Forgotten Book Friday: King’s Ransom, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand, The Heckler By Ed McBain

I started reading Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series a few years ago, starting in the beginning with Cop Hater.  In the beginning, Steve Carella was just one of the detectives. Meyer Meyer was a punchline. A black detective murdered in the first novel resurfaced a couple of books later as Detective Arthur Brown.

I made it through nine 87th Precinct books before now, the last being ‘Til Death. Along the way, McBain attempted to kill off Steve Carella, only to be told by his editor that he couldn’t kill off “the hero.”  Yes, McBain saw 87th Precinct as what today would be a Hill Street Blues. His editor saw it more as Law & Order: Isola.  Never mind that both shows were well into the future.

Since then, another editor told McBain to ditch Carella for the younger, handsomer Cotton Hawes to bring the sexy back. Only another editor nixed the idea, and Hawes became one of the boys.

Which brings us to books 10, 11, and 12.  Book 10 is King’s Ransom, which has a lot more in common with Law & Order than Dragnet, McBain’s stated inspiration for the series. In it, a little boy is kidnapped when he is mistaken for the son of Charles King, a shoe company executive on the verge of the biggest stock deal of his life. Turns out, the bungling kidnappers have snatched the chauffeur’s son by mistake. Their solution? Press King to pay the ransom anyway.  King refuses, since it’s not his kid.

King would fit right in with today’s modern Enron and Lehman Brothers types, putting profit ahead of human life. McBain paints him as a lousy sociopath, when the pressure of the kidnapping weighs on King.

King’s Ransom is the most predictable of the three, and 10 books in, the 87th is starting to read a little tired.

But if Ransom is tired, the follow-up, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand is damned punchy. “The boys” are the detectives of the 87th Precinct, including Meyer, Carella, Hawes, Puerto Rican detective Frankie Hernandez, and bigoted moron Andy Parker, whom Carella punches in the teeth.  And the hand? It’s a literal severed hand. McBain’s tongue is stuck to the inside of his cheek in this one, but it’s clear he’s looking for something new to do with his creation.

And he finds it with Book #11, The Heckler.  It starts out innocently enough. Someone is crank calling poor David Raskin, a garment factory owner who grew up with Meyer’s dad.  In the meantime, Carella catches a body in Isola’s Grover Park, a naked man shot at point-blank range with a shotgun. Bizarre, yes, but McBain introduces a new element, a criminal mastermind known only as “the deaf man,” so named because of his hearing aid.

The deaf man is a modern day Moriarty, planning to set off a series of explosions to cover a bank robbery. He succeeds, but is undone by his own miscalculations. The ending ups the stakes for the 87th Precinct, but today?

The deaf man would not escape.  He wouldn’t even have a chance to have his bombs built. Homeland Security would have picked up the paper trail and packed him and his cohorts off to Gitmo before you could say “Osama bin-Laden.”

However, the sharp contrast between the fictional Isola of 1960 and New York City of 2001 only makes the story more interesting. Several antagonists are accused of “making war against the people of the state,” which is as close to a definition of terrorism as anyone will come to in the pre-JFK era. Today, the deaf man’s bombs would be fodder for 24-hour news, political hysteria, and probably a poorly-thought-out military response. (As always, I blame the civilians in charge since I’ve seen a lot of eye rolling at the Pentagon since about 1999.)

Interestingly enough, the copy I read of The Heckler was released in 2002, a year after 9/11. A whimsical deaf man who only manages to kill one person “off camera” wreaking far worse havoc on a city like Isola (at various times the same size or larger than NYC) is a lot easier to stomach than a fanatical millionaire hiding in a cave. Unlike previous 87 Precincts, this one has a cinematic feel to it, more a thriller than a procedural. And despite the horrific way the deaf man tries to cover his tracks, this one is a lot more fun.

Forgotten Friday Books is a weekly multiblog feature started by Patti Abbot.  This week, you can catch FFB over at Broken Bullhorn, Richard Robison’s blog.

Forgotten Book Friday: Neuromancer By William Gibson

Pretty much every hacking movie you’ve ever seen, whether as elaborate as The Matrix and its sequels or as horribly bad as Swordfish, comes from this novel first published in 1984.  William Gibson projected the coming of the Internet with Neuormancer, his noir-styled thriller set in cyberspace (a term he coined).  Several terms from The Matrix come directly from its pages, such as “matrix” (what we now know as the Internet itself) and “jacked in.”

