Ed McBain: the birth of the police procedural

If Ed McBain didn’t invent the police procedural he certainly helped establish it as a modern mainstream genre that has gone on to dominate television cop shows.

McBain was a prolific writer. As Evan Hunter (his official name after changing it from Salvatore Albert Lombino) he wrote Blackboard Jungle as well as many other novels. He wrote also screenplays, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

His popularity though was based on his 87th Precinct series. The first outing for the 87th was Cop Hater in 1956. He wrote one, and sometimes two, books a year for the next forty years. The series had an ensemble cast almost all of which were in every book. The anchor was Steve Carella, who shared some physical characteristics of his creator.

The precinct is set in a fictitious city that has the look and feel of McBain’s home town: New York.

While the stories are well told and the characters engaging perhaps what is so good about the books is the way McBain reflects the times he is writing in. Over the decades themes and issues change while the police carry on catching the bad guy. Except, they don’t always succeed. McBain makes it clear that being a police officer is about gathering evidence and getting lucky. None of the characters, even Steve Carella, are Sherlock Holmes.

A TV version of the series was made in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. Neither took off in the way that Hill Street Blues did. When Hill Street was at its height, McBain would have his characters discuss the show and complain that it was clearly based on them. Humour was never far in a McBain plot however awful the crime.

After Hill Street we had NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street. There have been many more but these three stand out for their depth of storytelling and quality of writing.

David Simon (Homicide producer) went on to take the police procedural and do something very different to it. Arguably, he created one of the greatest television shows: The Wire. If McBain had been around when that show was broadcast he would have undoubtedly detected elements of the 87th as well as echoes of his earlier work Blackboard Jungle. He would have approved.