Justice & Law Quote by Evan Hunter

There’s a quiet provocation in Hunter’s word choice: “the only valid people.” Valid to whom, and for what kind of story? He isn’t praising cops as moral avatars so much as staking out jurisdiction. Crime fiction, in his view, had leaned too hard on lone wolves and exceptional geniuses. By insisting on cops as the “valid” operators, he’s shifting the genre’s center of gravity from the romantic outsider to the institution that processes violence as routine.

The second move is the real innovation: demoting the lead. Making the protagonist “a squad” isn’t just a formal experiment; it’s a statement about how modern urban life works. A squad implies bureaucracy, paperwork, hierarchy, bad coffee, grudges, jokes, fatigue - the unsexy mechanisms that actually produce justice, or at least closure. It also smuggles in ambiguity. A single hero can be redeemed; a unit can be competent, compromised, indifferent, occasionally noble, and still keep moving. That’s a more plausible moral weather system.

Context matters: Hunter is sketching the DNA of what became the 87th Precinct, the template for the police procedural as we now recognize it. Postwar America was thick with faith in systems and anxiety about cities. His squad idea taps both: reassuring readers that order has a method, while admitting that method is impersonal. The subtext is blunt: crime isn’t solved by charisma. It’s handled by teams, and teams are where the messiness lives.