Patricia Abbott: FFB: POISON, Ed McBain

 Patricia Abbott: FFB: POISON, Ed McBain

Happiness Is A Book: Lullaby by Ed McBain

 Happiness Is A Book: Lullaby by Ed McBain

Jerry's House of Everything: SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: REACHING FOR THE MOON

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FFB Review: Cop Hater: An 87th Precinct Novel by Ed McBain

Cop Hater: An 87th Precinct Novel by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) is the book that started the 87th Precinct Series. Originally published in 1956, it was republished by Thomas and Mercer in 2012. Back in the fall of 2019, Amazon made several in the series, including this one, free and I took advantage.

 

After an intro from the author explaining how the first book and the series came to be, the read opens with the weather and how the summer heat has its grip on the on “The City.” (I always thought this series was set in New York City, but as explained by the author in his intro, it is not and could be any major fictional city anywhere in the country.) Detective Mike Reardon gets up at 11:00 PM and goes about starting his day as he has the Midnight shift in the detective squad. By 11:41 PM, his walk to work is interrupted as two bullets entered the back of his head and punched out the front.

 

It was 11:56 PM when another citizen found him dead and made a call to the police. It is just after midnight and a new day and still hot as the Homicide Detectives from Homicide North survey the scene outside a boarded-up theater. It is close to 12:30 AM when Detectives Carella and Bush from the 87th Precinct arrive and roll the body over only to realize the murdered man is one of their own. 

 

There were sixteen detectives assigned to the 87th precinct. The murder of Mike Reardon means there are now fifteen. It also means that they have another murder case to solve. That must be done while the other cases keep coming---the robberies, the rapes, the assaults, and all the rest of it—as the work never stops. 

 

So too do the killings of cops as others are also murdered by a “cop hater.” Someone is targeting cops and has to be found and stopped. 

 

While a little dated in spots, after all it was published in 1956, Cop Hater: An 87th Precinct Novel by Ed McBain is a solidly good read. The weather and the city are each their own characters as are the various folks in the tale. A solidly good read that lays the foundation for many books to come. 

 

 

Cop Hater: An 87th Precinct Novel

Ed McBain

https://www.edmcbain.com/

Thomas & Mercer

https://amazonpublishing.amazon.com/thomas-mercer.html

May 2012

ASIN: B007MDDD52

eBook

226 Pages 

 

Per Amazon, I picked this up in October 2019.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2021

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Killer's Choice: Ed McBain

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Killer's Choice: Ed McBain: As the story opens, a liquor store has been robbed. The saleswoman, Annie Boone, is dead of four bullet wounds, and a lot of damage was done...

FFB Review: The Big Bad City by Ed McBain

Back several weeks ago, Barry Ergang offered his review of The Big Bad City by Ed McBain who was also known under his legally adopted name of Evan Hunter. I realized when I was reading Barry’s FFB review that I had not read this one. As it was available from the Dallas Public Library in hardback, I picked it up and read the majority of it while at UTD waiting for Scott. For the full list of reading suggestions for this first Friday in September 2019, head over to Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom Blog.

“So if you came here thinking, Gee, there’s going to be a neat little murder takes place in a town house and some blue-haired lady will solve it in her spare time when she isn’t tending her rose garden, then you came to the wrong city at the wrong time of the year. In this city, things were happening all the time, all over the place, and you didn’t have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind. (The Big Bad City, Page 32)

The detectives of the 87^th precinct, let alone the other precincts of New York City have their hands full. That was before a suspect in the precinct cage knifed a fellow suspect before being shot by Detective Carella. That resulted in two teams of paramedics being brought in and the obligatory visit from Internal Affairs Detectives on a mission to determine what the heck happened. It doesn’t help that it is August and the air conditioning in the precinct house is seriously on the fritz.

Then there are the murders.

One murder is the dead young lady found in Grover Park in front of a park bench. One could tell by looking at her throat she had been strangled. Detectives Brown and Carella had been ready to call it a day and go home when their boss, Lieutenant Brynes sent them out on the case. A case that is going to become incredibly complex.

The burglar nicknamed “The Cookie Boy” continues to do his deal of breaking into places and stealing stuff before leaving a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies behind.  Detectives Mayer and Kling have been on that case quite a while. A case that may now involve two murders.

