Lullaby – Ed McBain, 1989 ★★★

Pushing it to 11

There are times when a novel by a favorite author has what you want and expect to the point it becomes a liability. Passion and energy are revved up to an overheated degree. Fast-paced conversations read like boxing matches. An appropriately if super-heavy mood looms large.

Lullaby is a fantastically developed and fleshed-out dive into the world of Ed McBain’s legendary 87^th Precinct. It would no doubt have read better if it had been shorter. Alas, what makes it so brilliant a read also holds it back. The author is on such a tear he knows not when to stop.

A couple return to their Isola apartment from a New Year’s Eve party to discover the corpses of both their infant daughter and her teenaged babysitter. At first, a burglar is suspected. Further investigation suggests a more personal motive. But which victim was the target?

McBain is unsparing right away in depicting the aftermath of the crime, as processed by the baby’s mother:

The woman was silent again, that same numb look on her face. Reliving that second when she’d lifted the pillow off her baby’s face. Playing that second over and over again on the movie’s screen of her mind. The pillow white. The baby’s face blue. Reliving the revelation of that split second. Over and over again.

It is quickly established in the opening pages that the murderer broke into the apartment via the fire escape. But was the killer a simple burglar, or someone with killing in mind? The 87th Precinct detectives have a complex case on their hands.
Image from https://evgrieve.com/2021/02/reader-report-someone-broke-into-our.html

There are two schools of thought about the 87^th Precinct crime-novel series in the 1980s. One group has it McBain suffered from the need to fill each new novel with more pages to justify their cover price. Others enjoyed how McBain used those extra pages to fill out his city and characters in more intriguing ways.

I’m in the second camp, so it is odd to report I found the book flawed precisely because McBain pushed too hard to stretch it out.

Lullaby may be the longest 87^th Precinct to date, running 322 pages. Multiple plotlines thread across the novel: the three major ones involve the double murder; the private struggle of Detective Eileen Burke to deal with events that culminated in the prior 87^th Precinct novel, Tricks; and a sprawling case of a drug deal involving multiple gangs and betrayals.

It is the last of the three subplots where the novel gets the most extreme, but for most of Lullaby it also supplies the strongest adrenaline rush. It starts when Detective Bert Kling interrupts a beatdown of a Hispanic man by three Jamaicans. Instead of gratitude for saving his life, José Domingo Herrera tells Kling he would have been better off dead:

“Do you know how much pain I got here?” Herrera asked. “If you’da let them kill me, I wouldn’t have no pain now. It’s all your fault.”

Jamaican posse members. The term "posse," McBain explains, comes from the popularity of American western films in Jamaica. Posse leader Lewis Hamilton is bugged a hit he ordered was carried out with baseball bats instead of guns. "If we are looking to put this man in a box in the hole in the ground, why take the long way home?"
Image from https://www.kulturevulturez.com/top-jamaican-gangsters-all-time/

Kling is the 87^th’s most peculiar cop, not bad or corrupt, but prone to emotional outbursts and poor decisions. In Tricks, he contributed to the situation that led to the predicament his lover Eileen struggles with in Lullaby; here his impulsive if justifiable intervention opens a can of worms, especially after Herrera reaches out to him for help taking out the Jamaican gangsters. They are an up-and-coming “posse” whom Herrera claims are about to score a massive cocaine deal.

Can Kling trust Herrera, who has an annoying if understandable habit of disappearing? The dialogue in this section has strong “Miami Vice” undertones as it fleshes out the story of the Jamaicans, namely Lewis Randolph Hamilton and his chief lieutenant, Isaac Walker:

“So what I’m saying, you get a Jamaican posse making even a five-kilo buy, that’s a lot for them. But a hundred keys? Coming straight up the water instead of from Miami? I’ll tell you, that stinks on ice.”

It’s certainly not a bad “Miami Vice” imitation. With McBain now writing what amounted to R-rated fiction, there is ample profanity and violence, not to mention an extended scene of Hamilton and Walker enjoying the company of two sex workers. It makes for credible if unpleasant reading. But it is also confusing, partly because of the wide range of criminals involved, mainly because Herrera’s underlying motives seem to change every time we encounter him.

