He Who Hesitates – Ed McBain, 1965 ★★

Not a Typical Trip into the City

Ed McBain liked to say he didn’t write whodunits, he wrote whydunits. In this case, what we have is a whatisit. What is the deal with Roger Broome, and what are the strange circumstances that make him think about going to the police?

What it winds up being is a break from a typical 87^th Precinct police procedural. Instead of a fresh corpse and a trail of clues, you have a quiet loner from out of town pondering a secret in real time.

Broome’s odd personality grabs you right away. His mind works along slow and offbeat tangents. Having sold some woodenware in the big and strange city of Isola, he plans to return to his mother, with whom there seems an oddly co-dependent bond. But there is something he wants to get off his chest first, something he thinks he should take to police.

Roger is hesitant, though. He is unduly concerned about what the woman who put him up at her boarding house might think:

He stood alongside the table while she went into the other room for her handbag. He decided not to ask her where the police station was. He didn’t want to upset her, especially now that she seemed to be upset already about not having any children who could send her a valentine the way he was going to send his mother one. He wondered if his mother would get it in time. He supposed she would. If he bought it first thing, even before he went to the police station, and mailed it right away, he was sure she’d get it by tomorrow morning.

"When he awoke, the windows were rimmed with frost and the air in the room was bitter cold..." Roger Broome looks out on an empty street on a winter morning at the beginning of He Who Hesitates. A theme of persistent coldness permeates the entire novel.
Image from https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/new-york/worst-winter-ny/

How much you enjoy this one depends on your interest in the nattering, childlike imagination of Broome, and your patience with the very dark secret McBain takes so much time revealing. While you wait, Broome goes through his day, taking in a winter morning, being accosted by citizens who warn him about the police, and stealing a boy’s toboggan.

What are the detectives of the 87^th Precinct doing during all this? The series may be named after them, but they are very much on the margins in this book, only occasionally interacting with Broome. Eventually, Broome fixates on one of them (Steve Carella, usually the lead detective in these books) as a friendly face and the right kind of cop to talk to about his problem. But will he go through with it?

McBain’s willingness to experiment with both the genre demands of police procedurals and how his familiar Isola setting is experienced by a complete outsider lends an enjoyable dimension to this outing. Everything is strange to Broome, and McBain has fun with his displacement. But this stylistic departure will leave many faithful series readers feeling displaced, too.

For more than half the book, we amble after Broome, picking up clues:

“Do I look like somebody who’s in trouble?”

“I don’t know what a white man in trouble looks like. I’ve seen lots of colored people in trouble. If you’re colored, you’re always in trouble, from the day you’re born. But I don’t know the look of a white man in trouble. Are you in trouble?”

That is Roger talking to Amelia, a teenaged Black salesclerk he meets at a stationery store buying his Valentine’s Day card. This is appropriate given Amelia is the heart of the novel, attracted to Roger despite his strange manner (and the fact he is white). Eventually she takes him up on his left-field offer of a mid-workday date.

Throughout the novel, Broome is alternately attracted and repelled by the lamps flanking the doors of the 87th Precinct entrance. A man he meets in the park cautions him to stay away: "Their job is to take your fingerprints and get your hands dirty and make life miserable for you whatever chance they get. That's what being a cop means."
Image from https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/local/2014/11/12/historic-lights-added-police-station/18948985/

By this point in the novel, we have good reason to believe this is not going to end well for Amelia. Suspense kicks in. Will Roger do something awful while he dithers about contacting the cops?

McBain gives us clues about Roger’s particular hang-up, connected to a woman he met earlier on the trip named Molly. Roger also keeps contemplating his mother’s demanding nature, and how he finds his life to be a succession of boxes, “all of them were trying their hardest to keep a man all closed up, when all a man wanted to do every now and then was relax and enjoy himself.”

When the suspense finally does come, it pulls you in enough to give the last third of the book sudden urgency. The uncertainty principal McBain had been playing with all this time does eventually deliver something worthwhile, even satisfying, as McBain throws his cards on the table regarding the whatisit in the last chapter. I just wish the usual 87^th Precinct players were given more to do. That clever conceit of keeping them in the background gets stale long before this book winds down.

For most of the book, we have instead to ponder the strange mating habits of Isola’s citizenry, and the fact Roger, normally a loser with the ladies by his own reminiscence, quickly finds two eager hook-ups during his short stay in the big city.

Molly is the first of these, and the saddest. We only see her in Roger’s flashbacks, as he contemplates her unattractiveness in his mulish way: “Some women were just the unlucky ones in this world, they didn’t have pretty faces, nor good legs nor breasts, and even their backsides looked like a truck driver’s.”

Roger Broome meets Molly Nolan at a bar, where she sits alone at a table. Despite noting a notable lack of conventional beauty, Roger finds himself strangely attracted to her. "I'm all alone in the world," she tells him. "Who cares? I mean, who needs relatives?"
Image of "Automat" by Edward Hopper from https://samuel-thomas.com/automat-by-edward-hopper/

Loneliness is a recurring theme in He Who Hesitates. Molly has it bad, and so does Roger. Trying to find a detective he can talk to, he shadows Steve Carella to a restaurant, and watches him eat lunch with his wife, Teddy. It takes Roger a while to realize what regular series readers will know, that Teddy is deaf and speaks to her husband using sign language. Watching them being so cozy together sets his mind on edge.

Whether Roger can find true love is something you wonder about for a while. Then you just hope he gives up. Roger comes off as gormless and creepy, and his unsubtle date patter gets cringey fast. He may seem nice, but comes off alternately menacing and pathetic, like Lennie in Of Mice And Men. Yet for a guy as shy and awkward as Roger, it’s surprising how often he scores in the big city:

Molly paused and smiled tentatively, as though embarrassed by what she was about to say and do. She picked up her empty glass and tried to drain a few more drops from it, and then put it down on the table and said, very casually, “I’d like to see that room of yours. It sounds really inexpensive. If it’s a good-sized room, I might move from where I am.”

Watching people emerge from their shells is more gratifying when we sense they aren’t risking something terrible from it. Real life doesn’t come with such guarantees; nor does McBain in He Who Hesitates.

One of many paperback covers for He Who Hesitates, this one published by Ballantine Books in 1982. Like quite a few of them, this cover contains a plot spoiler, so don't examine it too closely before reading the book.

Broome’s interactions are quite banal in the main, but there is an edginess McBain knowingly injects into his narrative, fed through the consciousness of a stranger of uncertain motive and disordered mind. After a while this develops into a subtle, compelling undertow.

McBain wrote two 87^th Precinct novels in 1965. The other, Doll, also plays with conventions but is much more a traditional cop novel. Both books are quite short. The more I read He Who Hesitates, the more I realized its experimental, hermetic narrative would have worked better intercut in a reconstituted Doll, which involves the whole 87^th. The books are stylistically different, but pulling them together might have better satisfied reader expectations while still playing with the formula.

That said, most 87^th Precinct readers I know are fine with He Who Hesitates, rating it more highly than me. McBain’s willingness to bend the formula proved a good investment in the end. Series readers didn’t necessarily want the same old story when they picked one of these up. In the end you do get a thin if sharply realized payoff. Otherwise, McBain exercises his right to surprise readers, and push boundaries somewhere past the usual genre limits. That was likely the point.