Sadly, I appear to have read an entirely different book to most of the other people who’ve reviewed it online. I say sadly, because I thought it was terrible. In fact, I even thought the back page was dreadful. The opening line informed me that ‘Gloria Stanford was very sexy, very rich and very, very dead.’ I’m not even sure why I found that off-putting, apart from the unnecessary prevalence of ‘very’, but it irritated me before I even began reading. (Why did I read it? Because I’m a member of a crime fiction reading group and I always try to read the books they select, even when I don’t really like the look of them. Yes, I do think there are probably better ways to spend my time, but I’d hate to judge a book by its blurb…)

It’s probably important to state right away that I am a total newcomer to this series about the fictional 87th precinct. Ed McBain was a prolific crime writer until he passed away in 2005 and this seems to have been one of his most popular series, containing more than fifty books published over his lifetime. It’s based in New York City, which is rather thinly disguised, and focuses on a group of police officers, rather than one dark, brooding hero. Possibly, part of my underwhelmed reaction to the book is because there are so many references to events from other books that I hadn’t read. However, I think that this could stand alone as the case it deals with is resolved within the book; my dislike is more because I found events so unengaging.

In the opening chapter, the villain kills a double crossing ex partner in crime. As the detectives at the precinct try to solve the case, they quickly realise that the perpetrator is someone they have failed to arrest on several previous occasions and that he is in the process of organising another crime. How do they know this? Because the villain sends them typed notes on a more-than-daily basis informing them of his plans. Of course, this assistance could make their jobs a little too easy, so the villain writes in code: anagrams followed by Shakespearean references. As the date of the planned crime gets closer, the detectives continue to agonise over the mysterious clues – and their love lives. Can they solve the puzzle? Can they stop the crime? And might they finally catch the notorious Deaf Man?

My thoughts

I found it difficult to engage with this story from the very beginning. Something about the style unaccountably irked me. Take this example:

‘It was the shrug that told her he was going to kill her. Well, maybe that and the gun in his right hand. Plus the silencer screwed onto the muzzle of the gun. And their history. She knew he was not one to forget their history.’

Once again, I’m not really sure why I dislike it, I just do. I’m sure many people would find it gently comic, but it leaves me cold.

My next feelings are easier to explain as the characters spend two pages discussing exactly how much the woman, Gloria, stole from the Deaf Man. The long list of narcotics, prices and sales bored me immeasurably, although I suspect that it was once again intended to be comic. Furthermore, neither character seemed particularly likeable. Finally, I found Gloria’s complete lack of fear unbelievable: her conviction that offering sexual favours would prevent her old partner from shooting her seemed to come from a naivety that she simply did not possess. So much for chapter one then.

I’m afraid the rest of the book fared little better. A whole parade of detectives with messy personal lives are introduced and their stories develop alongside the main plot. I found their actions and motives believable to an extent, but the lack of quality time spent with each character meant that I didn’t care two hoots about them. In fact, some of them irritated me quite severely. (Surely police officers have more discipline than the newly dating couple who seem about to have steamy sex in their cop car?) I imagine that aficionados of the series would have much less of a problem here as they will presumably have grown to care about these characters over the past forty plus books. Personally, I found the diversions into their personal lives added little to my interest in the story. The only exception to this is the main detective, Steve Carella, who is distraught by the upcoming marriages of his sister and mother, but never does anything about it. His pain felt real, even though I could never fully appreciate it because I felt like I hadn’t been given a chance to bond with this character.

Worse, some characters are plain unlikeable. While it might be realistic to have cops who are so outwardly racist, and I suspect sadly that it is, I wanted them to be balanced by more thoughtful characters, rather than simply shown in all their glory. Fat Ollie, in particular, seems to be a great guy, despite his general antipathy to anyone of a different race. I suspect that his budding relationship with Patricia Gomez is meant to go some way towards showing that his views are changeable, but McBain’s focus on comedy rather than morality means that the overall impression is simply that this is a brutal city full of largely ignorant men.

Now, this is not necessarily a failing of the book: the depiction didn’t appeal to me but I live in nice, tidy suburbs and the most danger I’m likely to fall into is getting batted on the shin by a wafting crisp packet. It may be that I just can’t empathise with such a different place and mode of living. Certainly, the darkness of the place and many of the characters works to create an atmosphere of grime and futility.

Meanwhile, the clues and their exploration lack a certain credibility. It is never really explained why the Deaf Man is spending so much time setting up these complicated clues. The notion that he wants to play with the detectives just didn’t seem motivation enough for someone who could straightforwardly shoot another person for simple revenge.

