Rule of Thumb

"We need to nail this fast."

- Gene Hunt (BBC's Life on Mars) 

The comprehensive scope of Tipping My Fedora encompasses "mystery, crime and suspense in all media" and Sergio, in charge of the outfit, is currently in the process of reviewing the entire 87th Precinct-series by "Ed McBain" – a penname wielded by the late Evan Hunter. Sergio did his part in putting Killer's Wedge (1959) and Tricks (1987) in my hands, and they didn't disappoint, in addition to tossing another burden on my wish list. Thanks a lot, chum!

Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (1960) was the eleventh to appear in the row of 87th Precinct books, covering six decades, but the first to be published in a period no longer dominated by the bright light of the Golden Age. The moody, somber backdrop of a drenched city and the nature of the plot seem to (unwittingly) reflect the passing of the old order into a new and uncertain era.

First of the character vignettes in the novel is of a patrolman, Dick Genero, sloughing through his beat in the pouring rain on a dreary afternoon in March. Genero muses on the sordid business that comes with being a policeman and bums a drink from Max the Tailor, but the day takes a turn for the worse when he sees a passenger boarding a bus without his or her bag. It's a small, common looking bag from an airline with exception of its content: a large hand severed above the wrist with mutilated fingertips.

Genero takes the bag post-haste to the precinct and interrupts the boys reminiscing about their days in uniform, but, curiously enough, Genero only receives flack for not attempting to board to bus at the next stop. I'm sure removing that bag from the scene wasn't standard police procedure. Even if its rains. Anyhow, an examination reveals the hand belonged to a white male in his early-teens to mid-twenties... probably.

There's not much to work with for Steve Carella and his men except to comb through the list of missing persons and the structure of the story, strangely, reminded me of an episode of CSI (*). Forensics comes from examining the severed hands (other one was found in a trash can) and analyzing blood spatters-and types. Detectives are fleshed out in brief character sketches detailing past experiences or personal reflections, without dominating the entire story, while they "meet people on the worst day of their lives," but despite that there's still humor to be found in McBain's dark and gritty world. The conclusion is inevitably tragic and I'm sure something similar was done on CSI, because it would fit the show. Or, perhaps, 87th Precinct-series would be perfect for television adaptation. I think these stories would translate very well to the small screen.

Anyhow, I'm not very good in reviewing these character-driven crime stories, plots are my department, but I liked Give the Boys a Great Big Hand for its engrossing, semi-hardboiled story telling, slow unwinding plot and the picture of the city being drowned by a seemingly unending cloudburst. Shortly put, McBain could write and I'll be back for more.

*) I had a CSI-period, but, in my defense, Max Allan Collins duplicitously lured me to the franchise when someone recommended his TV tie-in novels of the series. Unfortunately, all three TV-series managed to lose my attention when the characterization began to resemble a parody of a daytime soap opera.  

Note before posting: I read back this post and it's really a poor review. Sergio does the book more justice and I recommend you read his review(s), if you want to be really convinced to give this series a shot.  

A Fish Out of Water

"Things were certainly bad when a respectable communications officer began playing gumshoe."

- Lt. Chuck Masters (Murder in the Navy, 1955) 

A year before the late Evan Hunter adopted the Ed McBain moniker for the 87th Precinct series, which ran for fifty years, there was a crime novel with the stylistic trappings of a traditional whodunit, Murder in the Navy, published under the Richard Marsten byline – later reissued as Death of a Nurse (1955) as by Ed McBain.

U.S.S. Sykes is a U.S. Navy destroyer and the backdrop for Death of a Nurse, on which the well-oiled, but routine, existence of the sailors is disrupted by Navy Day sight-seers and the discovery of the body of a Navy nurse in the radar shack. The reader witnesses how her boyfriend throttles Claire Cole to death without learning his identity and the case becomes a brass concern.

An investigative board of naval officers is formed, one of them being Lt. Chuck Masters, the story's protagonist, and a pair of FBI agents are send down to look into the case – which promised a nice contrasting of amateur and professional detective work. Frederick Norton and Matthew Dickason are G-Men, however, they look and act more like a snotty amateur reasoner of some celebrity of a bygone age and his Dr. Watson, but they let the captain know who's in charge of the inquiry – restricting the investigative board to gathering facts for the ship log. Nonetheless, they scooped up a handful of names from the sea of suspects by employing the same method: who were in possession of the keys to the radar shack and were, at one time or another, committed to the hospital ward and on leave during a specific period.

