Nothing, as they say, comes from nothing; largely authors and creators are quick to acknowledge, if not the direct influences on their work, then at least the traditions from which their output has emerged. Evan Hunter was proud of his work, boastful about it on occasion, but as Ed McBain he was happy to acknowledge the debt the 87th Precinct series paid to such things as the radio version of Dragnet, for example. The 87th Precinct books, and in particular the stories from the first two decades of the near fifty-year lifespan of the series, helped to shape the notion of what a police procedural series could be. What McBain did most successfully was demonstrate that much of policing was based on luck as well as and that all the tedious day-to-day matters that the job entailed couldn’t be avoided. In fact, he reveled in them, reproducing forms, reports, autopsy findings and laws as photostats in the books. Had this detailed quasi-fictional procedural nature been the only unique feature of the books, then they may not have become as successful as they did, but McBain’s coup de grace was to portray his cops as interesting and unique individuals struggling with not only their lives and relationships at work, but often at home as well. It is ironic that even with this winning formula, the 87th Precinct series was never effectively adapted for the screen, or at least not to McBain’s liking. Even worse, when police procedural shows really hit big in the early eighties, it was with a television show set in an unnamed city, starring an Italian-American cop as lead character, and focused on day-to-day procedure balanced against the relationships and lives of the cops in the squadroom. This was Hill Street Blues, still one of the best thought-of and most loved of all police television shows. Evan Hunter was livid.
“No of course they didn’t consult me,” the author told The Guardian newspaper in 1990, “if you come in to steal my jewels, you don’t say ‘May I come in tonight through the window please?’” Hunter’s first response to the appearance of this new show was to put a call in to his lawyer. He was told he had a case, but it would probably cost at least $500,000 dollars to fight it. He couldn’t afford to take the legal risk and instead took the opportunity to make his feelings known in interviews, and even out of the mouths of his characters in the 87th Precinct stories themselves. In his contemporaneous novel from 1984, Lightning, McBain dedicates three pages to venting his spleen. Everyone’s favorite bigot, Fat Ollie Weeks, is livid that an episode of Hill Street Blues has featured a character called Charlie Weeks, himself an out-an-out racist. Ollie goes on to outline all the similarities between the 87th Squad and Hill Street Blues and explains that he considered suing the TV company but that it’d, “prolly cost me a fortune.” It’s a fascinating insight into the author’s mindset as characters in a book, based in a fictional city, discuss fictional portrayals of cops in a fictional city. The layers of reality become quite blurry.
Hunter’s first response to the appearance of this new show was to put a call in to his lawyer. He was told he had a case, but it would probably cost at least $500,000 dollars to fight it.Evan Hunter’s fury at Furillo and his Hill Street Friends might have been more tempered had he not himself been engaged in writing a new 87th Precinct television pilot himself at the time. “I knew we were dead in the water,” he told Bill Slocum in the New York Times. Furthermore, had any of the other attempts to bring the 87th Precinct to screens, large or small, been successful, then maybe Hunter would have looked the other way. As it was, even by 1981 there had been a string of attempts at rendering the 87th Precinct tales on screen but none of them had satisfied their creator.
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The 87th Precinct was hot property right from the off and was clearly going to attract the attention of television and movie producers. The mix of gritty, realistic policing in a familiar setting with a cast of recognizable ‘hero’ characters was ideal for adaptation. The author, under the name of Evan Hunter, had already hit big in the movies with the film rights for The Blackboard Jungle, sold to MGM before the book was released for a reported $95,000, but it was not widely known that the creative talent behind these new cop stories was the self-same man. It wasn’t MGM who came knocking after the first few books in the series had been published, but the newly formed film company Barbizon Productions. They bought the rights to Cop Hater and The Mugger in 1957 and immediately set to work shooting the pictures back-to-back in New York. They were released in quick succession in the fall of 1958. Both books were adapted by Henry Kane, a newcomer to the motion picture business, but an old hand at writing TV stories about private eyes in New York, and were directed by William Berke, famed for his ability to bring in pictures quickly and on shoe-string budgets. Lucky, really, as that’s what he had to work with on these adaptations. Whatever budget did exist seems to have been weighted towards Cop Hater, which is by far the better of the two movies and showcases Robert Loggia as Detective Carelli (why he’s renamed from Carella isn’t clear) and features Jerry Orbach in his first screen role (Orbach would later go on to be a cop show icon in Law & Order). The Mugger, on the other hand, reduces the cops to side-men and instead features Kent Smith as Police Psychiatrist Dr. Pete Graham. Where Cop Hater captures at least some of the feel of the book, with a busy squad-room, stifling city weather and some great location shooting, The Mugger fails on almost every count and doesn’t even pretend to be about the 87th Precinct characters we know and love.
So much for that then. In the meantime, at least some versions of the 87th Precinct had already appeared on TV in the form of an episode of Climax! and as two episodes of Kraft Mystery Theatre, including one entitled simply The Eighty Seventh Precinct, written by Larry Cohen who would return to the McBain fold in the 90s when he adapted Ice and Heat for NBC. For those keeping track, by the way, the first person to play the ‘Carella’ role on television was Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves who appeared as “Steve Baxter” in the Climax! version of The Con Man—seen on screen as The Deadly Tattoo.
