#20Series20Days Day 11: 87th Precinct
Ed McBain took the noir private-eye aesthetic -- flawed heroes, moral ambiguity, urban settings, ironic humor, punchy prose -- and applied it to this long-running series of cop stories set in a fictional city that was basically New York. I'm a fan of the mood and the characters but especially the writing whose terse power could out-Hemingway Hemingway.