Has this ever happened to you? You re-read a book you remember really disliking, only this time you can’t recall what it was that put you off. What you are reading flows really well and keeps you engaged. Was it you? A bad mood, say, or an uncomfortable chair?
This happened to me with Calypso, a novel I remember being a nadir of my previous jaunt through the 87th Precinct. But blow me down; what a strong start! It has what you look for in a police procedural: a compelling murder victim, a sense of authentic urgency and sundry aspects of police process brought in with smooth clarity.
Then with no warning it takes a hard left into Silence Of The Lambs territory, with a crazy subplot that more or less renders all prior conventional police work meaningless. This isn’t the worst 87th Precinct novel; it does pull one in. But it may just be the most disjointed.
The ending is singularly strange and ugly, both for what it is and what it tries to do, but it isn’t just that. The tone of the novel throughout is unusually bitter and coarse. There is a relentless sordidness of perspective in practically every setting and character we encounter:
Both plate-glass windows of the Club Flamingo were painted over pink. In the center of the window on the left was a huge hand-lettered sign advertising TOPLESS, BOTTOMLESS, NOON TO 4:00 AM. The club apparently offered more by way of spectacle than Chloe had revealed to him last night. “It’s a topless club,” she had said, the difference between topless and bottomless being somewhat akin to that between Manslaughter and Murder One.
 |
| Strip joints and prostitutes become a focus of the 87th Precinct investigation in Calypso when a sex worker's murder is linked by ballistics to the killing of King George. "There is nothing cops like better than continuity," McBain writes, "even if it takes a couple of corpses to provide it." Image from https://www.blind-magazine.com/news/a-sizzling-portrait-of-times-square-in-the-1980s/ |
The 1970s, a decade from which this was the last 87th Precinct novel, saw the author at something close to his commercial peak, averaging one book a year. It was also a decade where the series began to stray from its lean pulp-fiction roots, resulting in some odder entries like this.
At least the energy is still here, getting us quickly from the murder to the subsequent investigation. As it is almost the 1980s, McBain does this by describing how a 911 call gets routed via a computer system.
She reached for the ENTER button on her keyboard and hit it at once. Instantaneously, in another part of Communications, a green light flashed on an almost identical console in the Emergency Dispatchers’ room. The dispatcher sitting in front of the console immediately hit his Q button. The message the aide had just typed and entered appeared on his screen…
This keeps going for a page or two until we get to what faithful readers will recognize as the classic formula: Homicide detectives Monaghan and Monroe making tasteless jokes around a corpse while lead character Steve Carella takes stock of the situation.
 |
| Computerized dispatching equipment, like this Motorola CentraCom Console, is spotlighted for the first time in the 87th Precinct series. It is one of many jolts regular McBain readers would have gotten as they read Calypso. Image from https://emsmuseum.org/collections/archives/communications/1980s-motorola-centracom-console/ |
George Chadderton, also known as King George, is a calypso musician who had just finished a big gig when he is gunned down. Who wanted to kill him? His socially conscious music exposing drug use and prostitution threatened to uncover some major criminal activities. He also tended to get on people’s nerves generally, a former bandmate describing him as a “full-time ego trip.”
He was also obsessed by the disappearance of his brother and bandmate Santo, after a gig seven years ago.
Calypso leans on the idea of calypso as the music of Isola’s underclass, which is a stretch. But the streets of Isola’s real-life counterpart New York City were alive with new musical sounds in 1979, specifically rap, which burst out of Harlem into the Top 40 that year. McBain wouldn’t have known about rap, but perhaps he sensed something in the air.
The Isola-New York connection gets a lot of play here, with McBain getting deeper on the locales and naming conventions around the five Isola boroughs in a way that mirrors areas in and around Long Island Sound. As the mystery deepens, the scope of the investigation travels both within the city and miles outside of it.
 |
| Just beyond the port city of Isola and its five boroughs are a number of small islands, McBain writes, including a couple with single, stately homes. One of these will figure in the narrative, but it takes the detectives a very long time to make the connection. Image of Heart Island in New York State from https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/these-nyc-area-islands-are-perfect-for-family-summer-fun/ |
New York City was just emerging from a famous budget crisis at this time, which McBain alludes to amusingly. Isola, he writes, is “a city that felt every other city on the face of the earth was rooting for its fiscal downfall only because it happened to be the foremost city in the world. The damn trouble with such a crazy paranoid supposition was that it happened to be true.”
I’m writing around the central storyline here, trying to avoid spoilers but also the risk of revealing the nub of the situation which takes the lives of King George and others. This is hard, because much of the reason Calypso fails as a book is the way it veers from standard crime drama into something more in the realm of unhinged psychological shock-horror.
That actually reads pretty cool as I type it. The problem is how it clashes with McBain’s more realistic template. Instead of creating a viable backstory or motive, McBain doubles down on derangement and a magical maniac. Instead of giving the 87th Precinct guys a realistic role, he leans in on trite coincidences and vague hunches.
 |
| Calypso is widely associated with festivity and joyful celebration, as practiced above in Trinidad, its homeland. But the brand of calypso performed by the late King George is about social protest and racial injustice. "He was trying to make people think," his widow explains. Image from https://gotourismguides.com/trinidadandtobago/calypso/ |
Unbalanced people involved in racy situations were part of the 87th Precinct as far back as its 1956 debut. But the series would push boundaries more and more strenuously, and I would say egregiously, as the years went on. By Calypso it was no longer a matter of a few F-bombs. Practically every woman we meet is a prostitute:
“You gettin’ that forty?” she said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Do you mind singles?”
“Singles? Forty dollars in singles?”
“I’m a waiter,” he said, as if that explained it.
“I’m gettin to be a waiter, too,” she said, “waitin’ for that forty.”
The title Calypso obviously refers to the music King George played, but also a type of orchid which becomes an odd connecting clue. The guys at Hark: The 87th Precinct podcast also bring up another source in Greek myth central to the plot I did not know about, which is cool if kind of sub rosa in the narrative itself.
There is some choice prose. I enjoyed McBain description of rain on a window: “Outside, neon tinted the slanting rain, transmogrifying the windowpane trickles into nests of disturbed green snakes.” Early in the book, Monaghan and Monroe are described watching Carella “with something less than interest but more than curiosity.”
 |
| Calypso is the thirty-third entry in the 87th Precinct's 55-book, 50-year run, which actually was dwarfed by his other output. Exhaustion may have been setting in for McBain, though if so, he managed a healthy rebound in the quality of his 1980s entries, which I find underappreciated. Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/325337108503 |
Fat Ollie Weeks of the neighboring 83rd Precinct would come to dominate the series like no other character but Carella; here, in one of his earliest appearances, he gets a brief but memorable spotlight scene shaking down a couple of suspects for information:
Ollie was not only fat, which in the United States of America automatically made him a villain, he was also bigoted. And he smelled. His breath smelled. His body smelled. He was a vast uncharted garbage dump. He was also a good cop. By certain standards.
What really smells in Calypso is the ending. It comes at the reader in a rush after pages of general investigative torpor. Then comes a climax where Carella is reduced to nothing more than a horrified onlooker in one of the series’s most wantonly grisly moments.
Was
McBain tired of writing 87th Precinct mysteries? There is a sense of
impatience in the way it goes through the motions. Anyway, mystery solved. Now I
definitely remember why I didn’t like this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment