A real classic...

When a cop is shot down in the street one night, the squad from the 87th Precinct in Isola swing into action. At first the reason for the shooting isn't known. Was it random? Was it personal? But when another cop from the precinct is killed in the same way it begins to look like there's a cop hater on the loose. Now Detective Steve Carella and his colleagues have two reasons to find the killer quickly – to get justice for their fellow officers and to stop the perpetrator before he kills again...

First published in 1956, this is the first in the long-running, successful and influential 87th Precinct series. I read many of them in my teens, but this is the first time I've revisited the Precinct in decades. I have no memory of the individual plots, but vividly remember the setting and several of the characters – a testimony to how well drawn they are. In this one Steve Carella is the main focus but as the series progressed McBain developed an entire group of detectives who took their turn in the spotlight, which is why the series is known by the name of the squad rather than any one detective. Carella stays at the forefront more than the other detectives overall, though, throughout the series. The books are based in Isola, an area of a major city which is clearly a fictionalised New York. The various boroughs have been given different names but are apparently recognisable to people who know the city (which I only do through books and TV or movies - I suspect my first impressions of New York may in fact have come from this series).

The style seems to me like a kind of crossover point between the hardboiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and their generation, and the more modern police procedural that would come to the fore and perhaps dominate crime fiction over the next few decades. (I hasten to add I'm no expert and not particularly widely-read, especially in American crime fiction, so this is just my own impression – perhaps other writers had been making the transition before McBain got there.) When he writes about the city – the soaring skylines, the dazzling lights, the display of wealth and glamour barely hiding the crime, corruption and violence down on the streets – it reads like pure noir; and in this one there's a femme fatale who equals any of the greats, oozing sexuality and confidence in her power over men.

But when he writes about Carella and the squad his tone is warmer, less hard-edged. While hardboiled and noir detectives always seem to be loners, rather mysterious men without much in the way of backstory, McBain's police officers are real humans, who joke and watch sports, who have wives and children. Personally I prefer that mix to pure noir – McBain's detectives aren't always wholly likeable, but they're human enough to allow me to care about them. Also, because he uses an entire squad as his protagonist, each individual is more expendable than the single hero or partnership of many other authors, so there's always an air of real suspense as to whether they will come through dangerous situations. They don't always...

The plot is excellent – I won't give any spoilers, but I will say that it was only just before the reveal that I really got any idea of where it was heading. McBain creates great atmosphere with his writing, which actually is of much higher quality than I remembered. Some of the scenes had me on the edge of my seat and he left me shocked more than once, but without ever stepping over the credibility line. In fact, realism is at the heart of the book – these detectives have to rely on doing the legwork, using informants and hoping for lucky breaks. There's a fair amount of casual police brutality, with the impression that this was the norm back then, and rather approved of than otherwise, both within the service and by society in general (and, I suspect, by McBain himself). Times change – depictions of casual and repeated brutality by police protagonists in contemporary British crime fiction annoy me because it wouldn't be considered acceptable here today and so jars as unrealistic. But it feels right in this book, and isn't over-emphasised; it's just part of the job.

There's also a strand about the relationship between the police and the press, with an irresponsible journalist creating problems for the investigation. This is handled very well, with the reader put firmly on the side of the police. They may not always be nice guys, but McBain leaves us in no doubt that they're the good guys. And yes, I do mean guys – no women yet in this detective squad. Women are strictly either femmes fatales or loving wives and girlfriends. Well, it was the '50s!

The ending has aspects of the thriller and again reverts to a more noir-ish feel as we discover the motivation behind the crimes.

I was expecting to like this but perhaps to find it a bit dated. In fact, I loved it. Writing, setting, atmosphere, characterisation – all superb. While some of the attitudes are obviously a bit dated, the storytelling isn't at all, and the vices and weaknesses of the human animal haven't changed much over the years. Excellent stuff – definitely a classic of the genre, and highly recommended to anyone who enjoys a realistic police procedural with an edge of noir.

