The 87th Precinct Logs Its 50th Adventure Without Missing a Beat

Forty-three years ago, Evan Hunter, using the pen name Ed McBain, wrote a paperback crime novel, “Cop Hater,” about a group of very human police detectives battling lawbreakers in a semi-fictitious metropolis he called Isola. Other mystery writers, notably Lawrence Treat, had been successfully working the police procedural beat for several years. Network television was brimming over with badge-wavers led by the dauntless Joe Friday. But McBain quickly moved past the pack with multidimensional characters, smart, realistic dialogue and satisfying plots. He published three “novels of the 87th Precinct” that first year, two the next and three the year after that. The 50th addition to the series, “The Last Dance” (Simon & Schuster, $25, 271 pages), has just arrived.

Among McBain’s many miracles (including the mere maintenance of a series for 50 installments) is his ability to keep his characters growing and experiencing changes while at the same time aging very little. His main hero, Det. Steve Carella, was 30-something in “Cop Hater” (which Pocket Books has just reprinted). He’s barely 40 when he and his longtime partner, Meyer Meyer, begin their latest assignment, an investigation into the death of an elderly man with a bad heart. The deceased’s daughter claims to have discovered him in his bed, but the condition of the corpse suggests something else--death by hanging. Why is she lying and why was the body moved?

Thus begins a serpentine tale that winds around a gunned-down stoolie, a Jamaican hit man who uses the date rape drug, a topless dancer, an assortment of theater folk (most of them obnoxiously self-centered), the revival of a musical that was a flop on Broadway in the 1920s and, most important, the men and women of the 87th. The stalwart Carella, the Talmudic Meyer, the perenially romantic Bert Kling, the impatient Arthur Brown and several of the secondary but fully envisioned members of the precinct family each form a key part of McBain’s murderous mosaic.

Sharing much of the action this time around is one of the author’s more unusual creations--Fat Ollie Weeks, a detective from the neighboring 88th. Described by Meyer as a “vast uncharted garbage dump,” the ever-ravenous Weeks is wildly eccentric, bigoted and odoriferous, but as we discover here, he’s not without his investigative skills.

If likable characters and strong plot were not enough, McBain offers a little extra by way of personal observations on the human condition. He also includes in-jokes, usually at his own expense, but not always. In a recent novel, he had a character insist that Alfred Hitchcock wrote the screenplay for “The Birds.” Evan Hunter did. In “Dance,” someone suggests that one of Frank Sinatra’s hits was “Strangers When We Meet.” That’s the title of a Hunter novel. The Sinatra song is “Strangers in the Night.” Best of all is Weeks’ annoyance at discovering that a recent novel boasts an unpleasant character named Fat Ollie Watts. One senses that McBain is just as annoyed at the unnamed book (actually, John Connolly’s “Every Dead Thing”), since he has Meyer say, “Oh, come on, Ollie, relax. This is just another Thomas Harris rip-off serial-killer novel.”

The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’ Gorman on audio books.

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* This Sunday: Martin Malia on “Messianic Revolution” and “Apocalypses”; David S. Katz on the siege at Waco, Texas; Judith Dunford on “Bogeyman: A Novel”; and Andre Aciman on the wonders of Proust.