Killer’s Wedge – Ed McBain, 1959 ★★

Squadroom in the Soup

A key difference between mysteries and crime fiction is that the former are about solving crimes, while the latter focuses on committing them.

Like if a dangerous robber was sent to prison, and he dies there, what will his wife do if she’s the kind of person that wants revenge?

Killer’s Wedge takes this idea and runs with it. Virginia Dodge used to be married to a guy named Frank. Then he got sent to prison, where he got sick and died. She doesn’t want to know about the crimes Frank committed, the man he blinded, anything like that. She just wants to kill the detective who arrested him, Steve Carella, whom fans will recognize as the main character of the 87^th Precinct series.

When Virginia shows up at the 87^th’s detective squadroom, she is carrying not only a pistol but a vial of liquid she says is nitroglycerin, which her husband used for safe-cracking work. Discovering Carella not there, she holds the rest of the squadroom hostage, making clear she means business:

“Don’t open that door, Lieutenant, or I’ll fire into this purse and we can all go to Hell!”

Is she really packing nitro, or as everyone calls it in this book, “soup”? That’s just one of the many questions McBain leaves hanging in this early installment of the 87^th Precinct police procedurals.

Virginia Dodge as she is depicted on the first-edition hardcover. All in black, "she looked for a moment like Death personified." Image from https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2012/02/killers-wedge-ed-mcbain.html.

The first time I read Killer’s Wedge, I was hooked. I loved the series already, but found my investment enhanced by the closer confines of this story. Everything involving the standoff with Virginia Dodge takes place in a single room over the space of a few hours, so the tension became magnified.

Reading it again, I found that tension curdling into frustration.

As a thrill ride, Killer’s Wedge proved a one-and-done experience for me, a surprise given this is a deeper dive into the 87^th Precinct world. Going in, knowing the perimeters of the story and how it turns out, I expected to still be engaged by the usual sidestories and tangents that McBain goes on, the material that I can count on myself forgetting when I’m done reading it.

There are tangents, too. He spends some time inventorying the detectives’ spare desk where discarded items are kept, and the life of a Puerto Rican prostitute who was picked by series regular Hal Willis and also finds herself a hostage. Much is made about the politics of power, how it is wielded by Dodge and resented by her prisoners:

And now, in the squadroom where fairness was an unspoken credo, the men had been presented with a situation which was totally unfair, totally illogical, and yet it sat there. Immovable, illogical, unfair, it sat there and waited.

By the time the book came out in paperback, Virginia had gotten more glamorous, losing the bun she has in the story, getting some cleavage, her black wardrobe going from severe to sultry. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Killers-Wedge-87th-Precinct-Perma/dp/B001KB3DAM. 

Reading it a second time, I too found the situation immovable, illogical and unfair. McBain emphasizes Dodge’s hardness and desire to kill Carella. Personality-wise, she’s a cipher. McBain’s villains, however nasty, usually offer depth, even complexity. Especially given how much time we are forced to spend with her, Dodge needed some of that.

She shoots one cop early on, leaving him grievously wounded. This should have shut down the situation there and then once the plainclothes officers downstairs responded. But only a desk sergeant pokes his head in. When told by Detective Lieutenant Pete Byrnes that nothing’s wrong, he nods and goes back downstairs, and that’s that.

Byrnes does slip in a codeword for a dangerous situation unfolding, “forthwith,” but this proves too vague, for the sergeant and the reader.

The passivity in how Byrnes and the other detectives handle this situation is frustrating, giving up their weapons and falling in line with Dodge’s orders. They know she plans to murder their brother officer, and ponder how much Carella means to them. They know she is a sick piece of work from the way she enjoys the power and violence she inflicts, yet even as another brother officer moans and groans, they employ indirect, time-consuming strategies like jacking up the thermostat so Dodge will take off her coat (and forget she stuffed a gun in its pocket), or throwing notes out the window when she’s not looking.

McBain books have been the stuff of cinema around the world. In 1963, French director Philippe Agostini made Killer's Wedge into the movie Soupe Aux Poulets [Chicken Soup]. Instead of fictional Isola in the United States, it is set in the French Mediterranean port town of Sète. Image from https://www.encyclocine.com/index.html?menu=&film=13018. 

The nitro has them cowed, of course. As a gimmick, it’s credible, but it renders the story static:

“Virginia Dodge has pounded a wedge into my command, Cotton, and split it wide open. As long as she sits there with her wedge – that damn bottle of soup – I can’t do a thing. Do you want me to kill everyone in this room? Is that what you want?”

I kept thinking if they rushed her, they could die in the attempt, but they certainly will die if they just sit there and wait for Carella to walk in. Much of the text consists of internal monologues that go nowhere.

McBain does work the tension well, a normal strength of his books he really shines at here. It feels like every time you are about to get a major event, a sudden twist pulls things up. The first time I read the book, I really enjoyed the cleverness of this yarn-spinning, the constant heart-clutches it produced. This time I found it manipulative and strained.

The 1967 paperback emphasizes two instruments of menace employed by Virginia Dodge, neither being nitro. One is her revolver, the other the telephone receiver she uses to monitor calls into the squadroom. Image from https://yellowedandcreased.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/killers-wedge-ed-mcbain/

Another annoying thing about the book was the way it handles Steve Carella. As the main character in the 87^th novels, stories usually revolve around him. This time, he’s on assignment, handling the B-plot involving an apparent suicide of a rich old man in a fancy if slightly decrepit mansion incongruously located in the precinct.

This might offer us an opportunity to get to know the other detectives a little better, but no. Either they think about Carella, or talk about him with the woman who wants to kill him.

The B-plot story is a let-down, too, though not as much. McBain has fun teasing out the classic conventions of a locked-room mystery, where the dead man apparently hung himself after actually locking himself into a windowless garret room. It’s a colorless sort of affair; I wasn’t sure whether it was a parody or a homage to the Golden Age of mystery writing (which ran from the 1920s to 1940s), but it worked best as a break from the woman with the nitro.

Carella thinks jokingly about asking for advice from John Dickson Carr (a Golden Age mystery writer) and then ponders the absurdity of the situation, a world away from the kind of crime he’s used to:

They’ve all popped off of some damn British comedy of manners, and they’re all make-believe, and that old man up there did commit suicide and why the devil am I wasting my time questioning people and snooping around a musty garret room without any windows?

This 1974 Signet paperback edition oddly employs the B-plot for its cover. According to McBain, the mansion is located at the very edge of the precinct, which may explain why it looks more like the Adirondacks than a city. https://www.amazon.com/Killers-Wedge-Signet-Ed-McBain/dp/0451163362.

Being Carella, he can’t just leave it there; and being Carella, his hunch about something hinky proves correct. So he hangs around trying to figure out whodunit, while back at the squadroom, Dodge beats people up and vents her impatience at Carella’s tardiness.

Killer’s Wedge was an experiment. Like McBain’s prior novel Lady Killer, the novel happens in less than a day (just four hours in the case of Wedge). More radically, the main story happens in one room, and ditches the mystery by putting the facts of the crime in plain view.

McBain maximizes suspense by intercutting between the stories, but it takes a novel where human interest is so absent to showcase just how vital an ingredient that is for 87^th Precinct stories. Killer’s Wedge is well-liked by many fans, but it’s like a sandwich without a pickle to me.