The detectives are not the only ones on the hunt in the city. So too is a man bent on revenge. His target is one of the detectives of the 87^th precinct. Like some of the other two legged predators that travel through New York City, murder is on his mind.

The Big Bad City: A Novel Of The 87^th Precinct is a complicated police procedural with many moving parts. Like others in the series, it is a solidly good read. As noted in the above quote, this is not a read for cozy readers who prefer sanitized language and situations.

The Big Bad City: A Novel Of The 87^th Precinct

Ed McBain

https://www.edmcbain.com

Simon & Schuster

https://simonandschuster.com

January 1999

ISBN# 0-684-85512-7

Hardback (also available in various formats including paperback and digital)

272 Pages

$25.00

My reading copy came from the downtown branch of the Dallas Public Library System.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2019

FFB Review: THE LAST BEST HOPE (1998) by Ed McBain Reviewed by Barry Ergang

After his all new review of The Big Bad City by Ed McBain last week, it seemed appropriate to run again Barry’s review of THE LAST BEST HOPE.  For the full list of reading suggestions, check out Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog.

THE LAST BEST HOPE (1998) by Ed McBain

Jill Lawton comes to attorney Matthew Hope's law office in Calusa, Florida to get a divorce—with alimony—from her long-gone husband Jack. Nine months earlier, Jack had gone north, ostensibly in search of freelance graphic design work, and she has not heard from him since. Jill hopes to invoke the Enoch Arden Law, but Matthew explains that not enough time has passed for this to apply, and that they'll have to find Jack and serve him with the divorce papers.

It's not long thereafter that a man's body is found on a beach in Calusa, the face gone from a shotgun blast. A driver's license and Visa card in the man's pockets suggest he's Jack Lawton. But when Jill is summoned to positively identify the body, she instantly determines from the absence of a miniscule blue dot on his Adam's apple that the man is not her husband.

Matthew puts a firm of private investigators on the case, and on his own phones a precinct in the city where Jack was last known to have been. The city is unnamed; the precinct is the 87th; the detective Matthew talks to is Steve Carella.

Thus McBain melds two series and the sleuths therefrom, each working in different locations on the same case.

As the body count increases and surprises unfold, McBain with the skill his fans know and love conveys the story's past and present from different angles and viewpoints, switching among the various investigators and multiple villains. The reader is taken into the heads of the characters, all of whom are believably fleshed-out, and comes to know them from their conversations with others and their internal monologues—another McBain trademark.

The Last Best Hope never lets up—it's a superb example of a "page-turner"—as characters and events converge in a wild climax tense with excitement but leavened with humor situational, coincidental, and authorial. The lyric from a song in a James Bond movie aptly sums up Ed McBain: "Nobody does it better."




Barry Ergang © 2007, 2019

Some of Derringer winner Barry Ergang's work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

FFB Review: THE BIG BAD CITY (1999) by Ed McBain Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Barry Ergang is back on the blog today with an all new review for FFB. For the full list of reading suggestions, check out Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog.

THE BIG BAD CITY (1999) by Ed McBain

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

The dead woman who “lay sprawled in front of a bench in Grover Park” in the 87^th Precinct “was wearing a white blouse and pale blue slacks, white socks and scuffed Reeboks.” The detectives assigned to the case are Steve Carella and Arthur Brown. Who the woman actually is and what the detectives uncover about her and her past takes them into the pasts of other suspects and events with some surprising revelations.

Meanwhile, the man who murdered Carella’s father has been persuaded that he needs to do the same to Carella lest he wind up in prison for life or dead at the hands of other inmates, and begins to stalk his next victim.

At the same time, detectives Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling pursue the burglar who has come to be known as The Cookie Boy because he leaves a batch of home-made chocolate chip cookies at the homes of his targets. A man who prides himself on his scrupulous and considerate approach to burglary, as well as on his love for baking, he finds himself on the run when events turn catastrophic during a particular foray.

A Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Ed McBain is probably the most well-known of the many pseudonyms of the versatile novelist Evan Hunter. The 87^th Precinct series has long ranked as one of the greatest series—perhaps the greatest—of police procedural novels, notable for its three-dimensional characterizations via internal and external dialogue, impeccable pacing, drama, suspense, and humor.

Raw language and racial slurs occur as part of some characterizations, so readers easily offended should avoid this one. To those not offended, this is an easy recommendation.

