That Ed McBain never served up any two 87th Precinct novels exactly the same way rightly delights many of his fans. Pick one up, and you don’t know what you will get until you are well into it.
So when I read a book of his that annoys me like See Them Die, I have to remind myself that here was a man who took chances, who never stuck to a set formula, who dared throw things up in the air without knowing how they’d land.
It’s just too bad this one wound up such a mess.
In the city of Isola one hot summer day, a group of young Puerto Rican wanna-be toughs meet at a corner eatery to discuss plans for killing another boy. The stated reason is vague, but in fact the leader, Zip, thinks the neighborhood will respect him for committing a murder. He wants to imitate his hero, a crook named Pepe Miranda.
It just so happens Miranda is holed up down the street, in an apartment above a whorehouse. When word gets out, the 87th Precinct shows up in force, united in a desire to take him down. The Latino community looking on is less united. As McBain explains it many times, some see him as a troublemaker while others sympathize:
To many of these people, Miranda was simply the rebel and the underdog. Consciously or not, they were rooting for him.
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| East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem for its influx of Hispanic immigrants, is a clear model for the fictional Isola neighborhood depicted in See Them Die. East Harlem was also where Ed McBain grew up. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/857935797737096984/ |
I struggle at explaining how crime fiction as a genre don’t always mean mysteries. See Them Die makes it simple. There is no mystery in this story, except who the “them” is in the title, and that’s more a point of suspense. No, what you get here is an armed standoff between a lone gunman and Isola’s finest on a hot July day.
It’s an action story, in other words, with violence and waiting. And talking. Lots of talking. Man, they never stop in this one.
Let’s start with the best part: The opening. See Them Die has a great opening, a lingering view of the unnamed Hispanic neighborhood where the action will take place. You get a long, scenic description of a muggy morning where the only visible life is someone sleeping on a fire escape.
McBain sets the stage with one of his enjoyably detailed weather reports, a dash of angry Walt Whitman before “Dragnet” begins:
Heat and July, they are identical twins who were born to make you suffer.
The air is tangible. You can reach out to touch it. It is sticky and clinging, you can wrap it around you like a viscous overcoat. The asphalt in the gutters has turned to gum, and your heels clutch at it when you try to navigate the streets. The pavements glow with a flat off-white brilliance, contrasting with the running black of the gutter, creating an alternating pattern of shade and light that is dizzying.
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| Social unrest in the barrio: Anger simmering among Hispanic residents toward their second-class citizenship depicted in See Them Die spilled over in Spanish Harlem in 1969, when the Young Lords street gang set garbage fires in protest. Photo by Hiram Maristany from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/nyregion/young-lords-nyc-garbage-offensive.html |
If this weather seems harsh, wait until you meet the people. Many of them are quite dangerous, including one who carries a detective’s badge. A hungover sailor still looking for action is warned by the good-natured Luís, who owns the corner eatery: “Go back to your ship. This neighborhood is not always a nice place.”
But Jeff the sailor is already getting the wrong kind of attention, from Zip, hankering to focus his destructive energy on someone.
Zip talks a lot, too, about how empowered he will become once he unlocks the miracle of street crime:
“After we pull this today, we’re in. You understand that? We wash this creep, and there ain’t nobody in this neighborhood who don’t know the Latin Purples from then on in. They’ll know we don’t get pushed around by anybody! Every damn kid on this block’ll want to be in the club after today. We are going to be…something! Something!”
The discovery of Pepe gets others talking. Detective Andy Parker talks about how representative of the Hispanic population this Miranda creep is, while Detective Frankie Hernandez tries to set Parker straight:
“A kid grows up here, what the hell do you expect? Miranda was cutting up people before he knew how to walk.”
“Maybe nobody ever took the trouble to teach him to walk.”
Once Miranda shoots a patrolman from inside his apartment and shouts defiance, conversation gets even more tense:
“If you force us to come in after you, you haven’t got a chance.”
“I got news for you, cop. I never did have one.”
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| The 87th Precinct brings everything to their siege: Snipers, tear gas, even a flamethrower. Above, Chicago police in 1969 take on a sniper holed up in his apartment. Image from https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/police-in-standoff-with-sniper-frank-kulak-at-his-apartment-news-photo/1173586054 |
It all plays more than a bit cliché. Perhaps because he knows this, McBain pulls away from the action with sardonic asides about how these stories play out on screen. He even details how the street would look if shot in Cinemascope, and later on, lays out an alternate version of this story if it were written by Hollywood. A tough who goes by the street name “Lil Killer” even jokes about the Breen Office.
