King of Procedurals: Ed McBain and Lady Killer (1958)

The police investigative crime novel, or police procedural, achieved a considerable vogue in the Fifties and Sixties, with the works of such authors as Maurice Procter, Hillary Waugh, J. J. Marric (John Creasey), Ed McBain and Elizabeth Linington receiving great acclaim from crime fiction critics and drawing a devoted following among mystery readers.  Crime writer and critic Julian Symons, who certainly reviewed a lot of police procedurals over the years, defined the sub-genre as novels concentrating on "the detailed investigation of a crime from the point of view of the police."  The "best examples of the kind," he added, do this "with considerable realism."

Hillary Waugh is often credited with starting the police ball rolling with his classic 1954 crime novel Last Seen Wearing, but Englishman Maurice Procter, an actual policeman, preceded Waugh's book with several lauded ones of his own in the late Forties and Fifties.  Of course Anglo-Irish author Freeman Wills Crofts' police detective novels went all the way back to the Twenties, but the approach of Crofts, a railway engineer, to police work was far more naive and he concentrated on solitary investigations by a police inspector or superintendent, rather than multiple inquiries by a police force. 

Englishman Henry Wade, to be sure, authored some more realistic police novels in the Thirties and Forties, though they still concentrated on single investigations by higher-ups.  Nevertheless, the floodgates really opened after 1954 with such milestones as Marric's Gideon's Day (1955), Ed McBain's Cop Hater (1956) and Linington's Case Pending (1960), authored under her most successful pseudonym Dell Shannon.  Also worth noting is the famous Jack Webb television cop crime series Dragnet, which ran throughout the Fifties and is often mentioned in police procedural novels.  Webb's deadpan "Just the facts, ma'am," became one of TV's most familiar catch phrases.  

And police procedurals were supposed to be all about facts--plain, unadorned, realistic facts.  But the problem was that that could make rather dull reading.  Julian Symons explains: 

The early police novels had great zest and freshness...but their limitations soon became apparent.  A fair degree of realism is possible, but it cannot be pushed too far for fear that the book might be dull as the actual days of a policeman.  The division of interest between several unlinked cases means that several are more interesting than others, so that one hurries through the pages dealing with the attempt to identify a crook practicing a long-term fraud to get back to the absorbing hunt for a child-killer. 

Laboratory details can be fascinating, but they have to be informed by some human interest that often strains credulity.  Details of the lives and loves of the detectives are often brought in so that they may be, again improbably, personally involved in the cases they set out to solve.  There are similar improbabilities in other kinds of crime stories, but they are particularly damaging to the police novel because surface realism is of the essence.

Symons identified Ed McBain (1926-2005) as undoubtedly the "most consistently skillful writer of police novels" and I agree with his assessment.  I would go further than Symons myself and name McBain one of the ten or twenty greatest crime writers.  

Like Rex Stout (another of the ten or twenty greatest crime writers) his greatness lies to a great degree in successfully merging two traditions within crime writing.  Stout brilliantly merged the classic Great Detective tradition with the rising hard-boiled school (great as Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are, they are even greater together, like French fries and catsup), while McBain, a better puzzle crafter than Stout, merged the classic puzzle mystery (artifice) with the police novel (realism).  McBain is the only one of the police novelists of whom I can confidently state, if you like Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr, you should like McBain.  

It's been a long time since I reviewed a McBain novel on the blog, but I can truly say that every book I have read by him has been a success. He wrote, I believe, 55 of his 87th Precinct series novels in the half century between 1956 and 2005, only death finally stopping the flow.  He was one of those rare crime writers who can write a lot and write really, really well all the while.  Probably his best books date from earlier in his career, when from my reading they often ran to just around 60,000 words in length.  Brevity was the soul of his wit and his books are very witty.  The narratives move, the New York setting (Isola--i.e., Manhattan) is strong, the characters sharp, and the plots clever, twisty and clued.  

I've been reading a lot of McBain's contemporary Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988) lately for an article I have written--if you can call nearly 30,000 words an article--and while I don't believe that Linington's work, which was once much praised, is entirely meretricious as the late blogger Noah Stewart so clearly did, nevertheless it is markedly inferior to McBain's in my view.  Her books are longer (usually over 80,000 words in my experience), more lumbering both in plotting and writing and full of frequently grotesque social sentiments.  (The author was a fervent member of the crank John Birch Society, a predecessor of today's MAGA with its conspiratorial, paranoid nuttery.)  

A big reason the novels drag on so long is that Linington distractingly has her characters use idiomatic, misspelled speech with lots of dashes and circumlocutions that can go on for 300, 400 words at a time.  She was was proud of this "naturalistic" writing but I find it tedious as hell.   

