Ed McBain mastered a specific type of mystery genre, the police procedural. But he wouldn’t be pigeonholed. Twenty-two years into his white-hot run of 87th Precinct cop novels, McBain launched another series celebrating a guy who got people free of the law.
Matthew Hope may not have been the same kind of publishing success story, but the series did go for 13 books and three calendar decades. More important, it allowed McBain to indulge in a different kind of crime fiction in a more tropical locale: sunny Florida instead of a big bad city somewhere in the American Northeast.
I think it possible to appreciate the man’s willingness to spread his wings while acknowledging something less satisfying in the result. From their winsome nursery-rhyme inspired titles to a fawning self-indulgence in McBain’s presentation of the main character, the Matthew Hope books never quite clicked for me.
Take Three Blind Mice, about a crime of castration revenge times three in which there is no one to root for and scarcely a lick of common sense in evidence. Instead, various people tell Hope over and over that he has no case. “Your man is as guilty as homemade sin,” says Hope’s own law partner.
Hope knows better because he has a hunch, which is all that matters, even after his client readily declares the victims got exactly what they deserved:
“I resent you calling them victims! They raped my wife! Whoever killed them should get a medal!”
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| A red Mazerati like this one, owned by the suspect and his wife, is seen driving around Calusa on the night of the murders, when the suspect was supposedly asleep. Yet the police never impound it as evidence, and it remains in the wife's use throughout the book. Image from https://dailyturismo.com/wheeler-dealer-electric-conversion-1985-maserati-biturbo/ |
McBain himself doesn’t seem that interested in the mystery, given the number of detours he takes with his story in the direction of love, sex, or cultural commentary. None of this is dull, just unnecessary, and not enough to distract from the fact the core mystery is a bit rote, whatever its flashes of subtlety and general yarn-spinning competence.
I won’t say I anticipated the big reveal, because I didn’t. Not caring was more my issue. The characters in this novel were bland and flat, beginning with Hope himself, who I admit got on my nerves with his self-righteous and non-credible attitude to his job, to wit: “In this world, there were enough lawyers willing to represent murderers and thieves. Matthew Hope was not one of them. Nor would he ever be.”
Did McBain, a. k. a. Evan Hunter, feel the need to make this point in order to sell Hope to his presumably more law-abiding 87th Precinct readers? If so, I think it was a mistake. From a moral perspective, a justice system works only if lawyers are willing to represent people they think may be guilty. From a practical perspective, even Clarence Darrow on roller skates will go hungry blowing off work.
Most importantly, it would have been more interesting if Hope was allowed to wrestle with his conscience somewhat, rather than just be presented as Perry Mason with a more active libido. Which is what you get in Three Blind Mice, with its heavy focus on Hope’s attraction for and to the opposite sex.
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| Author Ed McBain. In the 1980s alone he authored seven Matthew Hope books, nearly matching his output of 87th Precinct novels that same decade. He didn't write mysteries, but open-ended crime fiction. "Murders are messy," Hope explains in Three Blind Mice. "And the people who commit murders don’t read Agatha
Christie.” Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/645985140278288418/ |
If it isn’t Hope working on getting laid, it’s his intrepid investigator, Warren Chambers:
Warren was wondering whether he’d get shot down if he asked her out to dinner. She was wondering whether she should suggest discussing his age preferences over a drink later that afternoon. Neither said a word. The opportunity hung there expectantly, hovering on the air like a Spielberg spaceship, all shining with promise. And then, unassailed, it drifted off into a galaxy of glittering dust motes, and the distant typewriter began clacking again, shattering the stillness, destroying the moment.
Don’t worry, the pair will get it on alright, getting all naked and graphic on a public beach while discussing why Hollywood never had sex scenes featuring Black characters like themselves. Which of course is the sort of dialogue one can totally imagine happening in real life, with two people in the heat of getting it on, and not at all the self-congratulatory rambling of an amorous white liberal author.
While the story itself is not all that, I did enjoy reading it if only for McBain’s flair for setting. In the 87th Precinct series, the ersatz city of Isola is its own distinctive character, consistently delivered with grace and depth. In the Matthew Hope books, you have Calusa, Florida, another fictional locale which seems somewhere to the south of Tampa.
In Calusa, the pace is sleepier than Gotham City but the people just as dangerous, delivered with a touch of Southern Gothic and real pathos. An old man pines movingly for a pair of long-lost dogs, while another character takes time off from trying to score to reflect on how boats look like a thrill to ride until you actually get on one.
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| In 2001, Three Blind Mice became a TV movie starring Brian Dennehy and Mary Stuart Masterson, though with many changes. The playing cards motif you see here is not from the novel. The movie is currently viewable on YouTube. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0288254/ |
McBain makes clear a sunny clime doesn’t mean a happy one:
There was none of the lushness one associated with tropical climates, nor for that matter any of the riotous show of color you got in Atlanta when the magnolias were blooming, or Birmingham or Tulsa when the azaleas popped, or anywhere in summertime Connecticut when the daylilies bloomed orange and red and yellow along every country lane. Even the springtime blooming of Calusa’s jacaranda trees was pale by comparison to the exuberant purple explosion on virtually every Los Angeles street at that time of the year.
If McBain were only writing an atlas or travel book, and not a crime novel. The dopey, threadbare plot and feckless characters really get in the way of his better moments.
It isn’t just how correct Hope is at every turn, but how predictable his opponents are. The lead prosecutor is a slick headline chaser without a scruple, while his ambitious assistant can’t be bothered to consider the possibility the actual murderer may be at large even after a new victim is discovered with the same MO.
The assistant, Patricia Demming, is introduced in a moment of jarring coincidence when her car crashes into Hope’s in the middle of a Florida monsoon. McBain makes sure to tell us how hot she looks in a rain-slick dress with no bra, and how much she hates being called “Pat” or “Trish.”
“Flamboyant, seductive, aggressive, unrelenting, and unforgiving. You make one slip and she goes straight for the jugular,” is how she is described by one of Hope’s assistants. This immediately pulled me out of the book and into “Speedo” from “That Mitchell & Webb Look.”
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| "Gee, Hope, I know you love justice so much, but maybe you should just give it a rest, being we are in Florida in the United States of America and I'm the sexy crown prosecutor for the entire province." This is not a scene from Three Blind Mice. But it should be. |
Hope has his own issues. He has put on a few pounds, his ex-wife is asking him to come visit her up north, he’s getting embarrassed by the club pro on the tennis court, and he’s embarking on a new relationship with a Vietnamese-American translator helping him on the murder case.
She wants to know if he’s just after her for the novelty value of sex with an Asian woman. He has to admit it’s a good question:
He felt as if he’d been led down a jungle path by a beautiful woman who’d suddenly turned Vietcong, raising her hands high over her head to reveal primed hand grenades tucked under her arms.
There
are a lot of these types of racial and sexual booby traps in this book. Even if
McBain is planting them to make a point, they feel shoehorned in to advance a
kind of cultural merit beyond the novel’s grasp. Like the references to the
Vietnam War or to the novelty of cell phones, they just date Three Blind Mice,
and not in a good way. It is not a terrible book, just that McBain could and
did write them better.
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