© 2019 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer winner Barry Ergang's work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

SleuthSayers: Old School, New Readers

SleuthSayers: Old School, New Readers: By Art Taylor A few years back, one of the professors in the English Department at George Mason University (where I myself teach) told m...

Spinning Gold from “Cop Corn” (The Rap Sheet)

Spinning Gold from “Cop Corn” (The Rap Sheet)

Ed McBain Day on FFB, October 2, 2015 (The List)

Ed McBain Day on FFB, October 2, 2015 (The List)

Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine: FFB: Fiddlers -- Ed McBain

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FFB Review: "King's Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery" by Ed McBain

As far back as I can remember, Dad was an amateur radio operator. On more than one occasion I sat out in his office in our converted garage while he banged out Morse Code to fellow hams all around the world. That hobby was a major part of who he was all of his life. His framed license still hangs on the wall in his very packed office as is everything else exactly like he left it a little over three years ago when he suddenly passed. Like a lot of things, my Mom still won’t allow me to go in there and start doing the very hard task that needs to be done.

I thought a lot more about my Dad than usual while reading King’s Ransom by Ed McBain. Amateur radio plays a role in the read and there are references to the parts stores of my youth. Growing up, I spent many an hour with Dad in parts stories big and small while he surveyed rack after rack of parts. Dad built radio controlled planes from scratch (what some folks now call drones and come virtually ready to fly), radio controlled boats, and all sorts of other cool stuff. That gene bypassed me, who never had the manual dexterity for building stuff beyond models of various things, and went to my brother.

It was a far different world back then. Pretty much everything in my old neighborhood is gone now as it has been replaced by something else. Those kind of part stores have died out, my Dad has passed, and yet he lives on in me and my brother. His legacy lives on in a different way than Ed McBain’s and yet in some ways they are the same. Today on the blog we celebrate the legacy of Ed McBain. Both here and over on Patti’s blog where you can find more reading suggestions as part of Friday’s Forgotten Books.

King’s Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery by Ed McBain

It is October 1960 and Douglas King has worked himself to a position of some power at Granger Shoes. He has plans to move up and take over the shoe company as do others who intended to use him as a small part of their plans. Competing agendas and the future for Douglas King is at stake as his money is tied up in a deal to finally achieve his long held goal. A goal that he is not going to let anyone or anyone

interfere with as he finally sees a real opportunity to fulfill his dream.

That future is not going to be thwarted by the kidnapping of a child. If it was his child, it might make a difference. It isn’t.  It is the child of King’s chauffeur so Douglas King does not see the need to pay five hundred thousand dollars to get that kid back. If he gives his money up to meet the ransom demand, he will lose his opportunity and will very quickly be forced out of a job. One does not launch a takeover bid and survive the failure.

The men of the 87th Precinct don’t see things the same way as Mr. King. Detectives Meyer Meyer and Steve Carella certainly don’t and never will. Of course, they never have had that kind of money working for the NYPD and never will. They are honest and hardworking cops who do their best day in and day out despite all the job stresses and everything else. A kidnapping case gives them a break from petty crimes, bad coffee, and dirty jokes. It is cold this October in New York and the next few hours will tell the tale.

King’s Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery by Ed McBain is a good classic cops and robbers style read. Along with the complex details of the business deal and the kidnapping case, readers are treated to the backstory of numerous characters and their own situations as day to day life is a business deal as well. Sometimes, by fate or chance, you make the wrong bargain with the wrong people.

King’s Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery

Ed McBain

http://www.edmcbain.com

Thorndike Press

http://www.gale.com/thorndike

ISBN# 978-0-7862-9173-1

Large Print Hardback (available in other formats)

315 Pages

Material supplied by the good folks of the Plano Public Library System.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2015

Ed Gorman's blog: Guns by Ed McBain Random House, Copyright 1976

Ed Gorman's blog: Guns by Ed McBain Random House, Copyright 1976

FFB Review: "FAT OLLIE'S BOOK" (2002) by Ed McBain (Reviewed by Barry Ergang)

As we continue the run up to Ed Mcbain day next Friday on Patti Abbot’s blog, I thought I would run again a review of Barry’s that first appeared here a few years ago. Last week was THE LAST BEST HOPE. This week it is FAT OLLIE’S BOOK. As always, after you read the review below head over to Patti’s blog for the list of reading recommendations.