In her best books Linington bears some resemblance to Freeman Wills Crofts and by virtue of these she could be seen as a modern "Humdrum" writer to use Symons' term--although her prime detective in the Dell Shannon books, Luis Mendoza, is a fantasy figure straight out of the "glamor boy" school of posh detectives like Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn and Albert Campion.  

McBain seems obviously to have been a classic Fifties liberal and I personally find his social views more congenial than Linington's, but aside from that he was truly both a natural writer and a natural puzzler--a rare enough combination in the mystery fiction field and one to be cherished when you actually find it.

cop Cotton Hawes
(you can tell him by the white 
streak in his hair) takes aim
English first ed.

Take his 1958 novel Ladykiller, for example--the seventh of the 87th Precinct novels, I believe.  In this one the boys (no women cops are called upon in this book) at the precinct receive a letter proclaiming

I will kill the lady tonight at 8

What can you do about it?

The letter is actually printed in the novel and it's actually a clue!  Like the sort of thing you get in classic mysteries.  Or better even, because sometimes, like in SS Van Dine's The Kidnap Murder Case, the thing is just there; it's not a clue at all.  

Anyway, the boys get this letter at eight in the morning so they have twelve hours to find out both 

who the would-be killer is

who the would-be victim ("the lady") is

A tall order!  Along the way there are some more visual clues, in the form of police sketches--and they do matter, believe me.  And there are clues in the text too--believe me, Ed plays the game.

Crazed killer or kidding crank?

The modern pb/ebook version of Lady Killer comes with a great short intro by the author from 1994 in which he tells how he pounded this book out in nine days at a beach cottage in July 1957 while his wife and sons entertained another family, waiting for him to get done. In my article on Linington, who wrote her novels just as quickly, often writing four a year, I suggested one reason why her writing is so dull and drab is that she wrote so quickly.  But here's McBain writing just as quickly as Linington and writing so much better, so what can you say?  Also between 1955 and 1960 he published, under various pseudonyms, 24 novels!  Linington published 22 between 1962 and 1967, her most productive six year period.  

Some people are just naturally better writers.  And plotters too for that matter.  Where Linington at her best resembles an even more plodding version of Crofts, McBain at his best resembles Christie, Queen, Carr.  He has the same facility with clueing.  The plot of Lady Killer keeps you on your toes until almost the final page, never relaxing.  

Although he occasionally succumbed to overwriting (in his lyric and sometimes purple descriptions of the city, for example), usually McBain is a markedly pithy writer.  I don't believe I have yet come across a single memorable line in Linington's books, but every McBain story, like Lady Killer, has good bits, like on Detective Cotton Hawes' visit to a bookstore in a poor neighborhood:

at your local drugstore rack

You did not expect to find a store selling books in such a neighborhood.  You expected all the reading matter to be in drugstore racks, and you expected sadistic mysteries like I, the Hangman [e.g., Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury], historical novels like See My Bosom....

Hawes, who falls immediately in love (ugh) with the lovely lady bookseller is surprised she is working in this area, but she tells him "there's enough deprivation in this neighborhood.  It needn't extend to books," and "The people here are poor....But poor isn't necessarily synonymous with dangerous."

Whoo boy, are these sentiments foreign to Linington's crabbed and crabby books, wherein people are poor because they are stupid and shiftless and constitute a ceaseless threat to decent, law-abiding middle-class people.  I never get the feeling that Linington likes anyone in her books except cops and their wives, and, given her deep-seated misogyny, I'm not even sure about the wives.  

There's never any sense of real tragedy in the Linington books, just disgust for how loathsome and stupid people are--the criminals, of course, but also the stupid "citizenry" as the cops call them, usually with contempt.  There are always lots of words used contemptuously as epithets in Linington's books, like citizenry and citizens, "People!", louts, thugs, juveniles, perverts, deviants, fags, females.  Some of these terms occasionally overlap.  "Head doctors" invariably are useless as are "these soft-hearted judges."  The repetition of these plaints, like a rambling, reactionary Donald Trump stump speech, gets pretty wearying over the course of a novel.  

Elizabeth Linington was a recluse who, after her parents died, lived in the country with her cats, dog and goats and  peppered newspapers with letters about the Communist menace and the stupidity of her fellow Americans in not perceiving, like she did, the doom that awaited them around the corner.  How this woman would have loved social media!

I think I would much rather have spent the day, however, with McBain--in person or in fiction.  Critics called Linington the Queen of Procedurals, which sounds more impressive when you forget that she was about the only woman who ever wrote them, I think.  But if Liz was queen then surely Ed was king.  And in this case king mates queen.