Forgotten Book Friday: Lady Killer by Ed McBain

Every so often, I treat myself to a trifecta of 87th Precinct novels.  Currently, I’m reading Killer’s Wedge and Til Death.  But leading into these is 1958’s Lady Killer.  It starts simple enough.  Someone sends the boys of the 87th one of those letters made of pasted newspaper headlines reading “I will kill the Lady tonight at 8.  What can you do about it?”

Detective Steve Carella, first among equals in this long-running ensemble series, thinks it’s a crank.  Trouble is, they can’t be sure.  So Steve bewilders newcomer Cotton Hawes (introduced in Killer’s Choice apparently to replace Carella, who was too familyish to fool around for McBain’s editor) by threatening to jail a john for not paying a hooker on Isola’s infamous “Whore Street.”  Carella and Hawes are there to question a local call girl called “The Lady.”  She’s a maybe, but it doesn’t ring right.  Meyer Meyer – that’s his name, thanks to a father with a warped sense of humor – looks into a dog named Lady and a the socialite mother of a struggling writer.  Doesn’t wash with the precinct boys.  Hawes manages to track down the potential killer by spotting him in Grover Park across the street and gets into a fight with him.  The killer gets away, but leaves his stolen binoculars behind.  They don’t have a name, but they have fingerprints.

Hawes meets his assailant again tracking him to a rented apartment leased by “John Smith.”  The resulting fight looks more like Casino Royale and The Bourne Supremacy than the 87th Precinct.

This story is more about Hawes.  According to the author notes on two of the earlier “Killer” novels, McBain’s original editor, who freaked when he killed off Carella at the end of The Pusher, left.  (Incidentally, one change to that scene letting Carella live made the end of that novel possibly the greatest scene in the entire series)  His new editor didn’t like McBain’s “hero.”  Never mind that the books were about the precinct, not Carella.  The new sheriff wanted Carella out of town.  Enter handsome, red-haired Cotton Hawes, who manages to get laid in every novel, and has a peculiar streak of white hair over an old knife wound that arouses the ladies’ interest.

This story, more than the previous two and any since, is about Hawes as an action hero.  He nearly nails the killer in the park only to lose him by sheer dumb luck.  He later has a James Bond/Jason Bourne-type rooftop chase with the killer later.  McBain was ahead of his time there.

He was also ahead of his time with crime scene analysis.  Sam Grossman is the crime lab chief, and a lot of his geeky, technical tricks are what break the case as often as Hawes’ fists or Carella or Meyer’s brains.

Lady Killer is dated in its references and, of course, its pre-Miranda police technique, but in many ways, it’s more modern than a lot of thrillers written today.