When The Women Come Out To Dance – Elmore Leonard, 2002 ★★★½

Keeping it Tight

This short-story collection by Elmore Leonard can get overlooked in his total output yet includes one of his most influential stories. It also displays how he owned the genre of crime fiction enough to deliver engaging, wry tales of life regardless of any degree of law-breaking.

The story of note, “Fire in the Hole,” would be better known to television audiences a few years later as the basis for the pilot of a long-running series, “Justified.”

While that is the most representative (and satisfying) example of Leonard’s tough-guy fiction in the collection, it’s far from the only thing worth reading.

The Cutie – Donald E. Westlake, 1960 ★★★

Even Bad Guys Get the Blues

Straightforward mystery or crime fiction? I go back and forth with this one. The plot centers on a murder, a series of them as it unfolds, with mysterious phone calls and lengthy interrogations that double as exposition. Your standard mystery, basically.

But what it really is about is the life of a criminal, a hoodlum who thinks he’s in the driver’s seat until things start going wrong. As a character study, The Cutie is involving, full-on crime fiction. Yet most of the way through, it is tied to this formulaic mystery that leaves too many holes.

Our protagonist, Clay, works as a top operative for Manhattan gang boss Ed Ganolese. One night, at home with his latest girlfriend, the doorbell rings. It’s Billy-Billy Cantell, a junkie who claims the police are after him for murdering a woman he swears he doesn’t know.

The Frumious Bandersnatch – Ed McBain, 2004 ★★

Late McBain Leaves Bitter Taste

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 87^th 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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, 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.

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. A 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?

Tricks – Ed McBain, 1987 ★★★★½

McBain's Masterful Medley of Mayhem

A riveting showcase of hard-boiled crime-story technique blending suspense and wit, Tricks is a genre novel that dares to be great. From start to end, author Ed McBain keeps pulling surprises that are brutally twisted and wrenching yet also supremely fun.

It’s Halloween and the children of the 87^th Precinct are running wild. This goes beyond the usual shenanigans. Four costumed small fry bounce out of a car into a liquor store yelling “Trick or treat!” Before the owner can shoo them off, they shoot him dead and clean out his register.

The novel’s title has several meanings. A magician disappears after a final magic act, leaving body parts across town. A mysterious caller bothers a lone woman by claiming to have legitimate questions about her bust size. A slasher stakeout turns deadly for a detective disguised as a sex worker.

Heat – Ed McBain, 1981 ★★★½

When 'I Do' Becomes 'Oh No'

Marriage and summertime are two things we associate with happiness. Yet both can also be sources of intolerable pressure, like when they are used as key elements of a police procedural. In Heat, love makes the world go round, but also leads to murder.

While a typically energetic 87th Precinct page-turner, Heat is unique in the series for how quickly it makes the main criminal activity secondary to a riveting subplot involving one of the detectives.

Bert Kling has a problem. He’s married to a beautiful model, only now he suspects something is going on. A comment by a drunk girl at a party makes him wonder if his wife is having an affair.

Calypso – Ed McBain, 1979 ★½

Who Feels Like Dancing?

Has this ever happened to you? You re-read a book you remember really disliking, only this time you can’t recall what it was that put you off. What you are reading flows really well and keeps you engaged.

Was it you? A bad mood, say, or an uncomfortable chair?

This happened to me with Calypso, a novel I remember being a nadir of my previous jaunt through the 87^th Precinct. But blow me down; what a strong start! It has what you look for in a police procedural: a compelling murder victim named King George, a sense of authentic urgency, and sundry aspects of police process brought in with smooth clarity.

Then with no warning it takes a hard left into Silence Of The Lambs territory, with a crazy subplot that more or less renders all prior conventional police work meaningless. This isn’t the worst 87^th Precinct novel; it does pull one in. But it may just be the most disjointed.

Blood Relatives – Ed McBain, 1975 ★★★

One Body, Too Many Suspects

The more Ed McBain novels you read, the more you discover there is no such thing as a straight Ed McBain novel. He avoided the easy path of working to templates or formulas. He wrote police procedurals, yes, but always changed them up with crazy twists or skewed angles.

Blood Relatives may be his closest stab at a routine police procedural, centering on a single murder where suspects and testimonies are worked over until a culprit is found. Yes, he delivers real surprises but plays his cards straight from the deck.

The results are rather good. McBain’s ability to involve the reader through plot turns and digressions works just as well when he isn’t striving as hard to keep you off-balance.

