Writing as Ed McBain, the author Evan Hunter produced 55 police procedural stories in the 87th Precinct series. With the release of the twenty-first book in the series, Eighty Million Eyes, in 1966, the 87th Precinct turned ten years old. The series, which had initially begun with a commission for three books, ostensibly to take-over the publishing “slot” that Erle Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame had occupied for Pocket Books, ended up running for just shy of fifty years. Not that the publisher’s attentions away from the aging Gardner did anything to slow his output—he continued to write until he died, aged 80, in 1970.
If there’s one measure of success we can apply to the early 87th Precinct stories, it’s that the series, which had begun purely in the paperback “pulp” format that Pocket Books’ Permabook division was famous for, became primarily hardback editions under the Simon and Schuster banner as part of their Inner Sanctum Mystery range from 1958 onwards. They even repackaged the earlier entries into the series in three omnibus editions, ensuring that any eight-seven enthusiast could fill their shelves with hardback versions of all of the tales. The dust-covers of these early omnibus editions are full of plaudits from not only the likes of the New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, but also from other established mystery and crime writers, such as Rex Stout and John D. MacDonald.
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Warning: This article contains spoilers relating to characters and events in the 87th Precinct series from 1956 to 1966, between Cop Hater and Eighty Million Eyes. Where possible, however, every effort has been made not to link events to specific story titles or plot points.
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There are multiple reasons the series became so successful so quickly but I’d posit that it was the detective squad itself, the cops that McBain invented, that is chief amongst these. In the first few books we meet Steve Carella, of whom you’ll read more below, the newly-promoted youngster Bert Kling, Judo-expert Hal Willis, the patient, cynical and humorous Meyer Meyer, the brutish Roger Havilland and Arthur Brown, a solid cop and a dependable family man. There are others too who come and go, some who take more of a part than others, and this core line-up does change during the early years but McBain cleverly ensures there’s always someone we like, look up to or want to see how they progress.
You can also credit some of the success of the 87th Precinct series to the wisdom of McBain’s editor, Herbert Alexander. He encouraged the author not to kill off the lynchpin character of Detective Steve Carella at the end of the third book. Carella is generally perceived as the lead character for the series—he is the first character we follow through an investigation and is the first about whom we discover details of his life outside of work. We root for Carella as the family man and incorruptible cop that he seems to be, but a squad room full of Carella types would be both unrealistic and boring and for McBain, the squad in toto was the hero—a conglomerate—and whilst one cop dying was a tragedy, it should not act as the be-all and end-all for the precinct. With his experience and knowledge of the expectations of readers, Alexander encouraged McBain to leave Carella alive and thus to become someone who readers could rely on and follow through the subsequent stories. Whilst at other times detectives Meyer, Kling, Hawes, Willis, Brown and others would take the lead, Carella quickly became established as the readers’ favorite, with his personal life providing important and compelling background material as the series progressed.
It is perhaps a little sad that the original Carella death-scene has never been made available (although a version of it appeared in an abridged telling of the tale in Manhunt magazine). Otto Penzler, of the Mysterious Press and a close friend of Evan Hunter, describes the, “…poignance of the original… you weep. It’s so incredibly tender, this great man…dying. The editor saved his life.” Not that McBain gives Carella an easy ride in the first ten years of the series. He is variously shot, beaten, beaten again, shot again, used as a human shield and kidnapped, drugged and tortured. The effects of these assaults on Carella’s person are felt strongly by the reader, not least because we’re feeling them in sympathy with his wife, Teddy Carella. Over the first decade of the series, they are wed, move into a nice big house, and have twins. They have a strong and loving relationship—when they’re not being held hostage or in hospital.
Of all the other characters we are introduced to, there is only one to appear in each and every book (although, if you want to get technical, the story “Storm” in The Empty Hours is an exception), and that is the city itself. Isola, Manhattan in disguise, is usually characterized in feminine terms, sometimes alluring, sometimes teasing and sometimes, in what can admittedly be hard to read with modern eyes, as a “bitch.”
Of all the other characters we are introduced to, there is only one to appear in each and every book…the city itself.McBain doesn’t excel in these early stories in his portrayal of women in general, a fact that the New York Times crime book reviewer Marilyn Stasio picked up on in later years, relating on the Criminal podcast how she told him to his face, “‘You should write better women!’ And then he did.” More interesting than the characterization though is how the fictional city reflects the real world. It’s a melting pot of ethnicities and races, different folks rubbing up against each other with all the attendant friction that produces. New York’s own gang problems of the fifties are reflected in several of the stories (something that McBain would explore in more detail in 1959’s A Matter Of Conviction, writing as Evan Hunter) as are the major redevelopment and urban renewal works that took place in the late fifties/early sixties, under the cover of which The Deaf Man, the squad’s recurring nemesis, makes his debut.
