Vanishing Ladies – Ed McBain, 1957 ★★½

Stranger Danger in the Sticks

Pulp fiction is a genre famous for keeping it short. Wham-bam openings; terse dialogue; jump-in action sequences; swift resolutions: What you get is meant to be read fast and enjoyed at once.

Vanishing Ladies presents a baseline example of the genre, with many recognizable staples in place. One variation: the protagonist is a cop, not a private eye or regular joe, which makes sense given author Ed McBain had just launched his 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals the year before publishing this.

Police detective Phil Colby and his fiancée, Ann Grafton, are on a summer vacation from the city where he fights crime, unaware the isolated hamlet they drive to is steeped in unlawful activity. The next thing Phil knows, Ann has disappeared without a trace. No one saw her leave. In fact, no one will admit to having ever seen her at all.

You don’t need to be a cop to figure something’s wrong, though the blood he finds on his cabin floor is a clinching clue. The more questions Colby asks, the more suspicious and unfriendly people get.

“Don’t be a goddamned hero,” warns one of the burg’s residents, a justice of the peace. Sullivan’s Corners is that kind of town.

Vanishing Ladies establishes itself early on as a mash-up of two films readers of the time would have known, Bad Day At Black Rock and The Lady Vanishes. It’s a set-up with possibilities.

Walter Brennan suggests outsider Spencer Tracy move along while hotel clerk John Ericson looks on in 1955's Bad Day At Black Rock. Sullivan's Corners in Vanishing Ladies has its own dark secrets to hide. Image from https://nostalgiacentral.com/movies/movies-by-decade/movies-1950s/bad-day-black-rock-1955/.

McBain wastes no time establishing Colby’s chief antagonist, the town of Sullivan’s Corners itself:

The town had a temporary look to it. The main street was lined with the shops you find in any town, the grocers, and the butchers, and the dry goods stores, but they all gave the feeling of having been thrown up in haste, a feeling that they could have been disassembled in five seconds flat and taken underground in an atom bomb attack. There was, too, if a town can give out such a feeling at one o’clock in the morning, a sense of unfriendliness.

Where is Sullivan’s Corners, anyway? McBain plays it coy. His first-person narration – in a clever device, it comes to us in the form of a court deposition – mentions “the next state” over from where Colby himself lives and works, but doesn’t say what that state is, either.

If this was your standard Ed McBain novel, you might expect Colby to hail from Isola, the fictitious city of the 87^th Precinct. But Vanishing Ladies was originally published not as an Ed McBain book, but rather a Richard Marsten book, another pseudonym used by real-life author Evan Hunter. Only in later years, when the McBain moniker was a surefire pick-up draw at spin-racks, did the publisher swap out the name.

Evan Hunter, alias Ed McBain, alias Richard Marsten, alias a bunch of other guys, as he was in 1953, four years before penning Vanishing Ladies. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_McBain

The prolific Hunter employed many nom de plumes throughout his career so he could produce new fiction without wearing out his readership. In the 1950s, Hunter produced eight novels under the Marsten name alone, mostly crime fiction but also science fiction.

If there is an off-brand flavor to Vanished Ladies, it is slight. Colby could be a close cousin of lead 87^th Precinct detective Steve Carella. He’s brave, resourceful, observant, decent of manner, good at his job, and devoted like Carella to the woman who loves him, in this case his fiancée Ann, whose disappearance fuels the plot.

The big difference: this cop must act more as a private detective. The result is pulp fiction fed through the prism of a police procedural, with Colby relying not on his badge but rather his wits:

Crime detection is a line of work, the same as any other line of work. When a jeweler’s been handling gems long enough, he doesn’t have to put in the eyepiece to differentiate the real from the phony. He can tell from the feel of the gem, and the sheen and the glitter. Thieves glitter, too.

Rules of pulp fiction are otherwise ruthlessly observed. Bad guys operate brutally from opaque motives. Trusting anyone is a big mistake. People get beat up a lot, sometimes even killed.

"When love is for sale, life is dirt cheap..." Speaking of cheap, dig this amazing 1991 Avon paperback cover, maybe the ugliest in my entire collection! Did they think they were publishing a sci-fi book or a driver's manual?

And with a title like Vanishing Ladies, you can bet there are plenty of femme fatales on order. One named Blanche shows up uninvited in Colby’s motel cabin, and soon steps out of her dress:

“Admit it. I’m a nice package, ain’t I?”

“Sure,” I said.

“And I came gift-wrapped. God, but some men are lucky.”

Conventions of pulp-fiction can be limiting; Vanishing Ladies does hit some clams while rolling along. Some dialogue is painfully bogus. “This gun has no friends!” Phil warns some antagonists. A little later, someone muses: The lady had something eating her, and she wouldn’t be happy until the last bite was swallowed.

