Finished Sa 7/20/24
It's one of my ancient paperbacks and this is the first novel in the '87th Precinct' series (1956).
Detectives were being murdered in the '87th'. The connection is not connected to police work, but it's one 'evil' woman who was dissatisfied with her love life.
From 'shigekuni' wordpress.com:
"...Now, this woman is odd from the beginning. She is first shown us as a sexpot who does not offer her husband the sex he craves. In fact she teases him and turns him away. Strike One. Then she dresses slightly provocative at a funeral, enough to get a detective to have dirty thoughts. Strike Two. Finally, she transformed an apartment into some feminine nightmare that a manly police officer cannot possibly want to live in. It’s enough to terrify the lead detective on the case. His encounter with the woman ends thusly: “He was beginning to feel a little more comfortable with Alice. Maybe she wasn’t so female, after all.” – But of course she is very female. Strike Three. All these indications are not of course, real indications of crimes being committed, they are simple misogyny in action. However, the book uses the reader’s bigoted disapproval of nonstandard (submissive) female behavior in order to build a case against Alice that runs parallel to the police precinct’s borderline competent work. And when we finally see who did it, the book allows to quietly let these elements fall into place. In fact, Cop Hater even offers us a “good woman” in contrast: a woman who is literally unable to speak, who has no will of her own, who exists to love her boyfriend and be self conscious about her own shortcomings."
The section where the author describes Alice is some of the most anit-feminine piece of writing that I've ever seen. That was worth the price of admission.
Ed McBain is a pen name for Evan Hunter.
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