Pop music has always been a rough business, but how about this: a young singer’s major-label debut is transformed into a violent kidnapping. Despite the Lewis Carroll-inspired title, this is one of the grimmest and edgiest 87th Precinct novels Ed McBain ever penned.
Did he go too far this time?
I think so, though I didn’t hate this one as much on a second read. It has a clever, suspenseful plot once it gets going and offers some memorable highlights. It’s just that McBain’s increasingly bleak outlook and his willingness to indulge himself too much on matters away from the main story make this one tough to like.
Tamar Valparaiso is a hot young wannabe superstar poised to launch a record with a lot of buzz. It marries the lyrics of Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” to a hip-hop beat. While miming the song on the deck of a yacht crowded with music-industry VIPs, she is grabbed by three masked figures and whisked away on a speedboat.
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| The yacht Tamar is kidnapped from is cruising the River Dix, overlooking the skyscrapers of Isola. The fact the river has a state line brings in the FBI, or as McBain calls them, the "Feebs." He was not a fan. Image from https://floridapolitics.com/archives/634764-miami-dade-floats-noise-limits-for-party-boats/ |
“You ever hear of a singer named Tamar Valentino [sic]?”
“No!” Carella yelled back. “Who is she?”
“The one who got snatched,” Apted said.
“If she got snatched, she must be somebody,” Hawes said reasonably.
The book starts out with a 50-page-plus chapter with no characters from the 87th Precinct. Instead, McBain introduces us to the world of Bison Records, where boss Barney Loomis has big plans for his protégé Tamar. As he ponders the likelihood of his chartered boatride and floor show netting Tamar a number-one hit, McBain has characters discourse on the music business in general, stars of the day like Jennifer Lopez and Boyz II Men and the early-aughts hits they had. It’s a sharp disconnect from what one expects when opening a new 87th Precinct novel.
To be sure, McBain goes on too long down this path, until finally the kidnappers arrive to get the crime story in motion. The business situation does factor into the final outcome, and not only by raising the stakes for Tamar’s return. It just smacks of self-indulgence, McBain getting into the weeds of who were the big hitmakers of the moment like Casey Kasem doing a countdown show.
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| McBain writes the "Frumious Bandersnatch" single "seemed poised, please dear God, to do what Alicia Keys' Songs In A Minor had done in its first week, more than 235,000 copies for a debut album, #1 on both the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart and the R&B Album Chart, please dear God, let it happen!" Above, Keys and two friends at the 2002 Grammy Awards. Photo by Vince Bucci from https://www.goldderby.com/music/2022/alicia-keys-grammys-2002/ |
Speaking of indulgence, let’s talk about Fat Ollie Weeks. The center of attention in the prior novel, Fat Ollie’s Book, he’s back with his unlikely new girlfriend in a series of cute-date vignettes having nothing to do with the main story. McBain seems on a mission to reform his erstwhile bully-with-a-badge by making him lovable and even self-reflective.
McBain has this habit of narrating in character as Weeks. Whether he’s making some racist observation or just indulging his fancy for impersonating W.C. Fields, this loses its charm quicker than the hacky fat jokes: “The suit made Ollie look a lot thinner than he actually was, which meant he looked like an armored weapons carrier instead of a tank, not to mix metaphors with hippos, oh no, m’little chickadees.”
In addition to Weeks, there is another romance only tangentially related to the main story, this time between Detective Cotton Hawes and TV reporter Honey Blair. She and her camera crew captured video of Tamar’s kidnapping, which makes her part of the investigation. Cotton’s own investigation seems to center on Honey’s thighs.
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| Honey Blair's on-site news team captures sensational video of Tamar Valparaiso's kidnapping that for a time is blocked from release as evidence by Steve Carella. He discovers that one of the kidnappers shows signs of a limp, which could help identify him. Image from https://www.istockphoto.com/videos/tv-reporter-videographer-journalist-video |
The precinct itself is otherwise underrepresented this time out, with just series star Steve Carella getting the spotlight. This time he is reassigned to a hybrid FBI-Isola police unit known as “The Squad” whose elitist condescension gets under his skin quickly:
Now in this room full of WASPs – or such was Carella’s perception even though Corcoran was Irish-Catholic and Feingold was Jewish and Jones was black – he suddenly felt like a little Wop mutt who had no right pissing with the big pedigreed dogs.
