The Nature of Things

Killer's Wedge by Ed McBain My rating: 2 of 5 stars A woman in black walks into the squad room of the 87th Precinct's detectives. Four detectives are there, going through another routine day of complaints, interrogations, reports, holdups, beatings, rapes, and murders. The woman in black changes their day forever. She reaches into her coat pocket and brings out her hand holding a gun - a .38. She has the drop on the four men. They are her prisoners. The woman is on a mission. Her aim is to kill Steve Carella. As it happens, Carella is out when she arrives. He had taken his wife to the doctor's office and then had gone to investigate an alleged suicide. No one knows when he will return. The woman says she will wait. They will all wait. The woman blames Steve Carella for the death of her husband. Sometime earlier, Carella had surprised the man in the process of holding up a service station. He had shot and blinded the station attendant. Carella overcame and arrested him. He ...

Killer's Payoff by Ed McBain My rating: 2 of 5 stars Continuing with my reading of Ed McBain's iconic 87th Precinct series, I've reached number 6 which was first published in 1958. It was the second book that featured the character of Cotton Hawes. Hawes was introduced in the previous book because, as McBain explained in a foreword to the later edition which I read, his editor warned him that a married cop - such as Steve Carella was - could not be the hero. He needed someone who was unmarried and available to the ladies. Thus, Cotton Hawes was born. In Killer's Payoff , McBain is obviously still working on the development of the Hawes character. He's presented as a man who falls in love - or at least in lust - with every pretty girl he meets and, immediately after falling, he's generally in bed with them. It seems to make little difference whether they are someone who is involved in a case he's investigating as a possible murder suspect or just some random...

Killer's Choice by Ed McBain My rating: 3 of 5 stars And so I continue with my reading in order of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. I've barely started. This is the fifth of the books in the series which stretches all the way from the 1950s to 2005 and numbers more than fifty. At this point, I'm still in the 1950s and these early books now qualify as historical mysteries. I continue to be struck by McBain's crisp, to-the-point, just-the-facts prose and just how much information and atmosphere he's able to convey with only a few choice, spare words. The man could write! In this book, he introduces a new character, a new detective for the 87th, one interestingly named Cotton Hawes. He transferred in from another precinct which didn't see much crime and virtually no murders. He has no experience investigating murders and it shows on the first case that he's sent out on, but he's smart and diligent and a quick learner. He's teamed up with Steve Car...

The Con Man by Ed McBain My rating: 4 of 5 stars These early Ed McBain novels from the 1950s are now old enough to qualify almost as historical mysteries and the language and attitudes often seem staid, stilted, and outdated. Did policemen really used to talk like that? I remember watching reruns of "Dragnet" years after the series first ran and I seem to recall that Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner did, in fact, employ some of this terminology and exhibit some of those attitudes, so, yeah, I guess maybe they really did talk like that. In spite of the fact that the books feel dated, the writing is so crisp that it draws us in and holds our attention. We feel like time travelers visiting another planet and observing the interaction of the inhabitants there. The books never fail to spark our interest and this, the fourth in the 87th Precinct series, is the best one yet, I think. Each entry has been an improvement upon the last one, which bodes well for my future reading of the ...

The Pusher: An 87th Precinct Novel by Ed McBain My rating: 4 of 5 stars Now this is more like it! It seems for years I've been reading about the 87th Precinct series - what a groundbreaker it was and how Ed McBain has been such an influence on writers of mysteries since the 1950s when this series started.  But after reading the first two entries in the series, I confess I was disappointed. As far as I could see they were mostly just interesting for their historical value, but I didn't find them particularly entertaining. Then I picked up The Pusher , third in the series. He had me with the first sentence. And with the first couple of pages of that wonderfully evocative description of the city in winter, I was hooked. I could have read the book in one sitting, except I had to stop and do other things for a while. I rushed back to it as quickly as I could. It seemed to me that McBain really hit his stride with this book. The 87th Precinct and the city began to come to life for m...

The Mugger by Ed McBain My rating: 2 of 5 stars This book was of interest to me mostly for its historical perspective. It was published in 1956, the second in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. It seemed very dated to me, even more so than the first in the series, Cop Hater , but, as I kept reminding myself, it was of its historical period and this is, I think, the way that male writers of thrillers or crime fiction wrote in the mid-20th century - with gender and racial stereotypes intact and unchallenged. Even acknowledging all that though, I still found myself irritated by the expression of those attitudes. I was especially offended by the descriptions of the women characters in the book - all breasts and bottoms and legs. Especially legs. Apparently McBain was a leg man. Not that such attitudes aren't still apparent among certain writers today, but, on the whole, they do a better job of disguising it. The story here is as the title says, The Mugger . Th...

Cop Hater by Ed McBain My rating: 3 of 5 stars Over my years of reading mysteries, I have often encountered writers who acknowledged the influence on their work of Ed McBain, but somehow I've just never gotten around to going to the source of all that inspiration. I decided to remedy that chasm in my mystery-reading experience this summer, starting with the very first McBain entry in his 87th Precinct series. Cop Hater was first published in 1956 and the series ran all the way up until the year of McBain's death in 2005 with more than fifty entries overall. In the foreword to this re-publication of Cop Hater , McBain says that, when he started, his publisher was looking for someone to be a successor to Erle Stanley Gardner who was nearing the end of his long and productive writing career. It seems that the publisher struck gold when they selected McBain for that role. Among the first things that struck me about reading this book was the similarity between styles of McBain and...