There are also protracted moments like when Colby gets the drop on his adversaries only to stand there while they give him the runaround, or else tell him to relax and accept the situation. The first thing you know he would do as a good cop in a situation like this is call for help from the state police, but he is too content instead to play things by ear while Ann remains missing. 

The weakness of the premise grates the more one reads. Why would someone kidnap a woman just arrived from out of town? The question is answered, and in a way that makes some sense, but in a contrived manner. Ann is just a McGuffin to drive the action forward, and it shows.

The villains are weak broth, too. Other than the fact some are lawmen, there is nothing particularly distinctive about them, except when their personalities shift to suit the plot.

Colby's troubles in Sullivan's Corners begin when a state trooper on a motorcycle pulls him over for going 40 miles per hour in a posted 25-mph zone. Or was that 65 mph in a 40-mph zone? Sullivan's Corners seems to have an elastic view of the law. Image from http://www.policemotorunits.com/louisiana-state-police.html.

McBain’s ability to create engaging secondary characters is thus less in evidence, but for a couple of allies Colby gains in his search for Ann.

John Simms is an ex-Marine who doesn’t care if the woman he loves is a prostitute. He just wants her back, but it seems the same people who made Ann disappear got her, too. He explains the rules of love to Colby:

“In the songs, they say chemistry. It ain’t chemistry. It’s biology. Animals. Like when two dogs meet on the street, he don’t ask her she wants a martini or she wants to see his etchings. They know what it’s all about. They don’t have love stories to read, and love movies to see. They don’t get mixed up. The mutt knows, and the bitch knows, and they make it. Period.”

Then there’s Tony Mitchell, another detective from Colby’s precinct who shows up later on to lend a hand. Even more than Colby, he doesn’t like being away from the city:

You can’t feel tempo anywhere but in the city. In the city the footsteps are magnified by a million, and you can feel the quicker beat, and there’s suddenly purpose to the city – the summer is gone, the loafing is over, the city is tightening its belt for the cold winter ahead.

A rare first-edition paperback, when the book was credited to Richard Marsten. That Blanche in the purple sure is a swell dish! Image from https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/127762/evan-hunter-richard-marsten/vanishing-ladies.

There are moments like in the passage above – actually a long reverie on urban pleasures by Mitchell – where you discern the real Evan Hunter from behind his numerous alter egos. Mitchell describes growing up in the big city, serving on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II, cutting a path through the streetlife bustle; all things Hunter did, too.

McBain fans may enjoy Vanishing Ladies both for this hidden self-portrait of its author and for the fish-out-of-water element of a city cop struggling to make headway out in the boonies. As a story, it works more as a series of short chapters connected via cliffhangers, with left-field crises like snake attacks and motorcycle chases popping in for variety. Much like an early 87^th Precinct novel, but with less exposition.

I don’t know how much it will appeal to readers not as taken by the 87^th Precinct to begin with. I suspect they will be pulled along by the brisk narrative like I was, and feel mildly let down as it develops along formulaic lines. I don’t think they will feel cheated; it’s a fun ride.

It is a pretty fair time capsule, too; conventions of the 1950s are well in place. You have Marilyn Monroe pin-ups, Cadillacs as the epitome of fancy cars, comments about a life lived amid Sinatra and cigarettes.

One amusingly digressive debate revolves around whether Bing Crosby or Perry Como is the more “casual” singer.

“That’s the hardest thing in the world to do…Appear casual, I mean. Think of the pressure those guys are under. Yet they manage to look casual.”

A familiar 1950s sight was Frank Sinatra in a recording studio. At one point, the narrator declares: "If Fred had said another word about the merits of my old friend Frank Sinatra’s voice, I would have punched him right in the nose." Image from https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Sinatra/e/B000APTH54. 

One fascinating time-travel element of Vanishing Ladies is the repeated mention of the Mann Act, which for decades prohibited the interstate transport of females, underage or otherwise, for “immoral” purposes. It is apparently a reason why Colby takes a separate cabin for Ann, an excuse for the suspicious looks the couple endure, and a factor in how she winds up missing in the first place.

In the end, McBain’s innate skill as a writer outweigh his lack of engagement, just enough to keep you reading. Decades later, in 1991, another McBain novel not connected with the 87th Precinct would employ the same formula in reverse, a suburban character lost in the big city, in Downtown. That book has stronger humor and atmosphere going for it, not to mention a more clever and satisfying plot, and is really one of the best books under the McBain name, 87th Precinct or not.

Vanishing Ladies doesn’t quite miss that mark so much as not aim as high. The charm of the book is knowing the guy probably wrote it over a week and had ample time between chapters to take his kids to the zoo. Sometimes you want a steak, sometimes just a burger. Vanishing Ladies is fine for what it is.