FAT OLLIE'S BOOK (2002) by Ed McBain

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

City councilman Lester Henderson and his staff are setting up in Martin Luther King Memorial Hall for a rally during which Henderson will announce that he's running for mayor. While Henderson is practicing a walk across the stage to a podium, multiple shots explode from somewhere in the building and he falls dead. Because the Hall is in the Eighty-Eighth Precinct, the foul-mouthed, obese, gluttonous bigot Oliver Wendell Weeks is the detective assigned to the case. Because the victim lived in the Eighty-Seventh Precinct, Ollie requests help from that quarter, and Detectives Steve Carella and Bert Kling are stuck

with the task of working under his direction.

As excited as he is to be working his first high-profile case in a long time, Ollie is equally excited about his novel entitled Report to the Commissioner, which was written (on a typewriter) in the form of an official report. He has written it using the pseudonym Olivia Wesley Watts, who in her "report" is explaining to the Commissioner how she has come to be locked in a basement with over two million dollars' worth of diamonds. All but the last chapter has been revised, and Ollie has put the thirty-six pages of the preceding chapters into a dispatch case, intending to have it copied at a Kinko's. ("Less is more. That's an adage amongst us writers," he tells his sister when she questions whether he's really written a novel-length manuscript.)

When the dispatch case is stolen in a smash-and-grab from Ollie's car while he's inside King Memorial Hall, its recovery takes precedence over the Henderson murder, as far as he's personally concerned. Unbeknownst to him, the thief is one Emilio Herrera, a cross-dressing prostitute and drug addict who, upon reading the fiction, believes it to be a true but "coded" account, and who endeavors to break the code so as to get his hands on the diamonds.

Meanwhile, Detective Eileen Burke, who has just joined the Eighty-Seventh squad, is partnered with Andy Parker, a man whose attitude is as odious as Ollie's. One of Parker's informants tells them of a major drug deal that's going down in six days in the basement of a building somewhere in the city. What basement he doesn't know because the address keeps changing. He's only certain that the people involved aren't amateurs. He's somewhat wrong about that, however, as the reader learns soon afterward.

While Carella and Kling–and sometimes Ollie, when he's not trying to track down his manuscript–try to solve the Henderson murder, Burke and Parker's case becomes unwittingly entwined with Emilio's quest to locate the basement where Olivia Wesley Watts and the diamonds are held, resulting in some

moments worthy of a good sitcom.  

The reader also gets to join Emilio in reading Ollie's book, sections of which are scattered throughout the broader narrative. These make for great comedy in themselves, loaded as they are with English usage uncertainties–e.g.:

"Because that's where Lock lost him because, you should pardon this, Commish–and this is just between you and I, or maybe even you and me–he had to relieve himself....So it was with considerably great expectations that I took the call from The Needle that morning. Hopefully, The Needle...

"Or perhaps I hoped The Needle...

"Or maybe I was even hopeful that The Needle...

Hopefully, The Needle would have some information on Grant or his missing wife Marie or his cousin Ambrose Fields."

I was fourteen when I first read an Eighty-Seventh Precinct novel, 'Til Death, and I've been a fan ever since. The fifty-second entry in the series, Fat Ollie's Book has at least as much verve as the earliest entries, and quite possibly more. Ed McBain's characters, including many of the minor ones, are three-dimensional figures. His narrative style is laced with wry humor. His ear for dialogue is and always has been impeccable and unerring. His pacing is flawless.

As is, or even like, nearly every Eighty-Seventh Precinct mystery, Fat Ollie's Book is superb entertainment.  

Barry Ergang ©2012, 2015

Winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007 Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/

FFB Review: "THE LAST BEST HOPE" (1998) by Ed McBain (Reviewed By Barry Ergang)

Back in 2007 one of the first reviews Barry Ergang contributed here was on The Last Best Hope by Ed McBain. Like a lot of the early reviews on this blog eight years ago Barry’s review did not get the visibility it should have as I was stumbling around here in those early days of blogging and didn’t know what I was doing. It got a few more looks in 2011.  With Ed McBain day in two  weeks on Patti Abbott’s blog it seemed a very good time to run this one again. After you read Barry’s work, make sure you head over to Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom Blog for the rest of the FFB reading suggestions today.