Then, McBain tried to bring the story into the 21st century by involving Google (although, of course, it is a child who handles this task, as we all know that adults are computer illiterate!) Unfortunately, this plot device is thinner than a wisp of cloud: I googled a couple of phrases from the key passage and discovered the source in less than a minute. The officers spend most of the book trying to achieve this find, despite having the World Wide Web at their fingertips. Furthermore, I’m no expert on police procedure or budgets, but surely, given the importance they invested in these clues, they could have called in a Shakespeare scholar? Or just contacted any local university English department? The more I write about it, the more it seems like a terribly minor criticism, but the apparent inability of these officers to source one famous quotation frustrated me greatly. Ok, so these are touch inner city cops, but that doesn’t mean that their discussions about Shakespeare should be limited to ‘amusing’ confusions over why he can’t spell.

Complaints aside, this is a police procedural written by one of the earliest masters of the form, and the steps the police take are tracked clearly throughout. As in all good crime novels, the reader is given enough information to be slightly ahead of the game – sometimes even too far ahead: I wanted to scream ‘ANAGRAM! ANAGRAM! IT’S AN ANAGRAM YOU FOOLS!’ long before the cops discovered the Deaf Man’s party trick. There are no unbelievable twists and the ending, despite its surprisingly calm conclusion, nicely ties off the story.

Conclusions

If I hadn’t been reading this for my book group, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading more than the opening two chapters. I found the plot dragged on, the notes were irritating, and most of the characters were unlikeable. I would have preferred greater time spent on characterisation, especially of the villain, and less time listening to the officers attempting to decode the notes.

However, I think that it matches the requirements of a police procedural and will likely be greatly enjoyed by fans of the series who don’t mind the slightly slow pace created by all the notes. ( )

Since Ed McBain died in July, I though it would be fitting to talk about his 87th Precinct police procedurals. Reference works will tell you McBain’s real name was Evan Hunter, the name under which he wrote many books—including The Blackboard Jungle—and screenplays as well. He was born Salvatore Lombino, and changed his name to Evan Hunter when he began his writing career in 1952.
As Ed McBain he published 55 books about the 87th precinct in a city that is never named, but is obviously New York thinly disguised: Isola is his name for the borough of Manhattan, Riverhead for Brooklyn, Majesta for Queens. There’s a big hospital called Buenavista instead of Bellevue, and so on. Cop Hater was the first of these books in 1956. My favorites are Sadie When She Died, the 26th of the series, published in 1972, and Hark! which came out last year and will be the next to the last of the 87th precinct books; McBain had finished another before he died and it will be published later this year as Learning to Kill.
McBain’s main character is Steve Carella, whose family is always on his mind; between Sadie and Hark! his father dies and in the later book his mother remarries. The reader finds out what’s on Carella’s mind, and in each book several other story lines are followed besides the crime investigation. Often these are romances, going well or badly, of other detectives in the squad and sometimes a cop from a neighboring precinct.
Sadie When She Died is about a victim who lived a double life, Sarah Fletcher the respectable housewife and Sadie Collins, who picked up men in singles bars. Carella and the others know that the husband killed her, but the problem is to prove it. Eventually they do.
Hark! gives us story lines about Carella, Detectives Bert Kling and Cotton Hawes of the 87th, and Oliver Wendell Weeks, or Ollie, a detective from the 88th. Here also we have a caper story involving The Deaf Man, a clever criminal who hints at his plans by sending notes to Carella that contain quotes from Shakespeare and word games such as anagrams and palindromes.
McBain is sometimes considered the originator of the American police procedural, but that honor really belongs to Lawrence Treat and Hillary Waugh, who published in the 40s and early 50s. What McBain did do was show big city police work as a cumulative, team effort, while he invented characters who were interesting and funny. And the large number of his books means you can probably find one there you like. ( )

Gloria Stanford is found dead in her apartment. She has cheated on the Deaf Man and he has taken his revenge. But he is not finished with the 87th precinct. He has a daring plan to make the precinct, and especially detective Steve Carella, look very stupid. Carella begins getting cryptic notes, some of them Shakespearian quotations, some anagrams, and some palindromes. They are delivered to the station by a succession of druggies and down-and-outers and point to an event happening within the next week. I felt as if I had missed out by not reading earlier 87th precinct novels, and the mental gymnastics of the Deaf Man's notes left me just a bit cold. The fact that I was listening to the story rather than reading it probably ensured that I finished it. Complete & Unabridged 10 CDs with playing time of 10hrs 21 mins. ( )