Long Time No See – Ed McBain, 1977 ★★½

Shaking Up the Old Eight-Seven

Breaking out of an old formula sounds fine in theory, but can result in career death for a successful fiction writer. Ed McBain found himself in the mid-1970s with a need to shake things up, though, and so he gave his 87^th Precinct police procedural series a major retooling.

On the surface, Long Time No See doesn’t seem too radical. Like most of the 87^th Precinct novels, it involves a murder, or rather a series of them. It spends much time looking over the shoulders of the detectives of the Eight-Seven, especially nominal star Det. Steve Carella. Case details will be familiar to a regular viewer of “Law & Order.”

It’s a strict police procedural in those ways, at least:

Her hands had been put in plastic bags, par for the course when the weapon was a knife and the attack proximate. No dutiful M. E. would have neglected the possibility that the victim might have scratched out in self-defense and might be carrying under her fingernails samples of the murderer’s skin or blood.

There’s even a simple message at the core of the story, as related by 87^th Precinct regular Meyer Meyer: “You don’t have to be smart to kill people.” You don’t even need to be crazy.

But the novel does differ in key ways from what 87^th Precinct readers had come to expect after 21 years:

1.    Length – As blog host Sergio notes in his McBain-friendly book-review site, “Tipping My Fedora,” this was the longest novel thus far in the 87^th saga, a point promoted by the publisher back in the day. “The increased length was a selling point for the series,” Sergio writes, adding the market now expected paperbacks longer than McBain’s usual 200 pages.

2.    Tone – Another point Sergio makes is the jump in sex and violence. Profanity had been used since the 1960s, but the F-bomb count is now way up. There’s a rape, prostitutes, and a fairly graphic sex scene by McBain’s earlier standards. ‘60s McBains had been young-adult friendly; this plays more like a hard-R.

3.    Direction – McBain had experimented in his books before. He Who Hesitates puts us in the unstable mind of a killer; Hail To The Chief satirizes Nixon and Watergate. But Long Time No See represented McBain’s full-blown shift from the author of whodunits to what he called “whydunits,” with a very overt social/psychological subtext explored in the narrative by multiple mental-health workers.

While representing an evolution rather than a straight break, Long Time No See does feel different from what came before, in more than just heft. Was it a change for the better?

Many 87^th Precinct readers prefer early McBain for their taut stories, rat-a-tat pacing, and rabbit-punch late-inning twists. The later novels have those, too, but were often about scene-setting, character development, and lengthy detours away from the central plot. Some think the series got more long-winded over time; others appreciate McBain’s willingness to pull back and explore other colors in his writer’s palette.

Long Time No See begins with a blind man. Jimmy Harris is a Vietnam vet whose eyes were shredded by shrapnel ten years before; McBain opens on him walking the streets of Isola on a chilly November night, streets he knows like Braille. McBain makes clear right away Jimmy may be a beggar, but he knows how to handle himself:

Used to think being blind meant darkness all the time. Wasn’t so. Lights flashing. Electrical impulses from the brain, memory images, whatever. Lots of action in his head all the time. Couldn’t see nothing in front of his eyes, but saw plenty behind them.

But in front is what holds fatal consequences, a knife-wielding assailant who first chloroforms Harris’ guide dog, then slices open the blind man’s trachea. Before very long, two more blind people are similarly slain. Coincidence, or a new kind of serial killer at work? It’s up to Carella and Meyer to figure it out.

That this takes a while longer than 87^th Precinct readers were used to is part of the challenge with Long Time No See, although you may find considerable sidelong charm in that. McBain spends a good deal of time world-building, giving us an understanding of his fictional city of Isola, its layout, its geography, its history:

On the southern side of Isola was the River Dix, a favorite spot in the thirties for the dumping of corpses wearing cement slippers. Such activity had since been removed to Spindrift Airport out on Sand’s Point, where the bodies of gangsters were all-too-often found moldering in the locked trunks of late-model automobiles.