They had four names to pick from and that makes for a joyful game of whodunit, but, unfortunately, a second murder is written off as the suicide of Claire Cole's murderer. Consumed by remorse or feeling the hangman's noose tighten and preferred to chuck himself overboard, but the reader witnessed the unknown, shadowy assailant attacking and rolling him into the water beneath them. Here the official and investigative board, under pressure and after roughly sixty pages, closes the case and that takes the urgency out of the story – which rapidly deteriorates into a run-of-the-mill crime novel.

Lt. Masters is convinced that the murderer is still at large, but is forced to stop snooping around and ordered to accept the official explanation. Meanwhile, Masters and the unknown murderer are developing an interest in nurse Jean Dvorak, but at this point in the story, I was only able to marvel at the breathtaking stupidity at how some of the characters were poking and agitating the murderer – especially the last one to fall. He was one step away from dropping on his knees and popping out a small, velvet lined box containing a shiny cyanide capsule and asking, "will you murder me?"

McBain probably realized this and tried to excuse the victim by letting Jean confess that he was a good boy inside, who loved to violate classic compositions on his violin. The defense should probably take note of that. Hey, I try to keep this review up beat and you should sing my praise for not going with "Through a Keel-Haul" as a post-title for this shoddily written review.

Anyway, to whom did Jean make this confession, alongside a truckload of pesky questions about Cole Claire, while pretending to fall for this persons advances? The man who she happens to gravely suspect of having killed three people and successfully eluded investigators from different bureaus and organizations... while alone and slowly being undressed. Three of the four (would-be) victims could've easily aired their suspicions in saver environment to officials, but they practically went in front of him (the second one on an abandoned part of the ship in the dark) while saying, "I know what you did and it's going to ruin your life." I accept one dummy like that, but there were all together three of them (minus Claire Cole, who was the true victim of this book) and only one of them survived.

Death of a Nurse is well written as a story of crime, but lousy as a detective novel and that was what it posed like for the first quarter of the book. I expected more from the author of Killer's Wedge (1957) and Tricks (1987).

Finally, I wanted to come back on my previous review and I wanted to make a separate post for it, but it would've been a very short one. Anyhow, Marco Books pointed out one of the "Easter Eggs" that he had hidden in Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), which I had shamefully missed. I mentioned in my review that the video security of the house showed a lot of animals passing by and the first to "discover" the murder was an inquisitive tomcat, who tried to further investigate the trail of blood, but, ironically, couldn't get in on account of a locked front door and plaintively meows like the cat from A.C. Baantjer's DeKok and the Sorrowing Tomcat (1969). Again, thank you for that wonderful cameo(w)! 

And will I be stopped before spinning the purr-fect pun? Find out in the next blog post.

Closing the Gates of Hell

"The perfect murder, sir? Oh, I'm sorry. There's no such thing as a perfect murder. That's just an illusion."

- Lt. Columbo (Now You See Him, 1976) 

The name of Evan Hunter's alter ego, "Ed McBain," has become more noticeable, while perusing reviews and other related blog material, after having read Killer's Wedge (1957) – a story that warranted a follow up. One of the later novels in the 87th Precinct series, Tricks (1987), lured me with an appetizing synopsis of a Hellish shift on All Hallows' Eve.

"Halloween ain't what it used to be," reflects Andy Parker in a police squad room that has not been that quiet probably since the construction of the building, and bored policemen with too much time on their hands begin to nurture work distorted fantasies of becoming (crime) writers. Before the dawn of the next day, those peaceful moments of them reminiscing in the squad room has become as distant a memory as the old cases they were talking about.

The first problem that's plaguing them is the disappearance of The Great Sebastian, who was reported missing by his wife, Marie Sebastiani, after discovering that her husband's van was gone and their stage props discarded on the sidewalk. And their apprentice/jack-of-all-trades, Jimmy Brayne, has vanished alongside the great magician himself. A fitting case for Halloween, but far more ghoulish is the murderer who's cruising the streets for spots to dump body parts, even posing a waist with a pair of trouser clad legs in an elevator, and these two plot treads represent the classics and weaved a traditional pattern that I very much appreciated – even if I caught on almost immediately to the tricks that were being played. Granted, McBain did not exactly made a secret out of the solution, especially if you know your classics, but I nonetheless enjoyed this part of the story and loved the Columbo-like pouncing at the end. But there's more!

A gang of costumed children are wreaking havoc on the streets, sticking up liquor stores and they shoot before dipping into the cash registry, which leaves a trail of bodies that lead the police to a blonde woman, who drives the kids around, and puts Carella and his men in the line of fire – wounding two of them. Obviously, not as traditional a crime story as the other threads, but hats off to McBain, he had me fooled on one aspect until they did something peculiar during the second (or was that third?) robbery. It's something you easily miss on an evening like Halloween. 

