Fat Ollie’s Book – Ed McBain, 2002 ★½

Side Character Takes Over

Ed McBain wrote two kinds of 87^th Precinct novels. In one he details a single story that more or less takes over the entire book. The other is when he hops around, juggling multiple plots.

Fat Ollie’s Book is very much in the latter mold, a novel that dances around quite a bit keeping you trying to keep up, playing multi-layered games of who is fooling who, and even favoring us with fictional writing from one of the series’s most despicable characters.

It should be fun, since McBain knew how to tweak his established formula for humor and thrills. But somewhere along the line, he lost interest in providing the very thing readers expect when they pick up one of his books: a tight, involving police procedural.

 A city councilman with a big political future is shot dead while prepping for a public rally. Ollie Weeks is the police detective who catches the call. While not from the 87^th Precinct, he involves series hero Steve Carella by offering him co-credit for a collar if he helps Weeks out: “Tell your loot we share the bust, we’ll all be glory boys.”

A set-up like this offers many possibilities, like political intrigue and shadowy conspiracies. Unfortunately, McBain gives the murder of City Councilman Lester Henderson minimal investment. He’s more interested in Weeks, his famously maladjusted, racist detective who after appearing as a side character in multiple 87^th Precinct novels, now gets a book focused on himself.

Police investigating the public hall where Councilman Henderson was shot uncover a murder weapon on one side of the building and reports of a man running away from the other side. Carella and Weeks try to figure out how the culprit could be two places at once.
Image from https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-police-investigate-shooting-downtown

Weeks has two mysteries on his hands, Henderson’s murder being the less important to him. The more pressing case is who stole his Report To The Commissioner, his attempt at a police procedural Weeks thinks can launch him into the big time if he can get it back.

Weeks especially likes his grabber of a leadoff sentence: I am locked in a basement with $2,700,000 in so-called conflict diamonds and I just got a run in my pantyhose.

Fat Ollie’s Book wears its comedy leanings pretty openly. For one thing, McBain really leans into the title concept, with long passages like the above taken from Weeks’s purloined writings. Weeks has dreams of being taken seriously, though not quite in the way it happens. The thief, it turns out, is a transvestite prostitute named Emilio who accepts Weeks’s made-up first-person tale of a female cop named Olivia Wesley Watts locked in a basement with contraband diamonds to be a real story.

Ollie's manuscript is stolen only because he carries it with him in a dispatch case. "Up the Eight-Eight, the only thing anybody carries in a dispatch case is hundred-dollar bills or cocaine," Ollie tells his sister. "He prob'ly thought he was making a big score."
Image from https://wrenandivy.com/products/randle-dispatch-case?srsltid=AfmBOoq8fzNygqlxOg-0aZjiEOo-UhbQUCbNTo5k7g_Ngyb0K7XwLxMp

Sure, he doesn’t recognize many of the place names, but Emilio just figures “Livvie” is being deliberately obscure:

The trouble with Livvie’s city was that it was imaginary. The people, the places in her pages were all fictitious. For all Emilio knew, even the police routine was phony and not based on established investigatory technique. He realized that this was what she’d had to do in order to throw the bad guys off her track, but man it certainly made things difficult for a person trying to rescue her.

He thought of himself as her rescuer.

Experienced readers of the 87^th Precinct series will likely recognize elements of the above passage as the preamble of every book. It’s also amusing to reflect on how one guy pretending to be a woman author (Ollie believes female mystery writers sell more books, so he gives himself the pen name “Olivia Wesley Watts”) is pursued by another guy who dresses as a woman to make money in another way.

But the comedy is mostly centered on Weeks himself, an acquired taste at best with his penchant for ignorant name-calling and left-field W.C. Fields impersonations, never mind very few people in the 21^st century are familiar with the old movie comedian. Weeks develops a sentimental rooting interest despite himself, as we see he shares an apartment with his similarly antisocial sister and shrugs off the residue of a lonely, misspent life.

