Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

I still haven't brought myself to read the final McBain 87th Precinct book, "Fiddlers", published shortly before his death.  I don't want it ever to be over, this relationship with his cast of assorted cops.  So instead I find myself dipping into the back catalogue from time to time, re-reading and enjoying as much as ever.

"Lullaby" is from a less than happy period in the existence of the 87th Precinct.  I don't know if it mirrored some feeling of the author's that the world, or New York at least, wasn't what it had been.  There is little of the levity that brightens the earlier books - Meyer Meyer, so fond of funny stories, is at his most antipathetic.  I don't think I have ever before read him swear at and about a suspect.  There is little interaction between Steve Carella (the nominal "lead man" of the 87th Precinct) and his wife, while his children are present only by mention of their existence.  I wouldn't say that McBain was out of love with his characters, but I can't help that his characters were out of love with their lives.  And it would take a good few years before the general tone of the series lightened up, when McBain decided that the redemption of New Yorkers could be exemplified by that of Ollie Weeks, the hitherto unloved (and unloveable) unreconstructed bigot.


Enough of the  overall arc - what about this one book itself - how does it hang together after twenty years?  Well, it is great to read again stories where the solution doesn't lie in Internet searches, DNA tests and mobile phone records, but in relentless, plodding, fruitless footwork and interviewing.  McBain weaves together three separate storylines - the murder of a baby and baby-sitter, and double- and triple-crossing drug deal, and a soap-opera thread about a policewoman's fears of remaining in the job.  Separately, each thread is slight, but together make for a well-paced read, with each storyline being cut into and away from in order to achieve dramatic tension.    As a one-off read, it probably wouldn't make any new converts - too much depends on a familiarity with the cast, but a satisfying chapter in the 87th Precinct's story for any McBain fan.

Unputdownability : Lots of convenient chapter breaks make this a "cut-and-come-again" salad.