Ed McBain and The 87th Precinct

Hark! It's an 87th Precinct Podcast Article!

Once again the website We Are Cult is kindly playing home to our expressions of love for McBain and the 87th Precinct books. You might remember we appeared as Podcast Of The Week a little while ago.This time they're featuring an article by Paul. You'll find a little bit about McBain himself, stuff about captivating qualities of the 87th Precinct books and some explanation about why we started the podcast.

Click the link below to have a read!

http://wearecult.rocks/ed-mcbain-and-the-87th-precinct

Side-Pod - Star Trek Assignment Earth: DISCO BEAR

Hark! It’s an 87^th Precinct Podcast Sidepod!

We slip time-streams today and end up in the 23^rd Century before being whizzed straight back to the 20^th Century, 1968 to be precise, as we look at what could have been Star Trek’s swan-song. The episode “Assignment: Earth” was the final episode of season two of Star Trek at a time when the show was threatened with cancellation. This episode was intended as a back-door pilot for a new spin-off.

So how does this relate to the gritty and down to earth world of Ed McBain and the 87^th Precinct? Well, it’s linked by two very thin strands. The main star of the episode is the best on-screen version of Detective (2^nd Grade) Steve Carella, Robert Lansing as Gary Seven and also Leonard Nimoy who starred as a skinny-tie wearing, car-hiring, drug-running baddy in the 87^th Precinct TV series in 1961.

Joining Paul for the chat is illustrator, educator and all-round sci-fi nerd, Adam Paxman. Search for his various art outputs online: Mister Paxman’s Glorious Bastards, The Museum of Fragmented Shadows and BurningZebra: The Abandoned Storybook – a treasure trove of grotesques, horrors, intrigue, sci-fi, adventure and philosophy in various forms.

Wordcloud - The Titles of The 87th Precinct novels

We switched K.E.N.N.E.T.H. into "Word Cloud" mode over the weekend. We fed in the titles of all of the 87th Precinct novels, stoked his boiler, pulled the lever marked "Go" and then interpreted the resulting punched-card output as follows:

The process removes common linking words, to try and highlight which words are used more often. It's an interesting result in that "Money" appears to be one of the main words but it simply features three times as the title of one book ("Money, Money, Money", 2001). "Hail" also appears three times, but again as a duplicate ("Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here", 1971 and also "Hail To The Chief", 1973).

"Lady" is similar - appearing in two titles as a duplicate and singularly ("Lady Killer", 1958 and "Lady, Lady I Did It", 1961). "Killer's" appears as a result of the three early novels, the Killer's Trilogy, if you like, but otherwise it's clear that Evan/Ed was great at coming up with unique titles for the books, picking out words or phrases that were memorable enough that in most cases they were either released as single word titles ("Ice", "Lightning", "Vespers" for example) or had a key single word element (Heckler, Hand, Ransom). 

Looking Back - Cop Hater

Shall we take a trip down memory lane, to 1956 and the release of the first 87th Precinct novel, "Cop Hater" by Ed McBain - a pseudonym of Evan Hunter?

Copyright for Cop Hater was registered on the 20th March 1956, as can be seen in the "Catalog of Copyright Entries" for the year:

It was published by Permabooks - an imprint of Doubleday begun in 1948, out of their Manhattan office. Part of Permabook's mission statement was to produce "Books for reference, recreation and self-improvement". By 1954 Doubleday had sold the imprint to "Pocket Books" and Cop Hater was published by them on 10th April 1956 with serial M-3707.

The New York Times first reference to the book that would start this extraordinary series of police procedural books was simply this:

The novel was reviewed in the 29th April '56 edition of the NYT, by Anthony Boucher in his "Criminals At Large" column. Boucher himself was an author and editor of mystery and "fantastic fiction" writing. His review of Cop Hater says, "McBain has caught TV's semi-documentary flavor excellently. He's written a tough, sexy novel with inherent honesty and decency." (Full Text)

The UK release (by publisher T.V.Boardman) was reviewed in The Observer on 4/1/59 by Maurice Richardson who considered it "Efficient and Violent [with] convincingly detailed description of police procedure". Richardson further suggested that the book is "Crudely plotted but unforced" and states, rather grandly, "The development of this form is important for the future".

On June 5 '57 the NYT was reporting that newly formed film company, Barbizon films, was planning to make movies of COP HATER and THE MUGGER. Filming was reported to have started on August 6, 1957 with William Berke directing and Robert Loggia as "Carelli" (named changed from "Carella" for some reason!). Editing for the movie of Cop Hater was scheduled to finish by 20th Sept '57 (45 days to shoot & edit a film!) before filming on The Mugger began. The movie opened on 1st October ‘58. A review in the NYT the next day described the “inept direction” & said the best thing about it was that it featured relatively unknown actors.

Should you want to hear our take on Ed McBain's Cop Hater from the 87th Precinct series, our very first ever bumper size podcast episode is available here, or on anyof the main podcast providers.

Ed McBain's King's Ransom - Episode 10, Bonus: As If It Twere A Serpent's Tongue

Hark! It's the 87th Precinct Podcast Bonus Episode!

Join in again with our first birthday party, as we muse on Party Blowers, bakelite telephones and unidentified oscillators, the 87th Precinct TV series episode "King's Ransom" and answer some listener questions and queries. We discuss whether there should be a British novelisation of a Tollywood version of a Bollywood version of a Japanese Version of this American book.

Everyone's favourite peculiarly-accented ghost, Groff Conklin, pops by to give us some extra information! Right-ho - we'll be back soon for "Give The Boys A Great Big Hand"! Please like, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts!