Lady Killer – Ed McBain, 1958 ★★★

Killing Time

Detective work is tough enough when trying to solve a murder. How about solving a pending murder?

That’s the challenge members of Isola’s 87^th Precinct face in this early installment of Ed McBain’s long-running series of crime-fiction novels. A note written in cut-out letters handed to the desk sergeant by a young boy warns: “I will kill the Lady tonight at 8. What can you do about it?”

That gives the detectives just 12 hours to figure out what it all means, if it is just some bad joke or, if not, whether whoever “the Lady” is can be saved. Meanwhile, from his distant perch, a would-be killer watches and wonders if they will catch him before he strikes:

Tonight he would kill. Yes. There was no backing away from that. Yes. He had to kill, he knew that, there was no other way, that was it, yes. Tonight. They could not stop him, but maybe they would. They could not stop him.

Creepiness and pacing are two things Lady Killer has going for it. At just over 150 pages, it is a fast read even for McBain, who through the 1950s and 1960s pumped out pulsating suspense fiction designed to whiten knuckles when readers weren’t flipping pages.

The book includes an illustration of the note which kicks off the investigation, seen above. Also featured in the book are several composite sketches of the suspect.

Stopping after a single chapter is like eating one potato chip.

What drove McBain? In the case of Lady Killer, it was a party he was hosting on Martha’s Vineyard. According to an introduction he wrote for an Armchair Detective Library edition, he was trying to write the book before some house guests arrived, and almost succeeded.

An impetus to wrap it up may be the book’s greatest strength as well as its most obvious weakness. On the plus side, this is one of McBain’s most turbo-charged rides, pulling the reader in early and not letting go until the last page. The tight time frame is rigidly adhered to – at times in the form of an actual countdown on the printed page.

On the debit side are a weak ending and some credibility gaps that, while not major individually, do add up. The crime lab doesn’t just check for fingerprints, but identifies in hours the origin of the paste and letters used to fashion a note which, for all they know, may be a crank.

The dust jacket for a 1961 U.K. printing of Lady Killer. That desperate character crouching with the gun is Cotton Hawes, one of the good guys despite his intimidating appearance. Someone tells him: "You’d make a good menace. In a spy story. The streak in your hair is loaded with intrigue." Image from https://www.dustjackets.com/advSearchResults.php?authorField=Ed+McBain&action=search.

Lady Killer [number seven in the series for those keeping count] may be one of the more elemental of 87^th Precinct novels in its strict focus on police procedure. Police procedurals are what these McBain books are often termed, yet in most cases, especially in the 1970s and after as McBain expanded his approach, actual police work took a back seat to plot elements or character development.

In this case, the focus is on investigation, even as various leads fail to pan out. We follow the detectives in real time as they process fingerprints, analyze clues, talk to witnesses, and stalk the streets of Isola trying to catch a criminal before the crime is committed.

By the early 1960s, at the same time the Beatles were catching on in the States, the 87th Precinct was becoming a hit in the United Kingdom. Not quite McBain-mania, but enough to score a classy Penguin paperback. Today, three British superfans keep the fire burning with Hark! The 87th Precinct Podcast. Image from https://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/lady-killer-1958-by-ed-mcbain/.

The standout chapter to me in the book is all about police business and not about the crime. With only three hours left, we watch various 87^th Precinct detectives get sidetracked by everyday police work, all of them aware of the lost time but helpless to do anything as McBain masterfully buries the reader in the resulting minutiae.

…the men of the 87^th were working stiffs doing a job, and the things that happened within the next fifty minutes were not things that fit into place like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. They followed no pat line of development. They brought the cops not an iota closer to finding The Lady or the man who had threatened to kill.

When he began it two years before, McBain’s initial plan for the 87^th Precinct was an entire squadroom of detectives as a composite hero. Lady Killer is one of the few times this approach actually comes across. Often the books spotlight Steve Carella as the main character; this time uptown transfer Cotton Hawes gets nominal lead duties. Carella and the rest of the regulars – led by Meyer Meyer and detective commander Lieutenant Peter Byrnes – provide Hawes with able backup.