And so we arrive at the big-screen version of The Pusher. No longer in the hands of Barbizon productions, but instead in the care of another brand-new production company founded in-part by the author Harold Robbins, who would write the screenplay for this adaptation. The film was shot in early 1958 but didn’t appear in cinemas until 1960. Sensationalist and shocking at times, The Pusher’s main legacy is that it features Robert Lansing in the role of Steve Carella. It’s probably the best of the early novel adaptations and has several showcase moments, including an astonishingly Freudian Dance/Murder sequence that probably would have raised eyebrows in the censor’s office, although fans of the book will find the picture’s focus on the middle-class users and victims of drugs rather than working-class Puerto Ricans detracts from the tragic power of McBain’s novel.
In 1961 the 87th Precinct finally made its debut as an ongoing TV series—well, ongoing for 30 episodes at least. Robert Lansing returned as Carella, heading up a small ensemble that features Three’s Company’s Norman Fell as Detective Meyer Meyer, youngster Ron Harper as Bert Kling and Plan 9 From Outer Space’s Gregory Walcott as Roger Havilland – the bad-apple of the bunch in the books and, in fact, dead since the fifth entry in the series, but portrayed on screen as a somewhat laconic good-guy with an almost indecipherable and oft-overdubbed Southern drawl. Initially Gena Rowlands was included as a key cast member, playing Carella’s wife, the deaf and mute Teddy Carella, but ultimately she only appears in four of the thirty episodes. Ten of the 87th Precinct novels provided material for eleven of the shows—Killer’s Choice being split into two distinct stories—with the remainder being written by others, with one notable exception. The producers even adapted Donald E. Westlake’s McBain-inspired Levine story The Feel Of The Trigger for the series and Helen Nielsen’s The Very Hard Sell (which had featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1959) for the show. The exception mentioned before is the episode Line Of Duty, which occupies a special place in the world of the 87th Precinct as the only original 87th Precinct story written by Ed McBain himself that didn’t come from an existing book. In that story, Bert Kling has to face up to having shot a young man whilst off duty. The young man seems to have been popular and well loved by all who knew him and Kling is devastated at having taken such a young life. If that sounds familiar to you, then maybe you were watching Ironside in 1968 where the same plot crops up for the McBain penned episode All In A Day’s Work.
nothing ever quite managed to capture the series properly in the author’s mind. In 2002, speaking to CNN, he lamented, “I’d like to see it done well for a change. Once, I’d like to see it done well.”There’s much to love about this NBC series, but it didn’t last beyond the first season. Despite the source material, it isn’t really a police procedural and it isn’t particularly gritty. It is an ensemble mystery show that relies on the dynamic of the core cast and the guest stars and as such probably has more in common with Columbo than it does with Hill Street Blues, quite literally in fact, with the first featured villain played by Robert Culp and Peter Falk making a guest appearance in one episode. There are plenty of others who appeared in both, including Gena Rowlands and Leonard Nimoy and fans of one show would probably enjoy the other. Sadly the realism of the 87th Precinct stories is lost to the studio bound nature of the production, with the episodes having been shot on the Universal lot, although this does lead to the strange appearance of the names Meyer, Havilland and Kling in the police station in the film Cape Fear, when the ‘on-duty’ board prop was reused for that movie.
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There was not to be another US production based on the 87th Precinct stories for another decade after the NBC series ended. In the meantime, films and television series based on some of the books appeared in France and Czechoslovakia and, most significantly, in Japan. Director Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, released in 1963, was based on the novel King’s Ransom. Kurosawa wisely milked the book for all the drama it had for the first part of his film, but abandoned much of the rest of the plot for the conclusion of the movie. The result is not only the best adaptation of a McBain book, but one of the most thrilling crime stories ever to reach the screen. McBain himself considered it to be a very good film. He didn’t feel the same about the next US production, the Burt Reynolds feature Fuzz, despite this being the only big-screen 87th Precinct film with a screenplay by the author himself. At one point, Brian De Palma was set to direct, but beset by casting imperatives (he was forced by the producers to cast Raquel Welch and Yul Brynner) and Union strikes, de Palma walked. The picture eventually ended up being shot in Boston under the guiding hand of Richard Colla, who was primarily a director of TV serials. McBain felt that the result took too many liberties with the story and ended up looking like a Marx Brothers picture. Plans for a sequel based on Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man were shelved.
So we continue to this day to wait for a Procedural TV series based on the books, despite the property having passed through the hands of several well-known production companies (last linked to Donnie Wahlberg and the TNT channel in 2014). The success and legacy of Hill Street Blues continued to annoy McBain for the rest of his life. There were plenty of other creators who were influenced by the 87th Precinct, of course, and McBain considered most of these as homages to the ensemble storytelling he’d pioneered. He could even find humour in some of the clumsier attempts but, as he told Charles Silet in 1999, “I do not find the remarkable similarities between “Hill Street Blues” and the 87th Precinct books quite so funny.” Three TV movies based on his novels had appeared in the nineties, but nothing ever quite managed to capture the series properly in the author’s mind. In 2002, speaking to CNN, he lamented, “I’d like to see it done well for a change. Once, I’d like to see it done well.”