William Claude Dukenfield, patron saint of curmudgeons everywhere. Fat Ollie's W.C. Fields impersonation is a constant character tic in his 87th Precinct appearances. In Fat Ollie's Book it begins to dawn on the guy that many of the people he shows it off to have no idea what he's referencing.
Image from https://nypost.com/2010/08/19/last-minute-w-c-fields-at-lincoln-center-updated/

That is until he meets a police officer named Patricia Gomez who, despite her Hispanic ethnicity, sweeps the portly detective off his feet. Even more unlikely, she takes a liking to him despite his awkward manner. He asks her on a date, then asks if she will try to cut his penis off to make cuchifrito, her being a Latina and all. She shrugs this question off with a chuckle, turning it into a “cute-meet” moment.

However hard-boiled, romance was always a big deal for both the 87^th Precinct and its author. McBain believed in love with all his heart, and often revealed his soft side for many pages at a time detailing the blissful togetherness of Steve Carella and his wife Teddy. In Fat Ollie’s Book, Ollie gets his turn, though for most of the book he is searching for that book of his while Emilio searches for him, or rather, “Livvie.”

I kept waiting for this section to take off, since by the middle of the book, I had lost interest in the other plots, the murder of the councilman and a planned bust of a drug ring, as neither was turning out to be that interesting. The idea of a low-level crook finding something akin to gold in the scribblings of a wanna-be hero cop had real potential, especially when McBain presents excerpts of Report To The Commissioner to further the plot. Would fiction lead to some screwball truth?

But while the excerpts are amusing, the concept of a crook, even a drug-addled one like Emilio, buying Livvie’s crazy diamond story hook, line, and stocking run strained credibility, even before he spots what he thinks is the basement where Livvie is being held. McBain keeps promising a climactic confrontation between Ollie the author and Emilio the reader, even converging it with the otherwise limp drug-bust sideplot, but never pays it off.

The drug-bust subplot brings back longtime 87th Precinct character Eileen Burke, back as a detective at the precinct after a long hiatus. More attention is given to her reunion with former boyfriend Bert Kling, though he is happily in a new relationship.
Image from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/10/14/little-rocks-dangerous-and-illegal-drug-war/

The councilman’s story is the biggest stumble in the book, about as basic a murder tale as McBain may ever have spun. There is hardly a twist worth spoiling, just a routine tale of lust and jealousy that McBain seems uninterested in developing. Even Weeks, hot as he was to make a collar, seems to lose interest, ironically leaving it to the uniformed newcomer Patricia Gomez to help put together what puzzle there is.

More interesting is McBain’s detailing another kind of politics, those involving neighboring precinct houses. Here, helping Weeks out is made mandatory as much by Carella owing the guy as the possibility of sharing credit for a big arrest:

It was not unusual for cops in this city to ask favors of other precincts. Usually, but not always, they offered to share credit for any ensuing bust. Ollie had not deemed such an offer necessary. But, hey, he had saved Carella’s life. Twice!

Weeks seems to genuinely like Carella, something McBain hinted at previously but lays on thicker here. There is not only respect for him as a good cop, but the fact Weeks feels at ease with the guy. If Carella is disgusted by his table manners or his bigotry, he keeps it to himself.

Author Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) as he appeared at the time of Fat Ollie's Book, his 52nd entry in the 87th Precinct series. He wrote three more before his death in 2005.
Image from https://criminolly.com/2021/09/17/fat-ollies-book-review/

What keeps Weeks going? He prides himself on his individuality, we learn, and his willingness to tell it like it is. “He did not consider himself prejudiced in any way,” McBain writes. “He merely thought of himself as discerning.” This is a pretty spot-on depiction of a bigot, I find,

Whether readers can balance the less savory characteristics of Weeks with McBain’s desire to give him a varnishing of likability is a question I don’t think I can answer. For myself, I thought the experiment worthwhile but the execution wanting. As a sideplot, it might have worked better than as a main event.

But crushed between two atypically flabby crime stories, Fat Ollie’s Book never quite comes off as anything other than mild curiosity.