In terms of policing, technology and procedure, very little changes over the period in which these books are set. McBain, having spent a lot of time asking questions of and spending time with the NYPD in his early intensive research period, soon came to realize that in reality laws and procedure change all the time. This provided one of the key justifications for setting the stories in a fictional city—he would not have to slavishly adhere to the reality of the police work. Instead he was able to rely on the general principles and quote chapter-and-verse where it suited the story. One of the joys of the books is these moments of procedure as laid out on the page. These might come in the form of a cop relating the specifics of the law on a particular matter, or it might be in the photostat reproductions of crime-reports, forensic details or perhaps in an example of a photofit. In Eighty Million Eyes, we meet the police artist Detective Victor Haldeman. In his one and only appearance in the series, Haldeman is cleverly given life by McBain’s relation of his position in the structure of the police system, a brief snippet of his background and just enough information to provide that air of verisimilitude that marks the series out as something special.
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So where do the other characters stand? Frozen in time? To some extent yes, but the fact that they are workaday cops means this isn’t unusual. None of the characters appear particularly ambitious and seem, in general, to have reached a level within the force that suits them. Rarely does a character transcend the role they have upon introduction to us, although the unlucky figure of young Bert Kling first appears as a patrolman and becomes a detective through application of initiative. McBain delights in torturing Kling almost more than he enjoys beating-up Carella. In the first ten years, Kling’s promotion coincides with his falling in love with the young widow, Claire, only to have her cruelly snatched away from him in the most tragic and pointless of circumstances. The next few stories see Kling crumbling in the workplace, incapable of doing his job well and isolating himself from those around him. By the time of Eighty Million Eyes, he has been reborn somewhat and the seeds of love are blossoming with Cindy Forrest, daughter of one of the victims in 1963’s Ten Plus One. Surely the next decade will be kinder to young Bert? Detective Roger Havilland’s career of brutality is cut violently short during this period and McBain fills the space he leaves behind with the introduction of two characters; Cotton Hawes, who transfers in from the altogether more polite 30th Precinct and Andy Parker, the laziest cop on the squad, who McBain uses to expose the bigoted attitudes people still carried with them, even in an area and on a squad as diverse as that of the 87th Precinct. Parker’s character is surprisingly complex and, although in the first ten years he’s only a heavily featured player in See Them Die, McBain doesn’t allow him to become simply a cipher for hatred. His grief at the deaths, real and assumed, of his colleagues hints at a very troubled soul.
McBain doesn’t mind occasionally disposing of a character in order to heighten drama or to make a point. To make matters worse, he usually ensures you’ve invested in them over the course of a couple of books before he really puts the metaphorical boot in. There are at least three instances of take-your-breath-away character shocks in these first twenty-one stories. As an aside, thanks to The Deaf Man in The Heckler, it’s impossible to create an accurate ‘body-count’ for these stories—the character’s use of terrorism as a means-to-an-end is chilling and remarkably underplayed in the story. The reader is forced into following The Deaf Man’s sociopathic mode of thinking and it’s more terrifying than it might at first appear.
The majority of the stories forming the first ten years of the 87th Precinct were adapted for television or film both in the U.S. and across the world. Most of these versions are now quite hard to find, although the NBC series from 1961/62 is available on disc and, although the hard and violent edges of the stories are somewhat softened for this ensemble-cast TV series, it’s worth a look, not least because Robert Lansing as Carella is a fine choice (having first appeared in the role in the 1960 film of The Pusher) and also because it features the episode Line Of Duty—an original story by McBain that was never part of the written canon and which gives the author another chance to make Kling’s life difficult. Whilst the eighth book in the series, Killer’s Wedge, is probably the most adapted of all of the stories, it is the tenth story, King’s Ransom, that has perhaps had the greatest cultural impact, following its use as the source material for Akira Kurosawa’s phenomenal film High and Low in 1963. McBain later acknowledged this as probably the best adaptation of any of the 87th Precinct books, but bemoaned the general lack of success that they had in other forms, telling CNN in 2002, “I’d like to see it done well for a change. Once, I’d like to see it done well.”
After ten years of writing the 87th Precinct, McBain had fully set up the groundwork for the series to continue. He carefully manipulated the members of the detective squad to suit his story-telling needs and introduced enough backstory to make each character relatable but not so much as to obscure the main police story. He’d established his procedural tropes—the use of the M.E., the forensics, stool pigeons, the relationship between detectives, uniformed officers and everyone’s favorite glib Homicide detectives, Monaghan and Monroe—and he had also let the reader know that he would sometimes experiment with style or approach in stories such as He Who Hesitates or in the collection The Empty Hours. The next decade would see the introduction of more features into the stories, such as sweeping changes to law and police work that couldn’t be ignored even in the fictional force, and changes in technology that influence investigative techniques. At the core of all of the books are Carella, Meyer, Kling and company, in the squad room and on the streets, finding the bad guys and girls and keeping the residents of their section of Isola as safe from harm as they possibly can through the application of police process, procedure, dogged determination and the knowledge that luck and coincidence can be good friends to the detective.
