My to-read pile is completely out of control these days. So why would I make a special effort to check out the first book of a series that has over 50 (50!) books in the series? It’s all Lawrence Block’s fault. He raved so much in The Crime of Our Lives about Evan Hunter who wrote this 87th precinct series under the McBain pen name that I started feeling guilty about never having read any of them. In fact, as a mystery fan I was ashamed to realize that the only Hunter/McBain I could recall check...

Cop Hater by Ed McBain is a 2012 Thomas & Mercer publication. This book was originally published way back in 1956 and is the first in the 87th precinct series, one of the longest running crime series in history, with a whopping fifty-five installments. I’m not one hundred percent positive, but as far as I can tell, the entire series of books is available in the Amazon Kindle store, the digital format published by Thomas & Mercer, I believe. I also noticed that some of the books are part of the K...

The first entry in the 87th Precinct series. The series starts with a bang. The weather and the city are "characters" in this tale along with the cops of the 87th. The city of Isola isn't as fleshed out in this first book as it is in later books.

My first experience of the 87th Precinct novels was good fun, unexpected in its style and content but an enjoyable read. Having recently read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets I felt that the banter and camerarderie of the station house detectives felt both familiar and authentic which for me helped to give the book the edge over continuing or giving up early on.It's a novel that's nearly 60 years old now and it hasn't really dated which is incredibly impressive. Sure we've all become immu...

Robust first title (1956) starts the long-running 87th Precinct cop series. "Cop hater" takes out cops. Uses lots of 1950s CSI forensics. Heat wave hitting Isola (sort of made-up city) jacks up the misery. Terse dialogue.

Gritty, lean, and at times surprisingly romantic, the first entry in the 87th Precinct series remains one of the best. Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle and screenwriter for Hitchcock’s, The Birds, is better known today as Ed McBain because of the 87th Precinct series. He wrote Cop Hater in 1955 in hopes of filling a void being created at Pocket Books by the slightly diminishing output of the prolific Erle Stanley Gardner. The 87th Precinct novels not only filled that void, they broke...

When a cop is cut down with a .45, Detectives Carella and Bush spring into action. But can they stop the killer before he kills again?I was looking for another crime series to begin reading when the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain caught my eye. I'd read one McBain book before, The Gutter and the Grave, and I enjoyed it enough to take a change on the long long long series of 87th Precinct books.. Cop Hater is a police procedural about someone killing cops, set in the fictional city of Isola. W...

An engaging start for Steve Carella and the rest of the 87th Precinct gang. The author, writing as Ed McBain, is on to something big. Something that has had a major influence on storytelling in movies, TV, and the growth of the reality cop genre. You may have seen these quotes but they are worth including:"I think Evan Hunter, known by that name or as Ed McBain, was one of the most influential writers of the postwar generation. He was the first writer to successfully merge realism with genre fic...

My dad was a huge Ed McBain fan, so of course, I spent some of my teenage years with the guys in the 87th Precinct, but I never read the entire series, in order, starting at the beginning. Anyway, here goes . . . book number one.It's been almost 30 years since I visited the gang, but there's an old, comfortable feeling right from the first pages. It was easy to settle right in and make myself at home. I've always loved McBain's descriptions. He makes it easy to experience the sights, the smells,...

It is always a great pleasure to read the lean and mean novels of Ed McBain especially if it is from the 87th Precinct series.I came across my first Ed McBain novel in a cabinet on a wall second hand bookshop. I am not joking, the shop was just a cabinet on the wall of a building. But, the shop had an incredible collection of English books - from the classics to contemporary, from literary fiction to pulp fiction and also comics. This shop had played a key role in developing my love affair with

A real classic...When a cop is shot down in the street one night, the squad from the 87th Precinct in Isola swing into action. At first the reason for the shooting isn't known. Was it random? Was it personal? But when another cop from the precinct is killed in the same way it begins to look like there's a cop hater on the loose. Now Detective Steve Carella and his colleagues have two reasons to find the killer quickly – to get justice for their fellow officers and to stop the perpetrator before

Mine is a 1989 edition by Books On Tape. Not abridged, read by Paul Shay who added absolutely NOTHING to the book. Actually, his voice just sucked. It wasn't a bad novel, although dated. That added to & subtracted from it, but more adds, IMO. I got a little tired of McBain explaining things that we've come to take for granted like fingerprints, but I guess some of the stuff wasn't common knowledge back when he wrote it. It really added to the atmosphere & tone, though.The tone of the book is dog...

A gritty police procedural set in the 1950s in a mythical major city, USA. The characters are interesting -- although they are dropping like flies.

Ed McBain's first (of many!) 87th Precinct novels is a staightforward police procedural story. For a novel written in 1956 there are some moments of surprising violence, but the atmosphere the author creates is always one of believability.

Originally published in 1956, this is the first novel in Ed McBain's long-running 87th Precinct series. It introduces Steve Carella, who would be the most prominent of the detectives that McBain created to populate his mythical precinct; it also introduces the large mythical city where the books are set and which is based loosely on New York City. As the book opens, a plain clothes police detective is shot and killed as he is walking to work. The investigation into the killing has barely begun w...

I usually start with a corpse. I then ask myself how the corpse got to be that way and I try to find out - just as the cops would. I plot, loosely, usually a chapter or two ahead, going back to make sure that everything fits - all the clues are in the right places, all the bodies are accounted for...(I) believe strongly in the long arm of coincidence because I know cops well, I know how much it contributes to the solving of real police cases. --Ed McBain, on writing an 87th Precinct novel.For

Synopsis/blurb...Swift, silent and deadly, someone is killing the 87th Precinct's finest...When Detective Reardon is found dead, motive is a big question mark. But when his partner becomes victim number two, it looks like open-and-shut grudge killings. That is, until a third detective is murdered.With one meagre clue, Detective Steve Carella begins his grim search for the killer, a search that takes him into the city's underworld to a notorious brothel, to the apartment of a beautiful and danger...

If I had forgotten why I liked Ed McBain, COP HATER would have made that process a whole lot easier for me. As it was, this was one novel of his that I knew I hadn’t read (so why not start at the ground floor?), and this was a series I knew I enjoyed, mainly because it’s built around a real (albeit made-up) world with a group of 87th Precinct detectives leading the charge, any of whom could end up on the cutting room floor at any time for any reason. If that isn’t enough to scare you straight, t...

Here is a novel where the men are the men, the women are the women, and never the 'twain shall understand each other. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just leads to some pretty chuckle-worthy writing in regards to the vast gulf between the two sexes, such as where Carella finds his partner’s wife & their home so female & cloying that he somehow “had the feeling she would suddenly explode into a thousand flying fragments of breast and hip & thigh, splashed over the landscape like a Dali pai...

I wanted to rate this one higher, since it had a real cool retro vibe that didn't bore me. Plain clothes detectives start getting popped in a largely unairconditioned and sweating New York in the late fifties. A mad man or something else? While you're trying to figure that out, McBain dumps considerable portions of standard police procedure on you, which was probably pretty interesting and groundbreaking back in the day, some gritty language (shit, screw, etc.), and a few chicks needing showers