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Great Police Procedural!
The first of McBain's 55 novels in this series, published in 1956. Author is Evan Hunter (real name Salvatore Albert Lombino!), McBain being one of five psuedonyms he used.
Some nice sex in here - and even in the '50's he has people living together, and having pre-marital sex.
The HEAT. And the city he builds, which is NY, and not NY.
And love that it is a quick, pulp read.
Wonder if he drove publishers nuts with his use of atypical font. We get reports and info cards and other additions to the text that are not in the usual type font. Some complete with check marks!
Oh, and gangs/clubs. And crummy news reporters who will do anything for a story (although Steve really should have been wiser as a veteran detective).
Fun intro into police and crime of a 1950's big city. Looking forward to reading some of the others, but probably not all.

Entertaining, and with a good whodunnit sort of feel, but it definitely felt dated, and had some things that may be a bit unsavory for some. I probably won't read any more of this series, but it wasn't a totally wasted chunk of time spent reading it.

Just okay. Felt dated, and rightly so. I am curious to see how the writing develops over the years, if it does. Not rushing out to read the next one.

I began reading the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain nearly 40 years ago, having stumbled upon them entirely by accident in a library. McBain (real name Evan Hunter) is widely seen as the inventor of the ‘police procedural’ — a new genre of crime fiction that has become immensely popular. Over the decades, I read dozens of his books in no particular order as I found them in second-hand bookshops and libraries. I even got to meet the author briefly in London just a few years before he passed away. And now, never having read the books in any order, I thought it might be interesting to read them in sequence — in some cases, for a second time. Cop Hater is the very first book in the series, first published in 1956.

Someone is killing police officers, using a .45 handgun. But all is not as it appears. The officers are not in uniform when they are gunned down on the street. They are all detectives and they all work in the 87th precinct of a fictional city obviously based on New York. The main character in the series, detective Steve Carella, is introduced here, as is the woman who is the love of his life, Teddy (Theodora).

In a short introduction to the book, McBain recounts how it was written and reveals his original big idea. Instead of writing crime fiction with a genius detective as the hero, McBain wanted to create a team of heroes: the detectives of the 87th precinct. After writing more than 50 more novels over the course of more than four decades, it turns out to have been a very good idea.

I can’t wait to read the next book.

I really enjoyed this. The pace was different from more “current” books, but the ending was less telegraphed, the writing wasn’t an attempt to be the next Faulkner, and the romance wasn’t trying to do anything more (or less?) than flush out the characters.

The author's note in the library book says that he generally took about a month to write his early mysteries under the "Ed McBain" pseudonym. In my opinion, this book definitely reads exactly like a book would that was pumped out in a month or less. Two paragraphs dealing with someone filling and lighting a pipe, stiff dialog--even though it's a short book, I couldn't make myself finish it.

Read all the 87th Precinct novels years ago, but read a mention of them recently and decided to see if they were as good as I remember. While this is seriously dated, having been written in the 1950s, the basis is still a darned good book.

I had high hopes for the 87th precinct series as my all-time favorite author James Ellroy had mentioned them as a key influence and that he meticulously collected the entire series of 50-odd books over the years.

Much like when I read Jack Webb's The Badge late in 2023, I understood how The book could be influential on someone who was young and starved for crime genre material. Much like The Badge as well, Cop Hater is just not a terribly interesting book.

The intention was to create an ultra realistic portrayal of police procedures in a fictional city that was heavily based on New York. At least for the first book in the series, the result is an honestly quite boring experience. Walls of text filled with the most uninspired language imaginable made the slim book a slog to read.

The mystery itself starts very strong with a surprisingly graphic killing of a police officer, but quickly blows its momentum introducing detectives who are by and large interchangeable and shallow.

A few more murders pile up, but there's a complete lack of tension or anything to make the mystery riveting.

Ed McBain wrote another 55 or so books in the series, and I have a couple more checked out from the library, but the series is on thin ice from the start