As someone who is both a policeman and who specializes in
police procedurals, it goes without saying that Ed McBain's
passing saddens me deeply. In many respects, McBain had an
influence on my choice both of professions. Of both my
professions.
McBain can't properly be called the "inventor" of the police
procedural. I suppose if anyone deserves that title, it's
Jack Webb, whose radio-TV series DRAGNET was, as McBain
himself often admitted, such a major influence on the 87th
Precinct novels. And, for that matter, there were many
predecessors to Webb.
Even the innovations McBain did take credit for were often
realized by other writers prior to McBain. The signature
"precinct detective squadroom" setting was also the hallmark
of Sidney Kingsley's classic stage play DETECTIVE STORY (in
which McBain once appeared as an actor).
The fictionalizing of Manhattan into "Isola" is anticipated
by retired British policeman Maurice Procter's Harry
Martineau series, in which the North England city of
Manchester becomes "Granchester," and by Leslie T. White's
two 1930's Southern California cop novels, HARNESS BULL and
HOMICIDE, in which Los Angeles becomes "American City."
Even the "corporate hero" concept, in which a group of police
officers share the lead rather than one single character
predominating, was anticipated in a series of novels about
the Railroad Police by Southern Pacific cop Bert Hitchens and
his wife, mystery writer Dolores Hitchens, that began one
year before McBain's COP HATER hit the stands.
But McBain put all these elements together in such a unique
way, that he seemed to be doing something that had never been
done before. If he wasn't the police procedural's "Dashiell
Hammett," forging a new trail to a different kind of crime
fiction, he was certainly the procedural's "Raymond
Chandler," taking the raw elements that had been discovered
by others and using them in a way that seems so entirely new
that he became the single most influential practitioner of
the sub-genre.
One point that should be made is how marvelously he evoked
setting. William DeAndrea once called the 87th Precinct
series "the greatest sustained literary examination of New
York City in American literature," while ironically,
"pretending not to be about New York at all." That's hard to
argue with. Years before I ever visited New York, I felt I
knew it through the novels about the 87th, and when I finally
did visit, I felt as though I was in a familiar place, for
having experienced it through McBain's work.
Another point that should be made is the extraordinarily high
quality McBain maintained throughout the nearly five decades
he wrote the series. In almost all long-lasting series a
certain fatigue sets in after awhile, and "jumping the shark"
becomes almost impossible to avoid. But McBain kept the saga
of the 87th Precinct marvelously fresh in every single
entry.
Anthony Boucher, when he first coined the term "police
procedural" in 1956 to describe a kind of crime fiction in
which the main interest is the authentic depiction of law
enforcement, singled out both Webb and McBain (as well as
Britain's J.J. Marric) as exemplars of this new type of
mystery. McBain, however, never liked the term, though he was
one of the people for whom Boucher coined it. He preferred to
be thought of a someone who wrote novels about cops.
He'll be missed, and he'll be in my prayers (though, lapsed
Catholic that he was, that will probably annoy him).
JIM DOHERTY
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