Neuromancer concerns Case, a former data thief whose nervous system is wrecked by his former employers so that he can’t directly interface with the matrix.  He’s relegated to living in a domed slum outside of Tokyo working as an errand boy for some future underworld.  Along comes Molly, she of the cybernetically enhanced eyes and fists (metal blades under the nails) and enhanced ninja skills.  Molly works for a strange man named Armitage who recruits Case to do what he was born to do – go directly into the matrix and steal data.  They’ll even fix his nervous system for him.  Case buys in and is soon on his way to a space station run by a secretive clan of wealthy aristocrats who make the Rothschilds look like the Brady Bunch.

Along the way, it becomes apparent that Armitage is not what he appears.  In fact, Armitage is a manufactured personality grafted onto a shell of a man who is a tad insane.  The real employer is an enigmatic AI named Wintermute.  Wintermute is smarter than most flesh-and-blood humans, one step ahead of everyone.  Case is confused, though.  His attack on the mainframe Wintermute wants cracked will destroy him.  Or it, though Wintermute presents himself to Case as a male, preferring the image and voice of an associate of Molly’s called “the Finn.”

A bizarre novel by even today’s standards, it was very far ahead of its time when it appeared in the mid-1980’s.  The only thing remotely resembling it at the time was Blade Runner, and Gibson even worried he might be seen as ripping off that movie.  Indeed, the way data is depicted in this novel was almost impossible to imagine back in 1980, when Gibson first conceived of the idea.

One thing Neuromancer does is shake the cobwebs off of science fiction, cut out a lot of the fat built up by Star Wars and Star Trek and throw a lot of its stodgy and more pretentious conventions out the window.  Gibson wrote a nasty noir novel involving a computing environment that barely existed back then.  (The first spammer actually typed in the name of everyone on the network manually.)  Gibson’s is a dirty, damaged future, dystopic to be sure, but lived in.

Forgotten Book Friday: Stranger in a Strange Land By Robert Heinlein

A mission to Mars goes horribly wrong, and the only survivor is a baby born on the Red Planet, Valentine Michael Smith.  A second mission to Mars finds the Martian-raised man and brings him back.  Before long, everyone wants a piece of him, but soon he is spirited away from his hospital by his nurse to the home of Jubal Harshaw, a rich hack writer who also is a lawyer and a physician.  He cons the Secretary General of the Federation of Free States (There’s that Federation again) into granting The Man from Mars his freedom in exchange for the Secretary General personally overseeing Smith’s considerable financial affairs.  Apparently, his parents were both heirs to enormous fortunes, which gives him nearly unlimited wealth.

Soon, Mike Smith is learning how to be human inside the home of Harshaw, but finally “groks” being human when he has sex with one of Harshaw’s secretaries or his nurse, Jill Boardman.  When this happens, Mike and Jill set out to see the world.  They work as carnies, doing a magic show using Mike’s ability to make things disappear and use telekinesis to make Jill float.  He’s not very good as an entertainer, but he learns skills as a carnie that enable him to begin his life’s work:  Messiah.

Soon, Mike Smith is the head of the Church of All Worlds, and he has one message for mankind to grok:  Thou art God.  At first, he is a celebrity before outsiders turn on him, afraid of his pantheistic message, the church’s acceptance of group sex, and ritual cannibalism.  (On Mars, the idea of burying the dead would be horrifying.  But then death is done voluntarily on Mars, and the body is left as a gift to those left behind.)

Strange is definitely a word that belongs in the title.  It is one bizarre book. It marks the beginning of Heinlein’s love of tales of polyamory and is more of a jumping off point for the counterculture of the 1960’s.  The book is a twisted philosophical experiment, but it has much more substance to it than that other touchstone of the counterculture, On the Road, which seemed to glorify slacking and mooching.  (Sorry.  Not a Kerouac fan.)

Forgotten Book Friday: Starship Troopers By Robert Heinlein

A friend once told me if you wanted to get into Robert Heinlein’s head, just read Starship Troopers.  That pretty much sums up his philosophy.  I think he discounted Stranger in a Strange Land, which I’ll get to next week.

Starship Troopers follows the career of Johnny Rico, the son of a wealthy man who is Harvard bound at the time he enlists in the MI, or Mobile Infantry.  In the Terran Federation (clearly a forerunner of Star Trek‘s United Federation of Planets), only veterans may vote and only after they’ve served in the military.  So everyone and their cousin wants to be in the military.  The government doesn’t want everyone, but at least there’s no draft.

The first half of the book focuses on Rico’s basic training, during which time, he witnesses a fellow recruit getting flogged for questioning a “freeze,” where a soldier holds position, even if face down in pig excrement, until ordered to move again.  At one point, he is afraid he may wash out until he learns his history and moral philosophy teacher was a veteran and is proud to see at least one of his students in the MI, where he himself served.

