Kiss – Ed McBain, 1992 ★½

A Policeman's Lot

Solving murders, it turns out, is a lot easier than stopping or prosecuting them. In this late installment of the 87^th Precinct police procedurals, series hero Steve Carella gets shoved hard against the limits of his job.

Author Ed McBain inches ever-closer to full-on despair. Whether it be criminal justice, race relations, or the capitalist rat race, Kiss is a novel reeling in misery. Perhaps because of this, it lacks the usual series springiness, stretching out a thin plot for over 350 pages.

At least the author was inspired enough to write original song lyrics to justify the book’s title. But like the book, it’s not a song you remember.

Carella is introduced still dealing with the aftermath of his father’s murder. Now he watches a smug defense attorney cynically obfuscate the state’s case, thinking back to when he helped make the arrest:

Carella had already looked that bastard straight in the eye. Had rammed the muzzle of his service revolver into the hollow of Sonny Cole’s throat, had heard Detective Randy Wade whispering behind him, “Do it.” He had not squeezed the trigger, although in the narrow corridor of a house surrounded by vacant lots this would have been the easiest thing to do. He had not done it. Now, seeing the look in his mother’s eyes, he wondered if he had been right.

You know this is going to be one of those gut-punch novels when supercop Carella is left pining for vigilante justice. Add to that a rich woman who keeps finding herself the target of murder attempts despite her elusive assailant being someone she knows and can easily identify, and you get a sense of helplessness unusual for the series.

Real-life legal drama was all the rage in the United States in the early 1990s, with millions of viewers tuning in to Court TV. This may be a factor in the amount of time McBain puts us in a courtroom. Above, one of the signature cases of the era, the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez in 1991.
Image by Julie Markes from https://okcfox.com/news/offbeat/menendez-brothers-spotted-sitting-courtside-in-1990s-michael-jordan-trading-card-basketball-sports-athletes-money-collections-collectors-collectables-1994-upper-deck-rare-air-convicted-murderers-resentencing 

What isn’t unusual for McBain at this time is writing to accommodate a fat page count. That became a common complaint of the otherwise highly regarded 87^th Precinct series as it extended through the 1980s and beyond. Here, when we aren’t in a courtroom watching attorneys bicker over points of law, we watch the wheels of police bureaucracy grind slowly as detectives write down serial numbers and bicker over which precinct should handle a case.

Several pages are spent in an evidence locker where we learn how different property clerks manage inventory. Police work is difficult, it seems, no matter what kind it is:

“So what we do, we got the mesh cages for jewelry and such, and the lock boxes for cash. Because of all the sticky fingers we get down here. But usually we don’t separate cash that’s in a person’s wallet or handbag. Because that’s like a package, you understand? We don’t break up the package.”

The visit leads to the discovery of a business card, but otherwise just demonstrates McBain’s depth of research when it comes to police business. This does little for the story itself except slow it down.

A mysterious chauffeur is at the center of the main plot, at least for a time. It looks for a time it will only be a matter of finding the guy somewhere in the city and bringing him in. Of course, it is never quite that easy in an 87th Precinct novel.
Image from https://www.williamsburgchauffeur.com/top-reasons-to-hire-a-chauffeur-to-and-from-the-airport/

The woman in someone’s sights is Emma Bowles, the beautiful wife of a rich investment broker who lives in Smoke Rise, an absurdly posh suburban neighborhood in the midst of the generally ultra-urban 87^th Precinct. Emma carries a cool hauteur and is hard to warm to even as a potential victim. Her husband inexplicably refuses to believe her when she identifies the assailant as his former chauffeur. Instead, he hires a creepy, mysterious bodyguard from Chicago to look after her.

The detectives of the 87^th Precinct wonder about the bodyguard: “There was a feel here. It came from years of talking to killers and nonkillers alike. You just knew when someone was leading you down the garden.”

There is a curious absence of investment this time around. Normally in an 87^th Precinct novel you glom on at least one of the non-regular characters, enough to worry about their fate. Not here.