McBain waxes bitter and metaphysical, asking how God can let such real-life misery happen:
Maybe you’ve got a bigger design in mind which will not become apparent to us poor slobs until decades from now. Or centuries. So who are we to question? Being God, you are occasionally entitled to such sloppiness.
At the same time, McBain is deadly serious about what is really going down, a matter of life and death and of a system failing a vulnerable minority population who has few heroes and too many villains to look up to. He really wants this to be one of his socially responsible novels.
McBain’s treatment of his Latino characters is sympathetic but not convincing. He seems to consider it an open question whether they can be law-abiding citizens given the racism they experience from people like Andy Parker. Never mind that Miranda is not well liked, “a disgrace to the barrio,” as one of its residents calls him. He represents for McBain a violent impulse among his community that lawman Frankie Hernandez sees as his duty to eradicate: “If I kill him, the neighborhood gets nothing but a dead punk.”
Because if a Latino cop kills a Latino criminal, then the Latino community will see the result as justice, not repression. Right?
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| Above, a violent gang scene from a 1957 production of West Side Story. Hispanic youth in See Them Die are trapped between either joining a gang or standing alone: “I’m tired of walkin’ alone. You walk alone,
they all pick on you. But I’m spose to join a gang? I’m spose to go aroun’
shootin’ people? What for I want to shoot people?” Photo by Fred Fehl from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Story |
I don’t get it either. McBain is trying to incorporate a large number of non-white characters in this early 87th Precinct novel, which gives it a different and refreshing spin. Focusing on Zip and his crew also allows for McBain to revisit the juvenile delinquent genre he wrote the signature novel for, The Blackboard Jungle, six years before. He’s taking some smart chances here; so what goes wrong?
For an 87th Precinct novel, there is not a lot of 87th Precinct material in it. The precinct detectives don’t even show up until Chapter 5, and then only briefly. The main character in most 87th Precinct novels, Steve Carella, has a heroic cameo near the end, but most of the time the detectives featured are Parker and Hernandez, not series mainstays, there to hammer home the point stereotyping is wrong.
The Latino characters all speak English, a necessity for American readers of the day, yet an odd one that has them talking to each other with accents of varied thicknesses. When a character does speak Spanish, a boy named Sixto explains: “We here now, we speak English.”
This was an important point to McBain, a traditional liberal who cared deeply about immigrant assimilation throughout his career. But this point, like several others, comes off forced and preachy, and detracts from an already-thin crime story.
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| A beach view of San Juan, Puerto Rico's capital. In See Them Die, the immigrants are divided between those who recall "the Island" wistfully for its beauty and good-natured people and those who think of it more as being crowded and hopelessly poor. Image from https://www.planetware.com/pictures/puerto-rico-pr.htm |
We get snapshots of various people around the neighborhood.
Jeff the sailor meets a young woman named China he mistakes for a prostitute. After she rebuffs his repeated attempts at buying her sexual favors, she improbably agrees to a date. She even happily plans to make a picnic of it after she returns home from church.
Zip brags about what a big noise he’ll make when he kills that kid, who we see lying in bed, planning to go outside and show his face to the neighborhood so his would-be killer won’t think he’s a “turkey.”
Meanwhile, someone is glimpsed selling ices, while a fat business owner stuck in traffic caused by the siege makes the acquaintance of two prostitutes. Members of the press badger Byrnes, the commander of the 87th Precinct detectives, about what he’s going to do about Miranda.
Miranda’s own situation is left unexplained. We know he’s up there. We learn he shot one cop, and see him shoot another. But for such a central figure, not to mention a character who seems to have a Jesse James-like ability of inspiring fear and awe, he’s a non-entity in the book.
Perhaps McBain just wanted to emphasize the hollowness of the criminal model being held up to the impressionable. But a more beefed-up Miranda figure would have given the story some needed focus. As it is, it just flails around before wrapping on a deliberate down ending.
A point worth making: Lots of people do enjoy See Them Die more than me. Hark! The 87th Precinct Podcast rates it higher than most 87th entries (83/100, just ten points shy of the leader as of this date), while “Tipping My Fedora,” a late great book blog, praises it for “a powerful and complex look at the immigrant experience at the time.”
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