Carella has another defensive moment regarding his Italian heritage, this time in reverse, as he finds himself resenting his widowed mother’s new beau, a “ginzo” from the Old Country he can’t warm up to. A lot of personal bitterness wells up across the entire novel.
For me, the Tamar story got more interesting as it got going, especially as tensions developed between the three kidnappers. While one is a smooth pro, another is a hardcase who likes violence too much, while the third worries about Tamar getting too good a look at her face. All the time I wondered about Tamar, left largely a blank in the proceedings, worrying she would say or do the wrong thing.
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| Tamar finds herself blindfolded and in a closet. All she knows about the kidnappers is that they wear masks of Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and George W. Bush, "Three of the world's great leaders," one of the investigators scoff. Image from https://www.magnific.com/photos/beautiful-blind-woman |
The tension is developed effectively, aided by cutaways to the investigation by the Squad, and one guy in particular who suggests his fellow police academy graduate Carella call him “Lieutenant.” Even Loomis the Bison Records executive has his fill of the guy: “I don’t like any of them up there, you want the truth, Corcoran least of all. He’s too full of his own perfume.”
It all culminates in a brutal climax that hit me the first time as excessive, and not much less so on a re-read. McBain in his later period wanted to shock more than entertain, and The Frumious Bandersnatch, despite its frequent Carroll allusions and Weeks’s romantic sojourn, is Exhibit A.
There is a message in the story, about how the music business uses up and throws away young talent while playing to the lusts of the masses. Tamar is frequently depicted as barely dressed, the result of a video dance routine she was reenacting when the attack occurred, her body proving an enticement to at least one of the kidnappers guarding her.
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| The Reverend Gabriel Foster, a recurring character in the 87th Precinct series, puts in another appearance to complain about racial stereotyping in The Frumious Bandersnatch. He is clearly based on the famous New York City provocateur, Rev. Al Sharpton, seen above in 2007. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Al-Sharpton |
This emphasis on Tamar as a nubile victim is likely to annoy many readers. It seems more essential plot-wise to me, yet I wish McBain did more with the character than he does. He’s more interested in her song. He writes, perhaps tongue in cheek: This song spoke to gender problems and crises of identification. This song spoke to adolescent boys and girls in turmoil. This was a very deep song.
I wondered if his alter-ego Evan Hunter was having thoughts of turning this into a piece of musical theater, as he had an interest in that sort of thing. This is not the only 87th Precinct novel to have a musical interlude, but it really is played up here.
Still, Carroll verse reworked as rap doesn’t exactly make sense, and however hard he tries McBain is unable to sell it on the page. We are told the song is very popular and much discussed. It even engenders some controversy with black audiences, or at least those who purport to speak for them and have no idea of the source material:
“The one place I really detect clear racism is in the use of the words ‘Jubjub bird,’” Halliday said. “‘Beware the Jubjub bird.’ That is clearly a racist warning.”
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| The curtain had not closed completely on author Ed McBain when The Frumious Bandersnatch came out, but he was struggling with serious health issues by this time, including the loss of his voice from recurring throat cancer. Image from https://wearecult.rocks/ed-mcbain-and-the-87th-precinct |
Moments like that are amusing enough. You just feel guilty being amused by anything in this novel when it’s over. It’s that kind of read.
Ed McBain never wrote a book he didn’t pour his soul into. He died of cancer the year after The Frumious Bandersnatch was published, yet still managed two more 87th Precinct novels before his end. Far from his best work, Bandersnatch shows him fearlessly pushing the envelope rather than resting on his laurels. Yet the parts of the book that stuck closest to his usual formula wound up being the most enjoyable. It reminded me how special he was as a writer, and how much he is missed.
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