Andrew
This is a good story in its own right, but is also fascinating as a pop cultural time capsule. Published in 1956, this book is one of the predecessors of the modern police procedural but it reads almost like an anti-thriller. As one character says early in the story, you don't have to be smart to be a detective; you just have to be persistent enough to keep chasing leads. And then they spend the next hundred pages slowly and methodically chasing down leads.
You could not write a book like this today because the way cops are portrayed in media, the way they think about themselves, the public opinion on crime, gang violence, etc., is so radically different from the attitude of the 1950s. Gangs in this book are described as teenagers in matching jackets who occasionally get into rumbles and it's treated like, "Oh, boys will be boys." A cop's partner is gunned down by the killer and instead of going crazy with grief or dragging in any suspect he can get his hands on, the cop essentially shrugs it off, says it could happen to anyone, and goes back to flipping through ID books. There's one amusing bit where the lab techs have to explain how they can identify the killer's blood type from a sample, because that type of forensics was so relatively new at the time that it wasn't necessarily in the public consciousness yet.
The dialogue was snappy and it's a fast reading book thst left me very interested in reading more of the lengthy 87th Precinct series to see if and how the portrayal of cops in the media changes over the decades.
This is a good story in its own right, but is also fascinating as a pop cultural time capsule. Published in 1956, this book is one of the predecessors of the modern police procedural but it reads almost like an anti-thriller. As one character says early in the story, you don't have to be smart to be a detective; you just have to be persistent enough to keep chasing leads. And then they spend the next hundred pages slowly and methodically chasing down leads.
You could not write a book like this today because the way cops are portrayed in media, the way they think about themselves, the public opinion on crime, gang violence, etc., is so radically different from the attitude of the 1950s. Gangs in this book are described as teenagers in matching jackets who occasionally get into rumbles and it's treated like, "Oh, boys will be boys." A cop's partner is gunned down by the killer and instead of going crazy with grief or dragging in any suspect he can get his hands on, the cop essentially shrugs it off, says it could happen to anyone, and goes back to flipping through ID books. There's one amusing bit where the lab techs have to explain how they can identify the killer's blood type from a sample, because that type of forensics was so relatively new at the time that it wasn't necessarily in the public consciousness yet.
The dialogue was snappy and it's a fast reading book thst left me very interested in reading more of the lengthy 87th Precinct series to see if and how the portrayal of cops in the media changes over the decades.