Ed McBain's Cop Hater (#1956Club)

 

Cop Hater is the first of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. Somebody is killing cops: first Detective Mike Reardon is shot outside his house on his way to the precinct; then his partner David Foster is killed. The fact that the two were partners results in the investigation pursuing their previous arrests, particularly any recently out of jail, but when a third detective Hank Bush is killed and he doesn't have any particular connection to the first two, maybe there's just somebody out there who hates cops.

I thought this was nicely setup. We see just enough of Mike Reardon to humanize him before he's killed; Steve Carella and Bush are beat detectives who catch the case; they crack wise with the homicide detectives on the scene before they turn the body over and realize it's their colleague who's been killed. McBain's a pro with a crisp prose style. All that's in the first fourteen pages.

My edition is a reprint with an introduction by McBain from 1989. McBain, under his legal, though not birth name, of Evan Hunter, was already a successful author: he'd written Blackboard Jungle, the basis of the 1955 movie. The introduction is fun. McBain touts himself as the originator of the police procedural. Perhaps that's not perfectly true--John Creasey/J. J. Marric's first Gideon novel came out the year before--but it's close to true in any case, and McBain envisioned from the start a sort of collective hero, with different detectives of the 87th Precinct taking the lead in different cases, in different novels, which is pretty unique. He talks about the research he did to start the series, pestering actual New York City cops before deciding--with delight--he would just make up the city of Isola where the series takes place. 

McBain's grittier than the cozies and even most of the PI novels that preceded him; still it's not giving much away to say that the culprit is neither some recent release from the state pen, nor (though Savage the newspaperman promotes this theory) some cop-hating gang member. Those are both red herrings and the solution is more mystery-novel-ish than either of those possibilities. I've read 8 or 10 out of the 55 in the series and I'd say that's generally true of McBain.

But no spoilers. I wish I could say the same of Wikipedia, though. I might have expected (and didn't read until I finished the novel) that the article on the book would include spoilers; I was a little dismayed though that the general article on the 87th Precinct series, which I did look at halfway through, gave away the solution. Grr. Still it was fun, even if I did know--before I was supposed to--whodunnit. 

It was also fun to see the series at the start. Cotton Hawes and Meyer Meyer don't feature in this one but Steve Carella does; he goes on to appear in a number of them. We see him courting Teddy and the marriage is planned, but hasn't yet taken place, before the end of the book. 

It's the week of #1956Club! Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting.

Thinking about the #1956Club

Starting in under a week is 1956 Club, this fall's edition of the club in which we all read books from the given year, hosted by Kaggsy & Simon. Naturally the first thing to do is to heap up a pile o' books...

These are the ones I might be likely to read and which I haven't read...

Nelson Algren/A Walk On The Wild Side 

Ed McBain/Cop Hater

James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room

Allen Ginsburg/Howl and Other Poems

-it's possible I've read all the poems from Howl, but I'm not sure. But after all, I've been so tormented by seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked...I forget about the book.

These books are all pretty short, so there's even a chance I'll read them all. (Well, the 1956 part of the bottom two books is short.) I've also got an unread copy of Henry Miller's The Devil In Paradise around here, which is also short, but I'm less likely to read that.

1956 was a good year for fluffy books which I own and have already read:

That's:

Ian Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever

Ross Macdonald's The Barbarous Coast

Ellery Queen's Inspector Queen's Own Case

Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Gilded Lily

There's also Patricia Wentworth's The Fingerprint, but she was shy and couldn't be found for the photo op. I haven't read the Poirot of 1956, Dead Man's Folly, but I don't own it and would have to go find a copy. The Barbarous Coast is probably the best of those--Ross Macdonald is so good one hates to quite call him fluffy--but if I reread one, it's likely to be the Ellery Queen, which I read so long ago I don't remember it at all. Rereading a mystery you don't remember, why it's like a fresh new mystery all over again!

I've now been blogging long enough--or 1956 was so good a year--that there are actually two books in my back catalog that I've blogged about before. The better book of these is Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, a very good book indeed, I thought.

The better post, though, is for Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars, one of his juveniles, which could have been up there on the fluffy shelf. But pretty entertaining. Jet-powered helicopters plus dinosaurs. And still our hero fights with a stick...

If I decide to reread and post about books I've read before, the top of that list would be Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond, which is so good. I've been poring over other people's posts of preparation--I just changed 'reading' to 'poring over' to compound that alliteration--and I haven't seen anybody mention Kenneth Stampp's book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution, which I remember as fascinating. The first volume of Anthony Burgess' Malaysia trilogy, Time for a Tiger, is from 1956, and I liked the trilogy, but then I'd probably feel I should reread the whole trilogy, and what I really want to reread of his is Earthly Powers. The first volume of Naguib Mahfouz' wonderful Cairo Trilogy, Palace Walk, is from 1956. Long Day's Journey Into Night. There's two Rex Stouts (Three Witnesses, Might As Well Be Dead) from that year, which could have been in the picture above. Etc., etc. The more I look the more I think I've had very good reading out of 1956.

And I'm looking for that to continue! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting!