Killer's Choice

This early Ed McBain 87th Precinct entry from 1957 is a fast-flowing, incredibly intriguing read. Fans of the series get to follow Carella, Kling, Meyer Meyer and the boys around fictional Isola — which mirrored New York City — on two distinct cases. The first involves the death of a not-well-liked brother-in-arms who has been shot and killed. While none of the detectives were fond of the slain officer or his heavy-handed approach to policing, all of them understood why he’d adopted those tactics, and in the end, he was one of their own.

This first case introduces readers to a new face in the 87th — the tall, lean but muscular redhead, Cotton Hawes. Created at the insistence of the publisher, who felt Carella — who was married show more to deaf Teddy in the series — would not appeal to both male and female readers, and therefore could not be the hero. While that theory was invalidated over time, Cotton became a nice addition to the 87th nonetheless. Hawes’s inexperience with “real” crime nearly gets Carella killed right off the bat. Because Carella is not the type to hold a grudge, and Hawes is the type of cop who learns from his mistakes, and tries to redeem himself, in a strange way the edgy incident cements Cotton Hawes into the fold.

The second story-line, which is how the novel opens, is the most intriguing for the reader, and it take up the largest portion of the swiftly-moving narrative. Young Annie Boone, the divorced mother of a five-year-old daughter, lies dead on the floor of the liquor store where she worked. I’ll not get into specific suspects and questioning, but the interviews are mesmerizing because not one picture of Annie Boone emerges, but several. Described by various people — all suspects — in ways diametrically opposed, each of their accounts and perceptions have the ring of truth. From saint to sinner, tea-toddler to drunk, prim and proper to wanton desire, Annie appeared to be very different things to each individual in her life, making it almost impossible to get a bead on her, and therefore, her killer.

My only caveat — and it’s rather minor — with Killer’s Choice was McBain’s choice, which was to describe Annie’s child as a five-year-old. This became occasionally jarring because in order to drive the narrative — and thereby the case — forward, the dialog he puts in Monica’s mouth simply doesn’t ring true for anyone who’s had or been around a five-year-old. Descriptions of the phone call she had with the killer — that’s not a spoiler in any way — came off as artificial, rather than a real conversation between an adult killer and a child of that age. One minute she’s speaking almost like an adult, the next she wants to hang up and go play with her dolly.

While not on the level of some later entries in the 87th Precinct series, Killer’s Choice is still a fun and worthwhile read in McBain’s groundbreaking series of police procedurals, in which his only true rival in the field was the great Elizabeth Linington, known to most knowledgeable mystery readers as Dell Shannon and Lesley Egan. Her groundbreaking Luis Mendoza series, the splendid Ivor Maddox/Sue Carstairs series, and to a slightly lesser degree, her Vic Varallo series, deserve a proper paperback reprint just as McBain received.

Killer’s choice is a quick, fun read in the police procedural genre created and formed to perfection by McBain and Linington, and gets a solid four stars. show less

Killer’s Choice by Ed McBain is the fifth entry in his 87th Precinct series. These police procedurals just keep getting better. In this one a new character is introduced with Detective Cotton Hawes, a good looking single cop whose appearance is explained at the beginning of the book as a request of his publishers. In this outing we find the detectives hunting for two killers.

One death is of a young woman found on the floor of a liquor store riddled with bullets, while the other is of a policeman who interrupted a robbery and was thrown through a plate glass window, piercing his jugular. The story is well balanced between the two murders. We are treated to the sharp, sometimes humorous dialogue that flows naturally between the show more detectives who are also good friends. With it’s quick pacing and interesting plot, Killer’s Choice was a great escape read. This book is one part of the authors’ ground-breaking police procedural series and holds up well today. show less

Carella and Kling team up to track down the killer of a woman that becomes more of a mystery than her death. Carella and Kling make an interesting pair, as Kling's young and almost naive rookie appearance clashes with yet compliments Carella's experience and certainty. This is the first real Rashomon-style story in the 87th series, a theme that McBain will return to again and again to effectively illustrate the difficulty in discovering the truth when it's very definition is more than subjective. Conflicting testimonies and descriptions raise many questions about the true nature of the victim's personality, and many of these mysteries remain unsolved beyond the closing of the case, adding a dizzying perspective to the difficulty the show more detectives face in sorting relevant facts and clues from personal opinion and self serving dishonesty.

