Ed McBain mastered a specific type of mystery genre, the police procedural. But he wouldn’t be pigeonholed. Twenty-two years into his white-hot run of 87th Precinct cop novels, McBain launched another series celebrating a guy who got people free of the law.
Matthew Hope may not have been the same kind of publishing success story, but the series did go for 13 books and three calendar decades. More important, it allowed McBain to indulge in a different kind of crime fiction in a more tropical locale: sunny Florida instead of a big bad city somewhere in the American Northeast.
I think it possible to appreciate the man’s willingness to spread his wings while acknowledging something less satisfying in the result. From their winsome nursery-rhyme inspired titles to a fawning self-indulgence in McBain’s presentation of the main character, the Matthew Hope books never quite clicked for me.
