Best Adventures of 1956 (8)
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August 4, 2016
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1956 adventure novels. Happy 60th anniversary!
Ed McBain’s crime adventure Cop Hater.
In the first installment in McBain’s long-running (~50 titles, over as many years) 87th Precinct series, detectives Steve Carella and Hank Bush respond to reports of a shooting, only to discover one of their own dead on the street. Soon, another detective is killed… and then, Bush too. Though he’s no genius, Carella figures out who’s behind all this: a cop hater! So in his persistent way, he does what it takes to catch the perp. Set in an unnamed, but New York-like city, Cop Hater would provide a template for future police procedurals, including cop shows like Hill Street Blues — which McBain furiously condemned as a ripoff. (Carella also reminds me of another not-bright, but streetwise and unflagging, fictional New Yorker: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Ben Grimm, aka The Thing. For one thing, both of them are married to beautiful disabled women, in Carella’s case the deaf-mute Teddy.) Here, we don’t find the romance of postwar detective fiction… just the flop sweat and flat feet of ordinary cops doing their jobs.
Fun fact: The author, Evan Hunter (also not his birth name), wrote the 1954 bestseller Blackboard Jungle; and he would go on to write the screenplay for Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds. Akira Kurosawa’s terrific 1963 police procedural, High and Low, was loosely based on McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom.
Let me know if I’ve missed any 1956 adventures that you particularly admire.