This novel also sees the exit of Roger Havilland and the introduction of Cotton Hawes, the latter of which attempts to track down the killer of the former after a shaky start at the 87th casts doubt upon his credibility in the department. Meyer also makes his appearances, but mostly he is relegated to the background. show less

"Killer's Choice" was an early one, the one where we meet Detective Cotton Hawes, who was supposed to take over as the "hero" of the series, since McBain's editor determined that women would not find a married man like Carella an appealing hero. He was an idiot, whoever he was. I like Hawes well enough, but Carella and Meyer are my favorites, and they are both married. Anyway, this one is about a woman named Annie Boone who is murdered, and the detectives have to figure out which one of her was killed in order to find the killer. See, Annie Boone was a different person to everyone who knew her: her ex-husband thought she was brilliant and vivacious and missed her dreadfully; her mother thought she was a dimwit; one boyfriend said she show more played billiards with the best of them and was really fun; another boyfriend thought she was a very refined lady who enjoyed ballet. In other words, a normal woman. show less

#5 in the 87th Precinct police procedural series set in fictional Isola (modeled after New York.) Published the year I was born, some people would call this book “dated,” which, admittedly it is. But it’s a wonderful time capsule too, and I have to wonder if McBain deliberately set out to accomplish that, if he had any idea how long-lasting his series would be. The opening paragraph lets you know you’ve gone back in time as it talks about “eight dollar Scotch and twenty-five-cent wine” bottles broken together on a liquor store floor. I’m not even sure you can buy a bottle of eight dollar Scotch these days, and that was the expensive stuff back then. LOL There are numerous other clues—twenty-one-cent-a-gallon gas, a show more policeman’s salary of $3,800 a year, and phone numbers with an exchange listed rather than just a number. All that aside, McBain writes an enjoyable detective story, and already at this point in the series, I’m a big fan of Steve Carella, Meyer Meyer, Bert Kling and the rest of the gang.

A young woman employed in a liquor store is brutally shot to death four times, the stock in the store smashed to smithereens. They get several different pictures of who the young woman was—one from her mother, another from her ex-husband, and still another from friends. I had an inkling about who the killer was at the time they were introduced, but the clues as to how it was done weren’t really revealed until the end of the book—and I’d have missed them anyway, as a knowledge as to ‘how certain things were done’ would have been needed to figure it out. I still enjoyed this very much and look forward to the next one. show less

As said elsewhere, yes: short 'n' snappy. Does the job. It's effective, efficient, even entertaining. One can imagine the author as extremely good company: the writing comes easily, the story rattles along, he clearly writes as he speaks - fluently and amusingly ... but perhaps not very profoundly. And this is now a period piece, without quite yet achieving 'historical novel' status. The milieu of late-fifties NYC seems dated, and its inhabitants with it. There are universals in police procedural, for sure, but there is little here to excite a new reader. The plot, too, while clever(-ish), is, shall we say, formulaic, to the point of predictable.

Perhaps I shouldn't have started here?

“… and the moon hung in the sky like a whore’s belly button…”

Ahh, nighttime in the city, specifically, it’s 87th precinct! This book welcomes Cotton Hawes to the fold, and bids goodbye to Roger Havilland. And the main case is the murder of Annie Boone, a woman who seems to have had many 'faces'. (Havilland's murder is the secondary story) I enjoyed this fifth offering of the series, and look forward to number six! I also really like the ending:

"The car went silent. The men breathed the hot summer air. Slowly, the car threaded its way uptown to the precinct and the squad room."