Learning to Kill starts out with a wonderful introduction, where McBain details the history of his start in the writing business: responding to a blind ad in the New York Times for an editor that turned out to be from a literary agency. He almost turned it down when he discovered it was an agency, but quickly changed his mind when he found out why the person he was replacing was leaving. It turns out that he was making too much money writing his own stories to make staying in that position worth it. McBain jumped at the chance, and the rest is history. Once he was established, he began submitting his own work as well as handling other clients, and many of these stories are published in this book. The book is appropriately named as he was literally learning and honing his craft here. Along with the introduction to the book, I found the previews of the stories very interesting too, as he tells where the story was published (mostly in "Manhunt" magazine, but there are a few others) and gives some background on it. This background, written fifty years after the fact, is definitely intriguing.

The meat of the book, however, is the stories, and there are definitely some good ones here. The book is divided into subject sections: Kids, Women in Jeopardy, Private Eyes, Cops and Robbers, Innocent Bystanders, Loose Cannons, and Gangs. Most impressive to me were the ones dealing with cops, as that seems to be where he's most comfortable (as fifty years of 87th Precinct novels can attest). Each of these was written with ease and just flew off the page. I really found it interesting that he said he didn't do research because he wasn't getting paid enough for each story to do much research. All of his police procedures were taken from Dragnet and other outside sources. None of the stories in this section have any real twists and turns, instead being straight police procedurals where the cops do the digging and eventually find the killer. While they're not complex, I found the simplicity refreshing.