See Them Die

Not one of McBain's usual mysteries, but a crime drama, or even an urban social drama, centring on a single Sunday morning on a baking hot street in a Puerto Rican neighbourhood in McBain's fictitious city. A teenager on the make, a drunken sailor looking for a good time and McBain's perennial Bad Cop, Parker, congregate in luncheonette. The cops of the 87th Precinct are hunting notorious killer Pepe Morano. While the sailor looks for love, the teenager looks for blood and Parker mouths off, a violent siege develops, a crowd gathers and the neighbourhood threatens to explode. McBain winds the tension and suspense with consummate skill and a keen eye for the foibles and failings of multifarious humanity. Fast paced and unputdownable, but show more then I don't think McBain ever produced a dud in his life. show less

“Heat, like love, is no good unless you can talk about it.”

This book is about a lot of things. It's about racism, it's about love, it's about needing to belong. And in the center of it all, it's about Pepe Miranda. The detectives don’t show up until page 26 in this one!

It feels like a departure from the other 87th precinct books I've read so far, but a good one! It was nice having the focus on a different aspect of the city. And I liked the way it was written! Chapter twelve, when all of the plot lines smash together, is really well executed!

I also found it interesting how much some of the plot lines reminded me of "West Side Story", which I just saw on the big screen last week. I wonder if this book was influenced by the play?

Ed McBain's famed police procedural series about the 87th Precinct is, on the surface, easily mistaken for a relatively superficial set of cops-and-robbers stories. Yet McBain actually digs pretty deep into societal issues and human foibles in most of his stories, none more deeply than in this, a story ostensibly about a gunman held at bay by surrounding policemen. In reality, McBain uses this situation to pursue one of his most inquisitive excavations of human relations. The entire novel takes place on one day in the Puerto Rican ghetto of the unnamed city where the 87th precinct functions. The lives of the familiar detectives of the 87th are but a segment of the populace at play in this story. Gangbangers (long before the term was show more popularized), small business owners, sailors on leave, and fresh-off-the-boat immigrants all have pertinent portions of the mosaic McBain pieces together, and it's a remarkably affecting story about race, poverty, hero-worship, revenge, and loneliness. It's one of the very best of the 87th novels I've read so far, which means it's a very good book indeed. show less

This book is the perfect example of why McBain's novels attract me more than the run of the mill police procedural. He takes sensational topics like gang warfare and high profile police shootouts, and finds tension and drama in the lives and motivations of the people both on and off stage.

At least half of the action in this novel takes place outside of the 87th Precinct, as McBain follows a number of characters whose actions both directly influence the station's attempts to capture high-profile escaped convict and local legend Pepe Miranda, who is holed up in a nearby tenement building. An off-shore sailor, store owner, and ambitious street thug all present us with a day in their life, and provides the reader with in-depth look at the show more community behind the crime. Much like Ross MacDonald's later works, McBain is taking a more philosophical - perhaps even sociological - look at the origins and "victims" of inner-city crime, effectively blurring some of the lines between the black-and-white.

This isn't to say that we don't deal with the boys from the 87th either; Carella and Byrnes are on the scene, as well as Fernandez and Parker, the latter of which is given a more complex character background than his predecessor Roger Havilland. But they do take a backseat to the community itself, so if you are a fan of McBain's more unconventional approaches to the 87th Precinct series, this is definitely one to read. show less

The 13th in McBain's long-running (55 books!) series about the copy of the 87th Precinct in Isola, a fictional New York City. This entry takes place over the course of a long, hot July day as the police face off against a murderer who has taken refuge above a brothel in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of the precinct. There are some interesting (and for the 1960 time period fairly progressive) observations about the disconnect the Puerto Rican community feels with the larger city and the cops who patrol their neighborhood, as well as the self-imposed class divisions between the Puerto Ricans who were born in New York Isola and the "Marine Tigers" who are newly arrived immigrants from the island. Unfortunately, the gender issues are not show more handled with the same progressiveness as the ethnic, and the few women who appear in the book are almost cartoonish in their beauty and sexuality. One of the subplots involves a group of teenagers who dub themselves a gang, The Latin Purples, in an attempt to appear tough and the trouble their posturing gets them into. Not one of the series' best, but not terrible. show less

Another great 87th Precinct novel from McBain, this time not a mystery, but the tense tale of a siege in a Puerto Rican district of the city. Many of the usual bulls are missing, but it's still a worthy and enjoyable addition to the series with McBain's liberal views shining through.

One of the weaker books in the 87st Street Precinct series, primarily because most of the story is about a desperado and some kids in a bad section of Isola. Little happens involving the main characters of the series -- in fact, there is one important thing, but I ain't saying.