By 1967, this Dell paperback (illustrated by Dean Ellis) played up the suspense, as well as a sexy naked lady who alas is not part of the story. Image from http://paperbackpalette.blogspot.com/2018/04/dean-ellis-master-of-science-fiction-art.html.

More than most 87^th Precinct novels, Lady Killer offers a real moment-by-moment vibrancy, with a few detours like the hunt for the mysterious boy who dropped off the letter and various leads on who “The Lady” might be, including a fancy prostitute and a risqué singer.

While suspense is item one, two, and three on the agenda, McBain does keep it light at times with welcome jabs of humor, much of it developed around the odd characters the men of the 87^th come into contact with, like informer Fats Donner, the kind of guy who spends a very hot July day in a sauna, never mind his thick frame:

Fats was truly fat in the plural. He was city-wide, he was state-wide, he was continental. Like a giant, quivering bowl of white flesh, he sat on the marble bench against the wall, languishing in the fetid air, a towel draped across his crotch. Each time he breathed, layers of fat shook and trembled.

McBain in the 1950s was working cleaner than he did in later decades; profanity is kept to a minimum. There is some exploration of the local sex trade, including the transgressive notion of police officers looking the other way or even taking advantage of their position. “After all, if you ran a pushcart you expected the cop on the beat to take an apple every now and then, didn’t you?” he writes.

Carella and Hawes visiting a bordello became the cover image for the 1974 Signet paperback. The brief scene doesn't require either detective to draw his firearm, but you know, it's not a 1970s crime novel without guns and broads somewhere. Image from https://www.etsy.com/il-en/listing/603331061/1974-vintage-lady-killer-87th-precinct.

The situation prompts an interesting exchange between Carella, who has a live-and-let-live attitude about the prostitutes (though he doesn’t take advantage of them for money or anything else); and Hawes, somewhat shocked at his brother officer turning a blind eye to the trade.

“A cop can’t do everything by the book,” Carella explains. “I’ve got a sense of right and wrong that has nothing to do with the law.”

Hawes does get to make some time with the ladies, scoring a proposition from the singer and a dinner date with a bookstore owner. Those encounters are fairly perfunctory, revealing some of McBain’s limited approach with women at this point in his development.

More arresting is when Hawes, after an apartment-building shootout, encounters a witness who makes an immediate first impression:

The girl was unattractive, a brunette with large brown eyes and a very pale skin. She spoke from the side of her mouth, a mannerism that gave her the appearance of a Hollywood gun moll. She was wearing only a thin pink slip, and the one disconcertingly attractive thing about her was the bosom that threatened the silk.

Nothing much comes from the encounter. The more she talks, the clearer it becomes she has nothing of value to offer. Yet something about it sticks. McBain in just over two pages sketches a portrait of a sad, lonely woman who seems in her quiet way as much a victim of the city’s impersonality as anyone else here.

Lady Killer was the seventh 87th Precinct novel and also the basis for the third episode of the 1961-62 NBC-TV series, which featured (from left) Ron Harper as Bert Kling, Robert Lansing as Carella, Gregory Walcott as Robert Havilland, and Norman Fell as Meyer Meyer. Image from https://paleymatters.org/nypd-too-part-two-more-of-our-favorite-nyc-cop-shows-b79a384311f9.

It is but an echo of the deeper mood pieces and sentimental idylls McBain offered in other books, though to be fair Lady Killer doesn’t quite need to be so evocative, moving as fast as it does.

Lady Killer may be as thin on plot as it is in size, but it is a prime example of what McBain brought to the table, both in terms of inventiveness (the race against time idea worked so well he used it again in the very next 87^th Precinct novel) and in terms of what might be called creative agita, the ability to set an unsettling pace all the way to the end.

Lady Killer isn’t all that clever or memorable by McBain standards, but in terms of precision craftsmanship it shows what the guy could do.