Killer's Choice – Ed McBain, 1958 ★★½

Murder Takes a Back Seat

Why does the 87^th Precinct series still draw readers in, over sixty years after it began, more than a decade after its creator’s death? Can it boil down to more than crafty plots, cocksure villains, and cagey dialogue? Plenty of mystery series offer these; none are the 87^th Precinct.

My theory of the moment: It boils down to investment: Investment on the part of the author to populate his fictional city of Isola with a vibrant community of colorful characters. Investment on the part of readers to relate to these characters, enough so that like the police detectives of the 87^th, we are bothered when some evil is done them.

It’s the sort of investment that lives on even after one reads an 87^th Precinct novel not quite up to snuff. In the case of Killer’s Choice, readers are treated to two mysteries, one involving a murder, the other involving the identity of the victim. As a mystery writer, McBain was often a better scene-setter than yarn-spinner. That’s true here:

The girl lay among the glass and the liquid, lay face downward, her mouth partially opened. The girl was a redhead. Her eyes seemed too large for her face because they were bulging in death. The girl had been shot four times in the chest, and her blood still ran, mingling with the alcohol on the floor.

The woman, we learn, was Annie Boone, a divorced mother shot four times with a .25-caliber handgun in the liquor store where she worked. Everyone who knew her, it turns out, has a different version of Annie to relate when 87^th Precinct detectives question them about her.

One boyfriend says she was demure and into opera, another remembers her as sexually available and a regular at his pool hall. Her own mother calls her “not a very bright girl” unworthy of her more intellectually powerful husband. Then Annie’s ex tells them everything he did he did for Annie. Her red hair, he says, “set the pace” for a life lived loud and strong. “The day I lost her was the blackest day of my life,” he says.

Another reviewer likens this approach to that of the classic film Laura, where Gene Tierney’s title character is described in different ways by people, mostly male, who knew her. I think this was McBain’s approach, too, but it doesn’t gel. Indeed, the whole “many-faces-of-Annie” approach is never adequately resolved, nor does it really connect to the facts of the murder as revealed at the end.

What McBain does deliver, in fits and starts, is an extended rumination on how a female might alternately conform and rebel in the big city circa the 1950s, a series of observations that, while dated now and frustratingly incongruous in its own setting, do contain moments of recognizable truth.

But do these philosophical ruminations feed the central mystery? Not really. In fact, the whole mystery of who murdered Annie takes a back seat after the first five chapters and never really re-emerges until the last three chapters, when we get a rushed, unsatisfying resolution.

Evan Hunter, also known as Ed McBain, later in life. Image from https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/quote-of-the-day-262/mcbain/.

What makes Killer’s Choice a standout example of that investment I wrote of at the outset is the business filling the rest of the book. McBain, actually novelist Evan Hunter, was five books into the 87^th Precinct series, still tinkering with his formula. We get a new detective, Cotton Hawes, a regular for the rest of the series. We lose a detective, Roger Havilland, who had been the series heavy until he gets killed in a freakish accident involving a plate-glass window.

I was tempted to put a spoiler warning in the last sentence, but McBain doesn’t really seem to want it. We are told the moment Havilland appears that he is about to die, ironically because he tries to be helpful in a moment of fuzzy-headed altruism to someone who just robbed a store. Nailing his killer then becomes the other plot in this novel, a more involving, action-filled one than the Annie story.

Havilland was the fly in the ointment in the four prior 87^th Precinct novels. He was racist, corrupt, and a “bull,” known for knocking around suspects to extract confessions. No one else at the stationhouse liked the guy, McBain writes, and his burial ceremony is handled in bracingly unsentimental fashion:

Roger Havilland lay in the ground, no longer a part of it. A stone would be erected over his grave within the next two weeks. Relatives might visit his grave with flowers annually, and then perhaps the relatives might stop their visits, the flowers would stop.

Roger Havilland would never know or care.

The demise of Havilland marks a clear turning point in the series. McBain in time would introduce a bad-cop replacement, Andy Parker. There would also be Ollie Weeks, much later on, a nasty piece of work but with some redeeming qualities. Neither was Havilland. He was the archetype bad cop of his era, that being the 1950s, all bluster and brass knucks, but his type of crookedness would have little place in the series as McBain invested his stationhouse with nobler qualities, until it became an oasis of decency amid harsher surroundings.