Lullaby unusually brings cities other than the mythical Isola into the investigation. A possible family connection in Seattle is examined at length, with a call made by an impatient Steve Carella to the local police. Miami is also referenced multiple times.
Image from https://griffisresidential.com/things-to-do-in-seattle-as-a-local/

The Eileen Burke subplot is the best handled; we learn about her fears as she sits uncomfortably in a psychiatrist’s office, ready to quit police work after her last job ended violently. Her scenes with the female psychiatrist are characterized by anger and distrust:

She wished she trusted her. But she didn’t. Couldn’t shake the feeling that to Karin Lefkowitz, she was nothing but a specimen on a slide.

The fact this is by far the shortest of the three plots may make it more effective, though the point of it all is the pointless nature of Eileen’s police experience. It is at least fairly straightforward.

While not as circuitous as the Herrera storyline, the murder investigation of the infant and her babysitter veer off in multiple directions across the length of Lullaby. McBain was clearly invested in this storyline, as it fills most of the book’s pages, and rather well at that.

The role of a female police officer working undercover is depicted as much gnarlier in Lullaby than was portrayed in cop shows of the era, like Angie Dickinson's Pepper Anderson character in "Police Woman." For Burke, the threat of rape is a constant reality; so is shooting a suspect outside the strict line of duty.
Image from https://www.slashfilm.com/1731987/police-woman-1974-tv-series-actors-still-alive/

Investigating the burglar lead gets into some fascinating territory; specifically around the exploding use of crack cocaine in how even lower-level criminals operated at the end of the 1980s. Detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer know they need to find a needle in a haystack to catch the right guy:

Only the most inexperienced burglar went to a pawn shop to get rid of his loot. Even a twelve-year-old kid just starting to do crack knew that cops sent out lists of stolen goods to every pawn shop in the city. To take your stuff to a pawn shop, you had to be either very dumb or else so strung out you couldn’t wait another minute. 

Soon Carella and Meyer are chasing after a prep-school student who was involved with the babysitter, and then discovering the sitter had a secret that may bear on her fate. Carella meanwhile is pursuing his own hunch involving the baby as a possible target. If you have read a few 87^th Precinct novels, you know Carella’s hunches are usually on-the-money.

McBain’s writing is sharpest when he leaves aside the plot points to delve into the world of Isola, not just the 87^th Precinct area but the surrounding environs. Some of this injects welcome notes of levity, like a doorman who badgers Carella with his ideas for advertising jingles.

Ed McBain was finishing out his fourth decade writing 87th Precinct police procedurals with Lullaby, and still managing eight novels over a ten-year span despite a sizable spike in their average page count. Above, a first-edition jacket.
Image from https://www.amazon.com/Lullaby-87th-Precinct-Novel-McBain/dp/0877959943

At one point a possible witness is confronted as he works on an art project:

Now Meyer and Carella stood with a Matisse at their backs and a puzzled art student directly in front of them, looking up at them from a stone bench and probably wondering if it was against the law to sketch in a privately owned museum.

None of the three resolutions, when they eventually do come, quite satisfy. Nor do the subplots intertwine at any point. A hallmark of the series to this point had been when you had multiple storylines, each was echoed by the book’s title. The main double-murder is Lullaby’s main meaning, but what about the other two? When Hamilton orders an underling to “sing [Herrera] a lullaby,” it is the novel’s most forced moment. Eileen has childhood issues about family members dying in line of duty when she was a child, so maybe that counts, too?

Lullaby offers many sharp twists and turns that showcase its author’s brilliance. But I felt the novel lacked space to breathe. In 1989 McBain wasn’t only completing with over thirty years of his 87^th output thus far, but also TV cop shows and other crime-fiction writers who wrote for narrower attention spans than earlier McBain ever had to satisfy. You sense this pressure here. Lullaby is an ironic title for a book so focused on not putting its reader to sleep; it does its job almost too well.