Blood Relatives – Ed McBain, 1975 ★★★

One Body, Too Many Suspects

The more Ed McBain novels you read, the more you discover there is no such thing as a straight Ed McBain novel. He avoided the easy path of working to templates or formulas. He wrote police procedurals, yes, but always changed them up with crazy twists or skewed angles.

Blood Relatives may be his closest stab at a routine police procedural, centering on a single murder where suspects and testimonies are worked over until a culprit is found. Yes, he delivers real surprises, but plays his cards straight from the deck.

The results are rather good. McBain’s ability to involve the reader through plot turns and digressions works just as well when he isn’t striving as hard to keep you off-balance.

We open with 15-year-old Patricia Lowery fleeing the scene of a brutal murder, her face and hands oozing blood so freely the gore merges into the flashing reds of city lights. Somewhere behind her is a murder victim, her cousin Muriel Stark, stabbed repeatedly in the torso and groin.

McBain writes: Ten minutes ago, a half-hour hour ago, the girl had been alive. She now lay in angular disarray in an alien hallway, her life juices spilled around her as carelessly as dirty water from a dish basin.

"He would always remember seeing first the bloody prints, one on each of the glass-paneled doors. And then the doors swinging open and the girl spilling into the room..." Above, the scene as depicted in the 1978 film version of Blood Relatives, with Aude Landry as Patricia.
Image from https://offscreen.com/view/blood-relatives-claude-chabrol

McBain had been writing the 87^th Precinct series for 20 years. After recent entries that utilized pictorial images, contradictory victim profiles, and even angry political commentary, he returns to where the series began, a classic whodunit involving a single murder.

It’s a welcome change of pace. McBain knew how to spin a mystery yarn, by giving the reader the fact of a horrible crime and then working backwards to identify possible suspects and alibis. The whole criminal investigation apparatus is mobilized right away, turning a vacant building into a hive of activity, floodlights illuminating every corner while the floor is analyzed for clues.

The story at the outset, told by Muriel’s cousin, was that a male stranger with dark hair and blue eyes cornered them in this abandoned building while they sheltered from the rain. Brandishing a knife, he sexually assaulted and murdered Muriel. The cousin, Patricia Lowery, managed to escape before he could do the same to her. Patricia’s purse and bloody shoes are later found on the sidewalk between the tenement and the 87^th Precinct station house. Some time later, the knife turns up, too.

Even more straightforward is the immediate discovery of a suspect in a doorway near the tenement sleeping off some booze, his shirt full of bloodstains. After attempting to run away (and getting tackled by a lab technician after knocking down a pair of detectives), the drunk explains he didn’t do it because he was beating his wife.

A typical police lineup. In Blood Relatives, Patricia mistakes a plainclothes officer for her attacker. McBain writes this was not a surprise: "They were all experienced cops and familiar with the unreliability of witnesses."
Image from https://www.pond5.com/search?kw=police-line-up&media=footage

Blood Relatives is a very gritty 87^th Precinct entry, which had become the norm by the mid-1970s. It gets more lurid still when we meet the Lowery family, with whom Muriel resided after the death of her parents. Exactly how lurid becomes clearer as Patricia’s testimony begins changing. They certainly aren’t the Brady Bunch.

It sets up a creepy, compelling mystery, though as with most 87^th Precinct novels, I found myself more engaged by the background details and police portraits McBain uses. There is quite a lot of this, as he is working here with just one murder and no B-plot.

McBain sheds light on the social life of the series detectives, how they let off steam in their off-hours to stay sane. “Keeping the aspidistra flying” is his term for it, an old British expression George Orwell once used for a book title:

When it got too horrible, you went home. You took a shower and changed your clothes. You mixed yourself a cold martini or a hot toddy. You patted your dog on the head or your wife on the behind. You philosophized a bit, maybe wagging your head or clucking your tongue every so often. After all (you told yourself), if a person chooses to become a policeman instead of, say, a florist, then he’s got to realize he will more often be dealing with violence than with violets.

Donald Sutherland as Steve Carella in the 1978 film version of Blood Relatives. Sutherland is quietly good in a subdued performance that suggests the toll of his job. Directed by French legend Claude Chabrol, the film is a solid, worthy addition to the thin ranks of 87th Precinct movies.
Image from https://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/blood-relatives-1975-by-ed-mcbain/

McBain claims television cops are “dangerous” for the way they misrepresent the work of real law enforcement, and explains how every cop in Isola supports not only gun control but an outright ban on private firearm ownership: “But police officers did not have a powerful lobby in Washington, even though they were the ones who daily reaped the whirlwind while the gun manufacturers reaped the profits.”

He also delves into the intricacies of criminal investigation, whether it be the downside of using a rubber stamp for paperwork, the ups and downs of filing a search warrant, or the need to avoid smoking at a crime scene. He does this in other 87^th Precinct novels, too, but really takes his time laying it all out here. The explanations are enjoyably delivered.

The need for speed in a major police investigation is emphasized:

Muriel Stark had been murdered on Saturday night, and the case was now almost four days old. A homicide case usually begins to cool after the first twenty-four hours. If you haven’t got a lead by then, chances are the case won't be solved except by accident.

When a sobbing man drapes himself on the murdered girl's coffin as it is lowered into her grave, it is a sign of some major issues beyond the crime itself.
Image from the TV series "Twin Peaks" from https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Episode_3

Diverse elements of life in this fictional city come together in McBain’s hands: A garbageman complains about cops getting all the glory while they risk their lives, too; a shifty bank manager who knows more than he says; a hobo who imagines himself king of the city and visits junkyards to examine the tribute from his subjects.

This last portrait, of an affable scrounger known as Crazy Tom, is a memorable bright spot in a bleak as he is seen “making the daily rounds in September, when the skies above him were invariably blue and the air was like a maiden’s kiss.”

Crazy Tom figures in the main plot by finding a diary that reveals major details of what was really going on at the Lowery house. It’s a pat element which takes up the last fifth of the book. Another 87^th Precinct trope reused here has Carella ride a left-field hunch about eye color until it proves key in making an arrest. I probably let myself get too annoyed by this Mary-Sue tendency of Carella’s; he is the series star.

Muriel's diary holds some major secrets, but proves a chore for Steve Carella to read. McBain writes: "At times her prose was sickeningly sentimental. At other times it was morose and self-pitying."
Image from https://www.thingsremembered.com/Personalized-Leatherette-Heart-Lock-Journals-p36837.prod

The 87th Precinct series is a blast to read; I look back at past reviews and am sorry to see I don’t often come away from them with much positivity. Genre fiction, even when delivered at a high degree like McBain so often achieved, can be taken for granted. In fact, there are few books I look forward to reading than his. Even when the story itself is a minor dud, the active environment of Isola is so diverting and enveloping, a Manhattan in miniature but also its own distinct entity.

For example, the Lowerys are located on St. John’s Road, a neighborhood in Isola not as upscale as Silvermine Oval or Smoke Rise, but nicer than most. McBain explains: “You wouldn’t find any buildings with doormen on St. John’s Road, but neither would you find a row of broken mailboxes or hallways stinking of urine.”

Just a few blocks away, at 87^th Precinct headquarters, known sex offenders are lined up to be quizzed on their whereabouts the night of Muriel’s murder. One of them offers up a dicey alibi, and it leads down a path that uncovers dark deeds that may or may not have a bearing on the main case. McBain keeps you invested even when he isn’t advancing the plot.

McBain never did a map demarking the exact parameters of the 87^th Precinct. This may have been deliberate; the amorphousness of the imagined territory gave him license to play. Blood Relatives is a showcase for how his creativity was used to clever, subtle effect.