The corporate approach Ed McBain took to the 87th Precinct stories, as a collection of detectives rather than a single protagonist, is developed in Killer's Choice and would carry over to a television series which ran from 1961 to 1962. Pictured are from left to right, Norman Fell as Meyer Meyer, Gregory Walcott as Roger Havilland, and Ron Harper as Bert Kling. Seated at center is Robert Lansing as Steve Carella. Image from http://thecliffedge.com/?p=9704.

Cotton Hawes seems designed here as a first step in that process. When we are introduced to Hawes, McBain makes clear he’s not here to play nice with his fellow cops. He cuts short a lab technician’s explanation about ballistics and is rather curt with the main detective in the 87^th series, Steve Carella:

Hawes was as sharp as a plate glass splinter, and as cold as a plate of spumoni.

Hawes is neither racist nor corrupt. He just wants to do his job and go home. It gives Killer’s Choice a needed dose of interoffice tension. How will the other detectives adjust to the new guy, and vice-versa?

Carella tries to explain to Hawes the value of listening to others, but it is from visiting the apartment of Havilland’s suspected killer that Hawes gains something of an epiphany. He does the one thing McBain tells us a police officer should never do when standing at the doorway of the home of a suspected armed felon. He knocks.

“Politeness is something you have to be careful about,” Meyer Meyer, the sagest detective at the precinct, tells his family later on. Meyer goes on to explain “the best police department is the one which has hardly any manners at all.”

An early paperback edition of Killer's Choice spotlights a different approach than we see Cotton Hawes take earlier in the book. By then, he learned his lesson. Image from https://yellowedandcreased.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/killers-choice-ed-mcbain/.

Several gunshots later, Hawes is lying injured next to Carella, who was nearly killed in the fusillade of bullets triggered by Hawes’ “politeness.” Hawes, we learn, is a transfer from an uptown precinct where murder was a much rarer occurrence. Hawes will spend the rest of the book trying, within the law, to atone for his mistake.

This is really why I think the 87^th Precinct endures as a mystery series, and why Killer’s Choice, though less than solid in the story department, is a prime example of that deeper sense of investment overriding any plot concerns. Long after we lose sight of whoever it is Annie is supposed to be or why she was murdered, we remain interested in Hawes and how he will find a place on the 87^th Precinct team, enough to want to read the next installment in the series and learn more.

The book is brimming with personality. Not so much Annie’s many faces, which get brisk treatment, but other characters who intersect with the investigation, however tangentially.

My favorite moment in the book is a little one where an elevator operator (kids, ask your grandparents) asks detective Bert Kling about the weather outside. It’s a typically beautiful June day; the poor operator can only envy those who get to enjoy it:

“Up and down all day long,” the elevator operator said. “Up and down, but I’m never going any place. I’m a vertical mole. I’d rather be a subway conductor. Then at least I’d be a horizontal mole.”

An elevator operator on the job, back in the day.

A lawyer who is helping Annie’s ex-husband gain custody of their daughter (and who adds to the confusion over Annie by describing her as a “drunkard,” something which never otherwise comes up) is sent up as an amusingly pompous foil: “He spoke as if every word he uttered were the key word in his summing up.”

Meyer himself has one of the book’s best lines, when recommending marriage to Kling: “There’s nothing like marriage for a cop. It gives him a sense of justice. He knows already what it feels like to be a prisoner, so he doesn’t hurry to make false arrests.”

Enjoying the vibe of the 87^th Precinct goes a long way to keeping you focused and turning pages. Killer’s Choice is a short novel and a fast read. McBain isn’t connecting his plot pieces so well here, but he knows how to juggle and holds your attention that way.

The resolution is the weakest part of the book. I don’t want to spoil it, but will say this is one time I saw the killer coming and was thrown only by the haphazard reveal. There is a clue involving a vagrant which doesn’t seem like much to go on, but is explained after as being central to the case. Darned if I know how.

There is also a bizarre section where the killer calls Annie’s daughter, who proceeds to relate a verbatim transcript of the conversation. Hard to believe, as the girl is five and reveals herself more interested in playing with her dolly than talking to a stranger. But we get a moment-by-moment account through her retelling that shows her to have a photographic memory.

It’s a strange lapse in the realism that defines the series, more so because McBain doesn’t really need it for mystery purposes.

What McBain did need, and delivered, was a novel that gave his readers more to invest in, and care about. Killer’s Choice may not satisfy, but it does engage, which is why readers kept coming back, and still do.