Evan ‘Ed McBain’ Hunter is one of my favorite authors. His 87th Precinct series ran for over half a century, always reflecting the attitudes, trends and mores of the day. Hunter is excellent at capturing the cultural zeitgeist: The Mugger is as quintessentially Fifties as, say, Lightning is undoubtedly Eighties and Fat Ollie’s Book is peak Noughties.
‘First Offense’, I would argue, bucks that trend, as a genuinely timeless piece. It is, like the 87th Precinct, a procedural: it follows a young man as he’s booked on his first offense, and goes through the process of being charged and interviewed by the police. But the nuts and bolts are secondary.
Stevie, 17, starts his journey hardened and cynical, but regresses before our eyes, finally ending as a weeping and confused child. Hunter captures the essence of adolescence: of being half-man and half-boy, trapped between knowledge and ignorance, in the world but not yet of it. He also captures the system that is there to process, not care; solutions, not sympathy. The details of ‘First Offense’ may feel dated, but the most salient human and social elements of it are still relevant today.
First published in Manhunt, 1955. Collected in Learning to Kill, Harcourt, 2006
A Personal Anthology 