn't like it. Folks who live in New York can smile knowingly when the characters talk about the river or the docks on the East side because New Yorkers have a frame of reference. I don't. I'm one of those readers who likes his crime fiction to be based in reality. It's what sets the Marvel Comics characters apart from their DC Comics counterparts. Spider-man lived and worked in New York. Batman lived in Gotham which is and isn't New York. Just set the story in NYC and be done with it.
Joy in writing is something you can feel when you read a book. If the author loves what's being written, you're going to know it. Ed McBain certainly has a wonderful way with words, especially his pulp fiction verbs. With a book as short as Cop Hater, every word counts. Here's that elevator in the downtown police headquarters building: "The elevator crawled up the intestinal tract of the building. It creaked. It whined. Its walls were moist with the beaded exhalations of its occupants." With one metaphor, McBain puts more in your brain than a paragraph of description. He does this on almost every page. It's refreshing to have a writer channel his inner thesaurus with good results.
McBain's gift is bringing these characters to life. They are presented as real, honest, living, breathing, humans and all the baggage that entails. Real people talk about random stuff even when they are focused on something else. This kind of randomness shows up in movies like Pulp Fiction or Saving Private Ryan, television shows like The Wire, or books like those of Pelecanos. It's here in Cop Hater. The detectives just talk about stuff, women, booze, the weather, whatever. It makes them more three dimensional. Late in the book, Carella goes in to talk with his lieutenant, a man named Byrnes. The lieutenant is on the phone with his wife. In the hands of another novelist, Byrnes would hang up the phone instantly and get down to business. Not here. He finishes his call--like any regular person--and then the two men commiserate on women. Only after that does Carella relate to Byrnes the update of the case. This kind of realism is superb and makes you like these guys even more.
Even for 1956, McBain took some bold choices. The graphic descriptions of the gunshot victims surprised me. The overlty sexual nature of some of the scenes surprised me, too. But what surprised me most was the choice of Carella's girlfriend. She's deaf and mute. You just don't see that kind of attention paid to folks with disabilities unless the person in question witnessed some crime and the killer now stalked them. The scenes between Carella and Teddy were sweet, not cloying at all. It was two people in love and that love came through, even when, say, Carella had always to look directly at Teddy so she could read his lips. With this being the first of the series, I look forward to seeing how their relationship develops.
Which is to say I will certainly be reading more 87th precinct novels. In the past three weeks, I have examined Perry Mason (80 books), Cool and Lam (29), and the detectives of the 87th precinct (54). I enjoyed these characters and books immensely. I have already applied some of the traits of these accomplished writers into my own fiction. If I read nothing else but these three series, it would take awhile and y'all would become quite bored with my reviews. The thing is, I wouldn't be bored at all. I'd be in crime fiction heaven. [...]
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 This is where the beat begins..., 2007-10-14
I've never been a fan of police procedurals. The majority of them tend to be more concerned with showing off the author's knowledge of obscure investigation technique trivia than telling any kind of cohesive, let alone down to earth, story. With this in mind, the only reason I offer for loving the 87the Precinct series, written by the man who practically invented the genre, is that he writes it better than anyone else. If you're sick and tied of the Law & Order clones, maybe you should take a step back and check out the series that defined the genre and has yet to be surpassed. And if you've never visited McBain's series, then there is no better place to start than the beginning.
Cop Hater is an able and worthy introduction to the world of the 87th Precinct's Homicide Division, walking the beat of its fictional city for over fifty years, right up until the author's death last year. Many book series suffer from weak openings and fluctuations in quality and style that often leave fans recommending later entries as a starting point for new readers. The 87th never felt any such growing pains, and Cop Hater still stands as strong as the 53 that soon followed.
Detective Carella, the anchor of the series, is introduced in this initial outing, along with other long-term cast members including his love interest and future wife Teddy, stoolie Danny the Gimp, Lt. Byrnes, hack journalist Savage, Bert Kling (still a patrolman before earning his detective's badge in The Mugger), angry bull Roger Havilland, and the diminutive but dangerous Hal Willis.
Cop Hater is one of McBain's more direct titles, and covers the plot simply. Someone is killing cops out of the 87th Precinct. A dead cop is always taken seriously by other cops, but things become personal for Carella when the third officer gunned down in cold bloody is his partner Bush, and even more so when newspaper reporter Savage turns his deaf girlfriend Teddy into a prospective target. With nothing more to go on than the killer's motive as a Cop Hater, the race is on to catch the killer before he kills anyone else that Carella cares for, or for that matter. Carella himself.