Hunter & McBain: two men who could laugh at themselves

Character-wise, the main protagonist of Trick was Eileen Burke, who's the bait in an undercover operation at Larry's sleazy bar at the Canal Zone, but on a previous assignment Burke was raped and the guy they’re after now is about as dangerous – and the question is if she can face her demons and not lose her head on this job. But the scenes between the murderer, a self-styled comedian, with first Sheryl, a regular of the district who may've been the next victim of The Ripper in Stitches (*rib poke* get it?), and than Eileen laughing at his jokes, while buying them drinks, gave this storyline an unusual angle. But, oh, how annoyed I was at foreseeing that there would be moment were Eileen was doubting that his intentions, even after feeling a knife in his pocket.

All in all, Tricks is a nice bag of treats with enough different flavors to satisfy a good portion of the readers huddling under the umbrella of crime/mystery fiction, from traditional puzzles to a character invested thriller story, and I think McBain is a great example of a writer who updated the detective story to modern standards without shrieking and repelling at the thought of having to plot as well.

In short: McBain is a keeper! 

Rest in Pieces?

"I've never been a cop nor hope to be a cop, thanks."

- Evan Hunter. 

Ed McBain was perhaps the best known penname of the late Evan Hunter, a prolific author of crime and mystery novels, whose 87th Precinct stories are still being praised for its portrayal of a policemen and their daily struggle against crime, but I have seen McBain's work only in diluted form – like his completion of the unfinished manuscript, The April Robin Murders (1958), that Craig Rice left behind upon her death.

I have wanted to sample one of the 87th Precinct novels ever since my radical attitude towards post-WWII mystery writers began to taw, but before that fairly benevolent proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books posted a review of Killer's Wedge (1959), describing a hostile cat-and-mouse game with a locked room puzzle looming in the background, I had nothing to aim for. Well, it still took a year and a few months for it to reach the top of the pile, but it got there and sometimes it's worth to be picky when tackling a new writer.

A large slice of the story told in Killer's Wegde takes place in the squad room of the precinct, where a group of detectives are being held hostage, which began when Virginia Dodge sailed into the room brandishing a gun and a bag containing a jar of nitroglycerine!

Dodge is described as Death personified, "she had deep black hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head... brown eyes set in a face without make-up, without lipstick, a face so chalky white that it seemed she had just come from a sickbed somewhere," who's more than willing to complete the illusion by announcing that she has come to kill Detective Steve Carella. Dodge holds their colleague responsible for the death of her husband, who died in prison, and I wonder if the writer of Columbo had this book in mind when they wrote Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo (1990), which is not out of the question, since a few episodes were based on stories by McBain. Anyway, the wedge in her plan is that Carella is out on a case and so they have to wait until he returns.

The case that requires Carella attention stands in stark contrast to the premise set fort in the first chapters and throws the reader back to the days of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, who's referenced when Carella muses over the case. It appears as if the patriarch of the wealthy Scott family, and business tycoon, took his own life at his mansion by throwing a rope over a beam and tying the other end to the doorknob in a windowless room – bolting the door from the inside before hanging himself. The door had to be practically destroyed at the seams with a crowbar to gain access, and not before cutting the rope, which makes suicide a very tenable theory. Interestingly, the reader becomes privy of information that never reaches Carella, who has to reach the solution by pure reasoning – giving the reader an extra edge over the detective.

I suspected the correct solution even before forensics confirmed that it was murder, but I still enjoyed it because I have been on the look-out for a locked room mystery that would use it. The crux to the create the locked room is so simple and obvious that I have always been convinced that it had to been use, and it was proposed as a false solution in a novel from the 1930s, but never as the actual explanation and I have to give it to McBain for how he handled it.

Meanwhile, back at the squad room, the tension is slowly becoming unbearable as the detectives and Dodge engage in a dangerous battle of wits, a swelling pool of hostages (consisting of a wounded cop and a prisoner), several attempts to communicate with their (dense?) colleagues, but the shrew has firm grip on the gun – and all the while she keeps everyone guessing whether there's actual nitroglycerine in the jar. McBain weaved two separate stories, a character-and a plot driven one, together into a great, snappy page turner that was, for me, an excellent introduction to his 87th Precinct series. It's obvious that the author of Killer's Wedge embraced the new direction that crime fiction was taking at the time, but it's gratifying to see McBain was also one of those writers who occasionally glanced in the rearview mirror to determine how well he was going down that new route. As a result, Killer's Wedge is a book that can be appreciated by detective and thriller/crime fans alike.

Sergio from Tipping My Fedora also reviewed this book a while ago and delved deeper into the characters populating the plot. I'm just here to give the plot my stamp of approval.