The last half involves a war with the “bugs,” arachnid-like creatures that burrow under ground.  Their favorite mode of attack is to throw an asteroid at a planet.  One of them flattens Bueno Aires.  Rico’s mother was there when it happened.  So it doesn’t surprise Rico to see his father, who had been upset Rico had rejected the carefully planned life his father wanted for him, in MI uniform, reporting for his first assignment.

Throughout Starship Troopers, there’s an attititude that only soldiers can truly govern a nation.  It’s not that they’re stronger or better or smarter.  In fact, many veterans turn to a life of crime after the military in Heinlein’s world.  It’s that those in the military volunteered and had drilled into them that the greater good supercedes personal gain.

It’s a bizarre world, but Heinlein has a valid point.  Not that I necessarily agree with it.  On the other hand, there’s a reason they refer to the generation that grew up in the Depression and fought World War II the “Greatest Generation.”  Nothing was ever handed to that generation, and the world is a better place for their struggle.

What Starship Troopers does is elevate the space opera from its cartoonish Flash Gordon motif to something much more thoughtful.  The science is well thought-out, and much of it holds up sixty years after the book’s first appearance.  It certainly makes more sense than the horrible Paul Verhoeven effort.  (What the hell was that, anyway?  A few character names, and Bugs.  It had nothing to do with the book.)  Without Starship Troopers, there would be no Star Trek, no Battlestar Galactica (either version), and no Babylon 5.

And of course, there would be no Old Man’s War, but this guy freely admits that.

Forgotten Book Friday: Killer’s Wedge and ’til Death By Ed McBain

Ed McBain tries something with his wrap up to the Killer cycle.  He gives Steve Carella a locked room mystery.  Of course, we don’t know that until about a fourth of the way through the book.  Because Virginia Dodge is holding the 87th Precinct hostage.  All we know about Carella is that his wife, Teddy, is pregnant.  And Virginia Dodge wants to kill Carella.

Seems Carella sent her husband up a while back, and Mr. Dodge died in prison.  Virginia’s warped sense of justice demands she shoot Carella.  She shows up at the 87th with a gun and a bottle of what she claims is nitro.  Meanwhile, Carella’s studying what should be a slamdunk suicide only to find it not adding up.  Old Man Scott appears to have hung himself and left $750,000 to his sons, along with Scott Industries.  The setup looks legit.  Scott tied one end of the rope to a door knob and hung himself so the door remained locked.  It’s the little details, like the weight of the body keeping the door locked and three strong sons unable to open it, that bug Carella.

Back at the station, Mrs. Dodge has a gun pointed at a bottle of nitro and is effectively running the 87th Precinct, much to the chagrin of Lt. Byrnes.  Byrnes tries dropping hints to the desk sergeant, who is unaware of the situation.  Meyer Meyer, he of the practical joking father who named him, tosses a hastily typed note out the window in triplicate.  All these efforts fail, as do Cotton Hawes’ attempts to sneak up on Virginia.  His final plan involves convincing himself the bottle is water.  Is it?

It’s Carella who ultimately finds out.

How’s that for a useless spoiler.

McBain follows this up with Til Death, where Carella’s little sister gets married.  Only someone wants to kill the groom.  Carella calls in 87th regulars Bert Kling and Cotton Hawes (who surprisingly has a steady girlfriend he picked up in Lady Killer) on their day off to play bodyguard.  It becomes apparent there are two killers gunning for Tommy Giordano, Carella’s soon-to-be-brother-in-law.  One is a Korean War vet who blames Tommy for the death of his buddy.  It’s Meyer Meyer and hardluck Detective Bob O’Brien who end up chasing him down.  Carella has a near-death experience with a tampered limousine that makes him suspect the best man (who ironically tells the groom he needs to write him out of his will now that he’s a married man – Never give a cop your motive, even if you don’t have one).  Subsequent incidents, however, including a murder in the woods near the house, have Carella stalking Ben Darcy, the naive, monumentally stupid neighbor boy still carrying a torch for Carella’s sister Angela.

Both novels are products of their time.  Cell phones are glaringly absent, and typewriters are glaringly present in both books.  As with previous 87th Precinct novels, police procedure is pre-Miranda.

Still, McBain handles his ensemble cast deftly, giving virtually every 87th regular a larger role.  Cotton Hawes days as the series action hero are far from over, but his womanizing days are in decline.  And Meyer Meyer comes into his own as the 87th’s designated comic relief.

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.