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.
Ed McBain is, by far, the best represented author on my bookshelves, both under this pen name, and as Evan Hunter. There's a reason for that. He wrote the best damn police procedurals ever. Hill Street Blues? A straight, but uncredited, nick from the 87th Precint - in fact, in one of the novels the characters complain about someone spying on them and putting them on TV without their knowledge.
He wrote over 50 novels set in the halls of the 87th Precint squadroom. Some have been made into films - Kurosawa's "High and Low" is based on an early 87th precint novel, and you don't get much better than that. There have been short lives TV shows, even a comic book, but nothing can compare to the original. McBain is witty, funny, sharp, and moving. His characters are flawed, changeable, reedemable, three-dimensional. His plots are complex, thrilling, amusing, puzzling. And he dies about five years ago. I still have the final book he wrote unopened - I can't bring myself to say a final goodbye to the characters. So, in the meantime, every now and again, I pick up one of the old ones and re-read (and re-read and re-read).
"The Mugger" is the second in the series, dating back to 1956 and, in the edition I have, wrapped in the glorious "revolver and gallows" jacket of the Mystery Book Guild.
54 years: you would think it would date badly, wouldn't you? OK there are references to WWII and Korea, and the teenagers are (almost) straight out of West Side Story, but humanity never changes, and its capacity for lust, greed are constant, and expressed now pretty mugh exactly as they were back then. A mugger stalks the streets of a thinly disguised New York, a beautiful teenage girl get murdered, a patrolman uses his spare time to solve a crime and fall in love. will you guess whodunnit? You know, I can't remember if I did the first time I read it, and I know the answer now, but when I read it I still look forward with gleeful anticipation the the moment when the penny drops. And I look forward to the pleasure of re-reading all the rest of the series and maybe, one day a long way away, I will open the final book and bid a rueful farewell to Steve Carella, Meyer meyer, and the rest of the detectives of the 87th