At other times, McBain cocks an eyebrow at American society, in the manner of a pulp-fiction George Carlin:

In all of America, a toilet was something other than what it was supposed to be. It was a bathroom or a powder room or a rest room, but it was never a toilet…Americans, the most wasteful humans on the face of the earth, did not like to discuss waste products or bodily functions. Your average polite American abroad would rather wet his pants than ask where the toilet was. In the Eight-Seven, only criminals asked where the toilet was. “Hey, where’s the terlet?” they said. Get a clutch of muggers up there, a snatch of hookers, a stealth of burglars, they all wanted to know where the toilet was.

There are even digs at the current crime-fiction scene. Bald Meyer Meyer is tired of being reminded of Kojak, while Carella muses on the myth of the private eye. “The last time Carella had met a private detective investigating a homicide was never,” McBain writes.

Ed McBain, also known as Evan Hunter, was actually born under a different name entirely, Salvatore Lombino. Other nom de plumes included Richard Marsten, Hunt Collins, and Curt Cannon. As Burt Reynolds once observed, "Those are GREAT names!" Image from http://theroundplaceinthemiddle.com/?tag=evan-hunter.

The central mystery conspicuously spends time on the back burner while all these sideshows play out. Carella checks out a workplace affair, tries to find a taker for dead Jimmy’s guide dog, visits a massage parlor by posing as a john, and encounters a former street-gang boss who now dresses in a silk rep tie and patent-leather shoes. A lot of wheels turn, but for a very long time, until the last 30 pages, next to nothing happens story-wise.

There is also much psychology, delving into Jimmy’s experiences both as a street-gang member and a soldier in Vietnam. While fending off the advances of a pretty non-com, Carella reviews the dead man’s files and discovers a written account of a recurring nightmare Jimmy claimed to have that may shed some light on the circumstances of his killing.

Sound unconvincing? It is the weak link of the story as I read it, very much of its time with a lot of Freudian symbolism to unravel (e. g. a Christmas tree with a penis). McBain, who by his other well-known name, Evan Hunter, wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, even has someone make a jokey reference to Spellbound to perhaps acknowledge the over-tidy nature of how this head-shrinker stuff plays out. Because Carella is something of a supercop at this point in the series, it all comes together for him like clockwork at the final interrogation scene.

With the often hard-charging 87^th Precinct novels, conclusions can be letdowns, especially given the crackling way they begin. With Long Time No See, this issue might have been exacerbated thanks to the longer narrative, which renders our main story less hard-charging than normal. Pacing especially seems to suffer. The wrap-up is rather rushed along and over quickly.

More effective suspense scenes come in the form of patience-testing exercises, like whether the 87^th’s dimmest detective, Genero, will think to tell Carella about an important call he received from another part of the city. McBain’s feeling for the ebb-and-flow of a big-city precinct house feels spot-on and draws you in with his loose wit and incisive use of detail, aspects of the series which seemed to grow along with the page counts.

Take this account of the rundown neighborhood where Jimmy once lived:

In Diamondback, the locks on most lobby doors had been broken when there were still Indians running in the forests, and the landlords hadn’t bothered to replace them. Instead, the tenants fortified their own apartment doors with enough locks to keep out an army of thieves. A man who got to be forty and still was his own best doctor was a man who needed a doctor. And a man who lived in Diamondback for more than forty minutes without being an expert locksmith was a man who needed his apartment burglarized.

What ends up making Long Time No See a good read is much the same points that sell the other installments of this 39-year-long series, which began back in 1956 with Cop Hater and ran until 2005, the year of McBain/Hunter’s death, when Fiddlers was published. The pleasure of the 87^th’s company is undeniable, even when the author seems to have trouble here finessing a different approach.

It does get better; at least in my view. I think the 1980s contain some of the best 87^th mysteries in the entire series, with entries like Poison, Lullaby, and especially Tricks. Once McBain settled into his lengthier format, his mysteries got sharper and tighter, as well as a tad more ambitious. Long Time No See has nothing really wrong with it except a clumsy ending; fans of the series might even enjoy the lacking story for the way it forces greater appreciation of the characters and the precinct house which kept so many coming back for so long.