Instead, the book keeps hitting you over the head with big statements about the awfulness of the place we are in:

This was a city in decline. The cabby knew it because he drove all over this city, and saw every part of it. Saw the strewn garbage and the torn mattresses and the plastic debris littering the grassy slopes of every highway, saw the bomb-crater potholes on distant streets, saw the black eyeless windows in the abandoned tenements, saw public phone booths without phones, saw public parks without benches, their slats torn up and carried away to burn, heard the homeless ranting or pleading or crying for mercy, heard the ambulance sirens and the police sirens day and night but never when he needed one, heard it all, and saw it all, and knew it all, and just rode on by.

The prevalence of drugs in criminal life was higher than ever by the early 1990s. In Kiss, police feel like they are plugging holes with toothpicks. McBain explains: "[N]owadays if you got anywhere near half a loaf you were lucky. Most of the time, all you got were the crumbs left on the table."
Image from https://abc13.com/post/drug-bust-queens-fentanyl-heroin-cocaine/14001265/

Drugs are everywhere, McBain keeps saying, and so is street violence, to the point where bars now close at midnight as no one wants to be caught out that late. Isola is not only dangerous but depressing as hell.

Like many 87^th Precinct novels, Kiss is a time capsule to when it was published, the early 1990s. New York City just elected its first black mayor and appointed its first black police commissioner, so Isola does as well. In 1991 a race riot broke out in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and the next year another more famously in Los Angeles.

In Kiss, similar unrest is sparked by community calls for the release of the murderer of Steve Carella’s father. A minister modeled on Al Sharpton claims the repeat felon is being framed by racist cops.

“The Preacher operated on the theory that if you told a big enough lie often enough, people would accept it as the truth,” McBain writes.

Much of the narrative feels forced like this. Someone quotes a line from the TV show “Hill Street Blues” so McBain can lash out at how “art imitated art” as he believed that series plagiarized his books. McBain was also deeply sensitive about being characterized as an Italian-American; just plain American, please. So Carella makes this same point to a lawyer who unrealistically brings up his ethnicity out of the blue.

A "no-knock" police raid into a suspect's apartment, what McBain calls "the most dangerous thirty seconds in any policeman's life," delivers a tense sequence late in the novel, made worse when a senior police commander removes needed backup at the last minute.
Photo by Brant Ward from https://www.police1.com/swat/articles/the-badge-preparing-for-a-raid-gOhfEVmtgcli5qEI/ 

Kiss also features several vivid and gratuitous sex scenes, keeping with a recent 87^th Precinct trend. Like the violence, it always seemed aimed at tickling the baser tastes of readers. Not that McBain was ever sheepish in those departments. But what the book needs is a driving plot; instead it meanders and whines its way through assorted grouses and diversions before finally settling into a suspenseful situation some 250 pages in, and then plods to a conclusion. It becomes hard to care what happens.

At one point Carella calls in a favor from a mobster who owes him one to get the skinny on a suspect. At this point, the Bowles case has actually gone cold, but since Carella has one of his ironclad hunches, you must accept the idea of him going so far out on a limb as to play footsie with La Cosa Nostra regarding a murder that hasn’t happened yet.

In the case of his father’s murderer, all Carella can do is grieve.

Ed McBain, pseudonym of Evan Hunter (above) ultimately published 55 87th Precinct books between 1956 and 2005; Kiss was book #44. While a grimmer-than-ever mood dominates at this point in the series, McBain could hardly be accused of burnout, publishing seven 87th Precinct novels in the 1990s on top of his other fiction.
Photo by Mary Vann Hunter (Evan's wife and Kiss's dedicatee from 1990 from https://historicimages.com/products/dfpy27577?srsltid=AfmBOopaiMM_-8f7CgMijh4zxuiVPSYpZsxEOO9yEaASdMWJfXVKR9GJ

McBain seems in his element here describing grubby everyday environments inhabited by beaten losers waiting for a final, blessed release from their miserable lives:

Forget the veined and bulbous nose, forget the razor nicks on his chin and cheeks, forget even the ill-fitting and somewhat rumpled suit. There was something more than his disheveled appearance that told you Frank Unger had long ago lost touch with anything more meaningful than alcohol.

Kiss does get points for a dual ending that – while not nearly as shocking as the author may have thought – does deliver surprises. But the main takeaways here are hopelessness and despair, increasingly common themes for the 87^th Precinct as McBain seemed to sense his world tilting from its axis. His crime writing is still solid, yet outrun by bitterness.