Marriage and summertime are two things we associate with happiness. Yet both can also be sources of intolerable pressure, especially when used as key elements of a police procedural. In Heat, love makes the world go round, but also leads to murder.
While a typically energetic 87th Precinct page-turner, Heat is unique in the series for how quickly it makes the main criminal activity secondary to a riveting subplot involving one of the detectives.
Bert Kling has a problem. He’s married to a beautiful model, only now he suspects something is going on. A comment by a drunk girl at a party makes him wonder if his wife is having an affair.
A fellow detective, Steve Carella, suggests he talk it out with her:
Carella could have told him that in any marriage there was a line either partner could not safely cross. Once you stepped over that line, once you said or did something that couldn’t possibly be taken back, the marriage was irretrievable.
 |
| Kling's wife Augusta is a model in high demand, who spends her nights at glitzy parties where Bert feels out of place. But are his suspicions of her stepping out on him based on reality, or paranoia? This becomes the focus of Heat. Photo by Anthony Barboza from https://www.cnn.com/style/article/80s-fashion-style-comeback |
But Kling has to know, and so too does the reader. McBain strings you along two different ways, one by giving us a strong idea right away of what is going on but stirring just enough doubt to muddy the waters, and second and even more successfully, by having Kling compromise any baseline police ethics in search of the truth.
Heat is a packed book. Kling is also being stalked by a killer, a man who spent over a decade in prison for murdering his wife with a hatchet and now wants to kill the cop who put him away. Many of the Eight-Seven crew are also busy with busting a big heroin operation.
But the main act of the book is an investigation by Carella into the apparent suicide of an alcoholic artist. If it was a suicide, the guy didn’t leave a note, and that, McBain explains, “was like a pastrami sandwich without a pickle.” So Carella talks to several people who knew the artist, none of whom are surprised or sorry the man is dead.
This section would probably rate a good “Columbo” episode on its own. As with Kling’s wife, there is a question of whether it is safer to believe the worst in people (though for Carella, unlike Kling, this is his job.) As the widow becomes a key suspect, this opens up the question of marital loyalty (How well do we know the people with whom we share our lives, really?) in a way that parallels the Kling subplot.
Of course, the hatchet killer also had his marital problems. As with many of McBain’s best novels, a neat thematic bridge ties it together.
 |
| In 1981, the same year Heat was published, a new hit TV series about police officers called "Hill Street Blues" debuted on NBC. McBain hated the show, calling it a rip-off of his formula. Whatever his gripe, it raised the bar for police dramas overall. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0601759/ |
McBain was beginning to carve out some exciting new ground for the 87th Precinct, in terms of the lives of the characters and the city they live and work in. The 1980s would see many standout novels in the series, like Ice, Poison, Tricks, and Lullaby.
Heat isn’t quite in their class. There is a frustrating sense of predestination in how the plot strands get resolved. Kling’s wife Augusta had been channeled effectively in prior 87th novels; here she becomes an elusive sex goddess of uncertain loyalty. Halloran the hatchet killer is intriguingly set up but underdeveloped; his beef with Kling seems to be about being stopped before he could kill his wife’s lover, too.
But Heat is a solid exemplar of the way McBain continuously built and reconstituted tension from chapter to chapter. Also, in its probing treatment of Kling and his marital torments, it serves as a kind of overture for deeper psychodramas to come.
For the past few years, 87th Precinct novels had been getting longer; Heat pushes this envelope even farther, to over 200 well-packed pages. The book hardly sags as a result; instead McBain stretches his characters and their situations for some scintillating drama.
The title reflects several situations, but most immediately the weather. Isola is experiencing a series of 100-degree days, at the same time nobody’s air conditioning seems to work. This includes the apartment of Jeremiah Newman, a rich if not particularly successful commercial artist whose corpse is decomposing rather graphically when Carella arrives.
“I wouldn’t be surprised he died of heat stroke,” a Mobile Lab technician huffs.
 |
| A mobile lab and police van outside a Manhattan apartment. The noteless suicide of Jeremiah Newman makes Carella suspicious. Jeremiah's mother disagrees: "He killed himself, and that's the long and the short of it. It runs in the family, you see." Image from https://www.bulletproofaction.com/2025/08/07/bullet-points-ed-mcbains-87th-precinct-heatwave-1997/ |
The evidence indicates an overdose of Seconal, a fast-acting sedative. Carella also learns Jeremiah was an alcoholic, and a very unhappy one. Suicide seems logical enough, only Carella isn’t buying. His suspicions are supported when he learns Jeremiah had a phobia against pills of any form, even aspirin. The Seconal belonged to his wife.
So Carella looks at the people who knew Jeremiah, especially his current and his ex-wife. Both have clear motives, both have tight alibis.
It is an engaging whodunit, intriguingly presented with a fair number of twists and turns. But it hardly distracts from the Kling subplot.
