UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct Novels

            Reference works will tell you McBain’s real name was Evan Hunter, the name under which he wrote many books—including The Blackboard Jungle—and screenplays as well.  He was born Salvatore Lombino, and changed his name to Evan Hunter when he began his writing career in 1952.

            As Ed McBain he published 55 books about the 87^th precinct in a city that is never named, but is obviously New York thinly disguised: Isola is his name for the borough of Manhattan, Riverhead for Brooklyn, Majesta for Queens.  There’s a big hospital called Buenavista instead of Bellevue, and so on.  Cop Hater was the first of these books in 1956.  My favorites are Sadie When She Died, the 26^th of the series, published in 1972, and Hark!-- the next to the last of the 87^th precinct books; McBain had finished another, published after he died as Learning to Kill.

            McBain’s main character is Steve Carella, whose family is always on his mind; between Sadie and Hark! his father dies and in the later book his mother remarries.  The reader finds out what’s on Carella’s mind, and in each book several other story lines are followed besides the crime investigation.  Often these are romances, going well or badly, of other detectives in the squad and sometimes a cop from a neighboring precinct.

            Sadie When She Died is about a victim who lived a double life, Sarah Fletcher the respectable housewife and Sadie Collins, who picked up men in singles bars.  Carella and the others know that the husband killed her, but the problem is to prove it.  Eventually they do.

            Hark! gives us story lines about Carella, Detectives Bert Kling and Cotton Hawes of the 87^th, and Oliver Wendell Weeks, or Ollie, a detective from the 88^th.  Here also we have a caper story involving The Deaf Man, a clever criminal who hints at his plans by sending notes to Carella that contain quotes from Shakespeare and word games such as anagrams and palindromes.

            McBain is sometimes considered the originator of the American police procedural, but that honor really belongs to Lawrence Treat and Hillary Waugh, who published in the 40s and early 50s.  What McBain did do was show big city police work as a cumulative, team effort, while he invented characters who were interesting and funny.  And the large number of his books means you can probably find one there you like.