THE LAST BEST HOPE (1998) by Ed McBain

Jill Lawton comes to attorney Matthew Hope's law office in Calusa, Florida to get a divorce—with alimony—from her long-gone husband Jack. Nine months earlier, Jack had gone north, ostensibly in search of freelance graphic design work, and she has not heard from him since. Jill hopes to invoke the Enoch Arden Law, but Matthew explains that not enough time has passed for this to apply, and that they'll have to find Jack and serve him with the divorce papers.

It's not long thereafter that a man's body is found on a beach in Calusa, the face gone from a shotgun blast. A driver's license and Visa card in the man's pockets suggest he's Jack Lawton. But when Jill is

summoned to positively identify the body, she instantly determines from the absence of a miniscule blue dot on his Adam's apple that the man is not her husband.

Matthew puts a firm of private investigators on the case, and on his own phones a precinct in the city where Jack was last known to have been. The city is unnamed; the precinct is the 87th; the detective Matthew talks to is Steve Carella.

Thus McBain melds two series and the sleuths therefrom, each working in different locations on the same case.

As the body count increases and surprises unfold, McBain with the skill his fans know and love conveys the story's past and present from different angles and viewpoints, switching among the various investigators and multiple villains. The reader is taken into the heads of the characters, all of whom are believably fleshed-out, and comes to know them from their conversations with others and their internal monologues—another McBain trademark.

The Last Best Hope never lets up—it's a superb example of a "page-turner"—as characters and events converge in a wild climax tense with excitement but leavened with humor situational, coincidental, and authorial. The lyric from a song in a James Bond movie aptly sums up Ed McBain: "Nobody does it better."

For more on this novel and mysteries in general surf to http://tinyurl.com/2ny8gv




Barry Ergang © 2007, 2011, 2015

Winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007 Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Dressing Up a McBain Classic (The Rap Sheet)

Dressing Up a McBain Classic (The Rap Sheet)

FFB Review: "The Last Dance" by Ed McBain--Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books. Patti’s move continues so Todd Mason is handling things link wise again today on his  Sweet Freedom blog. Last week Barry kicked off May with his review of THE BURNING WIRE by Jeffrey Deaver. This week he is reviewing THE LAST DANCE by Ed McBain. Unlike Barry I have only read a few of these novels and I have not read this one. Make sure you check out the list over at Todd’s blog after you read Barry’s review……

THE LAST DANCE (1999) by Ed McBain

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

The question facing 87^th Precinct detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer is: did sixty-eight-year-old Andrew Hale, who had a history of heart problems, have another, ultimately fatal heart attack? Or has he been murdered? If the latter, why? He had no apparent enemies and relatively little in the way of a bequest—his daughter is married to a successful attorney, so a $25,000 insurance policy is probably not worth killing for. This being a mystery novel, an autopsy soon proves the cops have a murder on their hands because the victim, prior to his demise, was doped with Rohypnol, a.k.a. the “date rape” drug. Moreover, the manner in which he was killed is somewhat bizarre.
  

How, if at all, do the subsequent murders of a young woman named Althea Cleary and the elderly Martha Coleridge tie in to the Hale killing?

Joining in the investigation is Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks from the neighboring 88^th Precinct, a man good at his job but repulsive in nearly every other way imaginable. 

As they probe the various cases, the detectives—and readers—encounter a variety of individuals, some apparently respectable, others definitely not. These include—among others— housewives, confidential informants, an African-American socio-political activist, local and imported hit men, and a considerable number of theatrical types. Both detectives and readers encounter their share of the kind of tense physical action that real-life big-city cops face all too often.

Although I wouldn’t rate The Last Dance as one of my favorite 87^th Precinct novels, I can nevertheless recommend it simply because I’ve never read a novel in this series I’d call a dud—and I’ve read nearly all of them. What always makes them appealing is the late Ed McBain’s skill at creating very believable three-dimensional characters via their actions, dialogue, and internal monologues. His narrative style includes entertaining explanations of technical procedures, whether investigative or forensic, and is often leavened with wry humor. He was and remains arguably the finest exponent of the police procedural sub-genre.

Warning: The Last Dance contains raw street language some readers might find offensive.

© 2015 Barry Ergang

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Via Not The Baseball Pitcher-- FFB: Hark!: A Novel of the 87th Precinct – Ed McBain

FFB: Hark!: A Novel of the 87th Precinct – Ed McBain

Via Not The Baseball Pitcher--- FFB: Calypso – Ed McBain

FFB: Calypso – Ed McBain