Kling’s marriage to Augusta Blair always seemed a longshot; she is a beautiful model with a promising career that takes her places far away from the Big, Bad City. But Kling is a persistent kind of guy. Almost a decade ago, we saw him in Sadie When She Died using his badge to pressure a material witness into a date. Here he uses it to shadow his wife and even break in on her suspected love nest.
 |
| In 1996-1997, NBC aired a trio of TV movies based on McBain 87th Precinct titles. Heatwave was ostensibly based on Heat but uses none of its plot elements. It focuses instead on a series of rapes and features a character, police detective Eileen Burke, who was not in the novel. Image from https://www.bulletproofaction.com/2025/08/07/bullet-points-ed-mcbains-87th-precinct-heatwave-1997/ |
Kling is hardly a model of investigative composure as McBain makes us privy to his state of mind:
…yes, Gussie, I know you sweat, I know you’re human, but Jesus, Gussie, do you have to… do you have to do this to me, do you have to behave like… like a goddamn bitch in heat?
In the past, I read Kling as being just another macho member of the 87th Precinct crew, and his habitual line-stepping the natural byproduct of a working libido, at least as McBain figured it. But here it is clear McBain wants you to see there is something wrong with the guy while he sweats over her return from a shoot: Three hours, Kling thought. He had known Augusta to climax in three minutes.
McBain doesn’t underline the ways Kling transgresses police norms in pursuing his investigation of what Augusta is up to. He just lets it play out. Even when the hatchet killer first strikes, Kling hardly notices. He seems driven by equal parts neediness and insecurity; making quite a contrast from Carella.
The superheroic qualities of Steve Carella can irritate me; here his sharp intuition is more realistic and driven by good, solid police work. We see him badgering the phone company and a Los Angeles hotel to check the widow’s alibi, looking into an art gallery which is strangely reaping the bulk of Jeremiah’s estate, talking to the dead man’s unruffled mother, and listening to the ex-wife, a former Israeli soldier named Jessica Herzog, explain about Jeremiah’s aversion to pills.
 |
| McBain pauses in the middle of the story to tell us there will be no formal reading of Jeremiah Newman's will, as a will is a public record and such a ceremony is not really needed. Throughout Heat, we are reminded of how fictional tropes are not in play here: "Miss Herzog," Carella said slowly, "this isn't Agatha Christie." Image from https://www.hoyweb.com/faqs/the-reading-of-the-last-will |
All the time, we are reminded that the 87th Precinct has other cases to worry about. There have been 75 homicides since the start of the year, they are well on track to record over a hundred. With only an 80% clearance rate, that tracks to over 20 murderers running free. “You know what you can do with your measly suicide, don’t you?” Carella is told.
There are lighter moments, too, like an interview with Jeremiah’s affable brother. With his usual sidekick Kling occupied, Carella is forced to bring along Genero, one of the 87th dimmer bulbs:
“Have you met Jessica? She is some kind of woman, believe me. Captain in the Israeli army – I think she’s got a kill record of seventeen Arabs. Great tits besides.”
“Yes,” Genero said.
Carella looked at him.
Kling also ponders haircuts he sees when watching the news:
The television sportscasters in America all had the same barber. Kling had thought that distinctive haircut was indigenous only to this part of the country, but he’d once gone down to Miami to pick up a guy on an extradition warrant, and the television sportscaster there had his haircut the same way, as if someone had put a bowl over his head and trimmed all around it. He sometimes wondered if every sportscaster in America was bald and wearing a rug.
 |
| New York City's Chinatown, a locale we see mirrored in fictional Isola. Kling visits a restaurant there to investigate a dinner Augusta said she went to the night before. But the waiter who served the dinner does not remember seeing her. Photo by Julienne Schaer from https://www.nyctourism.com/new-york/manhattan/chinatown/ |
Isola’s development as a character in its own right is carried forward from prior books, such as the otherwise weak Calypso. Describing the city seemed one way McBain enjoying filling in the extra pages he was allotted, and he uses it to manifest some stark visions. From his hiding spots in city alleys, Halloran sees how rats and other creatures feast off the leavings of the poorest neighborhoods.
All this is made much worse by the unrelenting weather:
The windows in the apartments were open, but the air was still and the heat within was equally balanced with the heat outside, so that the people who lived here felt they were moving through a vast, viscid, impenetrable, virtually blinding force field.
If
I had to pick a word to sum up Heat, it would be “pressure.” That’s a
common element in a lot of 87th Precinct novels, but here McBain
really steps on the gas, with assorted family issues both in and outside the
precinct house. While it is dogged with that same downbeat quality that McBain
seemed unable or unwilling to shake, it draws the reader along in a clear,
compelling enough way to justify an overall somber mood.
No comments:
Post a Comment