Ed McBain: The Writer Who Invented the Police Procedural

Turn on a television, stroll the bookstore, walk through a movie theater, and you’re bound to see a cop. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching Spider-Man touch base with Jean DeWolff in Brand New Day, enjoying Jake Peralta goof around on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or reading the latest John Sandford thriller to pass the time at the airport, the police are everywhere. Moreover, they’re almost always the heroes—certainly flawed, often beleaguered, but at the end of the day, effective and morally good.

But that wasn’t always the case, at least in film and literature. While several different events sent cops to swarm American popular culture, no one person deserves credit or blame more than Evan Hunter, who wrote 55 novels in the “87th Precinct” series under the pen name Ed McBain. McBain’s grumpy and flawed professionals and his attention to detail transformed hard-boiled fiction into something legitimate, setting the stage for everything from Michael Connelly’s Bosch novels to endless Law & Order spinoffs.

From Genius to Gumshoe

Ed McBain states his thesis on police work early in 1956’s Cop Hater, the first of the books in the 87th Precinct series. There, veteran detective Hank Bush tells his younger partner Steve Carella, “it doesn’t take much brains to be a cop.” Instead, he goes on, “All you need to be a detective is a strong pair of legs and a stubborn streak. The legs take you around to all the various dumps you have to go to, and the stubborn streak keeps you from quitting. You follow each separate trail mechanically, and if you’re lucky, one of the trails pays off. If you’re not lucky, it doesn’t. Period.”

Bush’s statement might surprise modern readers, who are used to watching brilliant sleuths like Lieutenant Columbo or dedicated detectives like Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler. Film and books of the era tended to portray police more realistically, less interested in selling an image to the public and more concerned with reflecting American’s suspicions of armed officers in their midst.

The first significant change in pop culture depictions came with Dragnet, the radio show created by and starring Jack Webb as strait-laced Sergeant Joe Friday. Webb worked with the LA Police Department to secure access to case files—access granted with the chief’s approval of scripts—which allowed him to sell the show as a collection of true stories about crime and punishment. As middle-class white Americans moved from the cities to the suburbs, and televisions became an expected modern connivence in every home, Dragnet made the jump to TV, where fans tuned in every night to gain assurance that professional police kept the bad guys from entering their neighborhoods.

Friday and his partners weren’t geniuses like Sherlock Holmes. They solved mysteries not with intellect, but with professionalism and a lack of emotion, ensuring faith in the legal system. And that made them boring and unrealistic for Evan Hunter, and something he would need to change when he started writing under the name, Ed McBain.

More Than Just the Facts

Every entry in the 87th Precinct series begins with the following sentences: “The city in these pages is imaginary.
 The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.” With that introduction, McBain signals his interest in both realism and fantasy, the two impulses that led to the creation of the series.

McBain’s first success came from drawing from his own experience, as he drew from his time teaching in an inner-city school to write the 1954 novel Blackboard Jungle (under the name Evan Hunter), which became a hit film the next year. So when he was contracted to write a trio of crime novels, McBain looked to realism first. Only police would realistically and regularly encounter crimes, so police had to be his subject.

Moreover, he wanted his police to be realistic. That meant following the model of Dragnet to a certain degree, including doing research by riding along with actual officers and interviewing them, getting to know their routines. Evidence of that knowledge appears in the facsimiles of reports, forms, and documents that his characters encounter as part of their jobs. In 1966’s Eighty-Million Eyes, detective Bert Kling must document an assault that one suspect committed upon another, and that report—complete with margins and typewritten information—appears in the book. The text of 2002’s Fat Ollie’s Book is regularly interrupted by excerpts from a novel that the titular character writes, contrasting the realities of police work to his imagination.

The focus on detail is a hallmark of the police procedural, something McBain picked up from Dragnet and that has been carried on by everything from S.W.A.T. and The Rookie to Bad Boys and Zodiac. These stories about the work of policing, the various techniques and operations that make up an officer’s day.

But McBain wasn’t interested in just getting the details right. He was also interested in characters, which is what distinguishes his work from Dragnet, and what sets the model that everyone else followed. McBain filled his novels with complex, compelling characters, partially drawn from archetypes of hard-boiled fiction of the preceding century.

His main character is Steve Carella, a large man capable of violence, but who more often solves cases through determination and dumb luck. After getting married early in the series, McBain introduced Cotton Hawes, a tall redhead of Puritan stock, who becomes the romantic lead. Carella often works alongside Meyer Meyer, a Jewish detective whose legendary patience stems, in part, from the silly name bestowed upon him by his jokester of a father. There’s the aforementioned Bert Kling, who worked his way up from being a beat cop but who suffers endless calamities in his relationships. One of those relationships is with fellow detective Eileen Burke, whose undercover work puts her in danger.

This small sampling of characters gives you an idea of the breadth of the 87th squad, which is McBain’s most important innovation. Even though Carella serves as the main character of the series, McBain always wanted the squad room itself to be the main character, with different officers working different cases within the same novel.

That focus on the community and the changes within it allows the police procedural to evolve past Webb and Dragnet. For all of its popularity, Dragnet channeled all of its stories through the single and impersonal view of Sgt. Friday. McBain showed that police work is done by people, lots of people, who have sometimes wildly different ways of doing their jobs and, thus, can tell different types of stories.

Beyond the 87th Precinct

In the 1987 novel Lightning, the slovenly, but effective, detective Ollie Weeks complains to his fellow officers that he had been watching Hill Street Blues, the hit television series, and noticed some familiarities. The main character was an Italian guy called Frank Furillo. There was a gruff but lovable desk sergeant, not like the 87th’s own Dave Murchison. The bullpen included detectives of Jewish and African American descent, which reminded him of his co-workers Meyer Meyer and Arthur Brown.

Even though they come from one of the more reprehensible people in the station, Ollie’s observations match those of McBain himself, who complained that Hill Street Blues ripped off his series. McBain may overstate his case (for example, the put-upon Henry Goldblume who Joe Spano played on Hill Street Blues has none of the patience or gregarious Meyer Meyer), but he was right in general.

McBain’s books showed that stories about police work still needed to be stories, that they needed to have compelling characters. He may have maintained ultimate faith in the police as an institution, but he showed that the people who do the work are complicated and messy, often falling short of their noble intentions. Without McBain, we wouldn’t just lose some archetypes on Hill Street Blues. We wouldn’t have The Wire or The Shield, we wouldn’t have The French Connection or The Departed. For better or worse, the police procedural would have faded away without regular trips to the 87th Precinct.