Many police procedural series try to over-the-top with spectacular crimes or completely outrageous twists and turns, and mind-numbingly technical procedure descriptions. This is territory that where the 87th Precinct never strays into. While McBain does take the time to explain how and why certain aspects of the job are undertaken, he does so not to flog the reader with facts, but to help them understand exactly what the bulls of the 87th are up against. The crimes and characters of the 87th are always believable, interesting, and never fail to ring with a truth and honesty that makes it seem as real as crime in your local papers. Cop Hater embodies this truth as much as any of the other books, despite being written over fifty years ago. The procedures may change over time, but the criminals are cops are still driven by the same beliefs.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The First of the 87th Precinct Mysteries, 2007-02-16
What makes this such a great book to read is that it introduces characters that will be in many of the 55 or so books that McBain will write in the next fifty years. The original was published in 1956 and is therefore 51 years old, though it still reads well. The times were so different, that the city was suffering a heat wave and even the police station didn't have air-conditioning. Gang members wore colors, but they were emblazoned on satin jackets (like baseball teams).
Culturally it's interesting to see the changes that have happened in Police work over that time. Carella participates in a 'line-up' where the Chief interigates criminals picked up the night before, no lawyers no rights, no anything. At one point a detective who is questioning some punk, hits him in the mouth in from of the whole squadroom (can you imagine what would happen today).
The book reads a little like Dragnet (which the cops mention) and at any minute you can imagine Broderick Crawford coming through the "House" on the way to do his 'Highway Patrol' schtick. The local tabloid guy is such a sleeze he would fit right in on Entertainment Tonight or Accent Hollywood.
As to the story, which is wrapped around the killing of three cops and the shooting of another, it's the same old story of guy meets dame, dames married, so guy decides to kill the husband and make it look like something else. You could just see this being an episode of 'Law and Order' or 'CSI'.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Welcome To The Eight-Seven, 2004-04-08
"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..."Thus in 1955 Ed McBain begins his first-ever 87th Precinct crime novel, "Cop Hater." But before you start worrying if he's turning into Walt Whitman, he breaks off his rumination of urban beauty with this kicker: "There was garbage in the streets." And thank goodness for the garbage, or else we wouldn't need the bulls of the 87th Precinct to clean it up. "Cop Hater" reads like pulp fiction, perhaps because that was the genre Evan Hunter, the real-life writer responsible for the McBain pseudonym, worked in. "Cop Hater" was a unique sort of novel all the same, because as Hunter writes in his new introduction, it presented as a protagonist/hero not so much a central character (though here as elsewhere in the series, Det. Steve Carella is the main figure on the case) as a police squad room. McBain spends a lot of time depicting the squad room in this book, dwelling on physical details that he would gloss over in future volumes. This time at least, he and his readers were venturing into unusual territory. For those familiar with the 87th Precinct stories, there are plenty of recognizable signposts: Carella's slanting eyes, long and ominous descriptions of the weather, McBain's obsession with the ethnic make-up of his characters and the WASPy prejudices of others (one witness tells Carella she would prefer to tell her story to an "American" detective after realizing he's of Italian ancestry.) You can see the mainstay elements taking shape, which makes this a must-read for fans. The bare bones nature of the crime itself (a series of killings targeting 87th Precinct detectives) may leave readers used to juicier 87th Precinct plotlines wanting more. The language of the streets is considerably cleaner and less realistic than later volumes. Bert Kling is not a detective yet. Andy Parker and Meyer Meyer have yet to arrive. But it's a nice introduction to the 87th Precinct, a tough, merciless world of bad people, good people, and lots of grey in-betweeners. The cast of detectives at the Eight-Seven include a few who aren't around later, like Carella's first partner, who has some issues at home that seem to be distracting his work effort. Another is the precinct commander, an out-of-it old-timer named Frick who "was a tired man when he was 20" and shrugs his way through the violence around him. There's a nosy, unscrupulous reporter named Savage who makes trouble pestering gang members but insists he serves the community. McBain works in a resonant feeling of the times, the mid-1950s where open windows were the most common form of tenement air conditioning and the most dangerous juvenile weaponry were homemade "zip guns." One of the good things about "Cop Hater" is the center story is simple and resolved in a satisfying manner. Another is that the story leaves you wanting more. Just how much more no one could have predicted in 1955, but considering there's now been 53 87th Precinct novels, "Cop Hater" probably wasn't a bad idea for a book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A START with a BANG., 2003-08-18
If you LIKE this one , you're gone LOVE almost all of the sequels: more than 50 by now and continuing the series with style and fun.
I started with this first novel in 1963 and got hooked from the first page on.....
The 87th-precinct guys are part of the family.
(And thanks to AMAZON, i have now also the audio's).
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