Sadie When She Died – Ed McBain, 1972 ★½

Sex and Death in the Big City

The 1970s were called the “Me Decade” because of its tendency for hyper-individuality. Families and communities became untethered as individuals obeyed their needs for self-fulfillment. At least that was the popular view. In Sadie When She Died, we meet a casualty of that culture.

At first the homicide of Sarah Fletcher appears to be the result of a burglary gone wrong. The trail from broken window to bloody corpse is straightforward enough; there’s even a junkie’s confession in Chapter 3. But for lead detective Steve Carella, it’s all too neat.

The more he investigates, the more he learns about Sarah, about a restless life lived on the edge, about a marriage that had fallen apart, about lovers meetings in strange bars. He realizes much more is at play than a simple silverware job.

Jigsaw – Ed McBain, 1970 ★½

One Piece at a Time

The concept behind Jigsaw, book #24 in the 87^th Precinct series, is that standard crime just doesn’t cut it anymore, not even for criminals. Sometimes they must play their own little games, spicing things up to keep life interesting.

That was true for Ed McBain, too. Already inclined to experiment in his police procedurals, the author pushes the envelope further with an offbeat tale about long-dead hoodlums and their unrecovered loot from a bank heist. Instead of providing us with prose pictures, he gives us an actual picture, a photograph cut into puzzle pieces by one of the goons. It’s up to the detectives of the 87^th Precinct to put it all together again and find the money.

The trick is finding all the pieces.

80 Million Eyes – Ed McBain, 1966 ★★

Lights, Cameras, Murder

If a sign of a great author is making a book readable even when there is little in way of story, then here is Exhibit A in Ed McBain’s greatness. This book is fast-paced and gripping, capturing authentic moments of life on its margins. But the plotwork falls short of form.

If you are already familiar with and enjoy the 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals, you can find things to extend your engagement. But if you are a newbie wanting to give McBain a fair shot, this is not the book to start on.

80 Million Eyes is more a killer-and-filler entry.

Doll – Ed McBain, 1965 ★★★½

One of Our Detectives Is Missing

While the 87^th Precinct police procedural series was built on an entire squad of detectives working together as the main protagonist, this was not how it really worked in its 50-year run. Ed McBain couldn’t help but make his alter ego, Steve Carella, the star of the series. Most times, if they were lucky, the other plainclothes officers got to ride shotgun.

This time, McBain deliberately takes Carella out of the loop, missing and presumed dead. The rest of the team must figure out what he figured out back in Chapter 3, and save their comrade by solving a murder.

However bendy its approach, Doll is a fine example of the classic 87^th Precinct formula, a dark and compelling crime, detailed characterizations, clear insights into the processes of a criminal investigation, and a storyline that never slackens. It doesn’t always make sense, but the pages fly by too fast to notice.

He Who Hesitates – Ed McBain, 1965 ★★

Not a Typical Trip into the City

Ed McBain liked to say he didn’t write whodunits, he wrote whydunits. In this case, what we have is a whatisit. What is the deal with Roger Broome, and what are the strange circumstances that make him think about going to the police?

What it winds up being is a break from a typical 87^th Precinct police procedural. Instead of a fresh corpse and a trail of clues, you have a quiet loner from out of town pondering a secret in real time.

Broome’s odd personality grabs you right away. His mind works along slow and offbeat tangents. Having sold some woodenware in the big and strange city of Isola, he plans to return to his mother, with whom there seems an oddly co-dependent bond. But there is something he wants to get off his chest first, something he thinks he should take to police.

The Golden Gate – Alistair MacLean, 1976 ★½

Hijackers with Manners

This is a singularly strange action yarn where the bad guys are more likable than the good guys and the crime scene includes jape-filled press conferences and hostage-takers who pause for photographs.

“I’ve never been responsible for anybody’s death in my life,” says the top hijacker, a fellow named Branson. It’s a kind of villainous boast you don’t expect, but he really means it.

In the opening chapter, Branson and his henchmen execute a plot that nets him not only the President of the United States and two Arab oil potentates but also the Golden Gate Bridge. His price to release them: half a billion dollars, as well as pardons for him and his team.

Three Blind Mice – Ed McBain, 1990 ★½

A Different Point of View

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 87^th 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.

Candyland: A Novel In Two Parts – Evan Hunter & Ed McBain, 2001 ★★★★½

Tag Team of One Makes Winning Combination

If schizophrenia is not merely talking to yourself but answering, what is it when a famous novelist partners up with his own nom de plume? 

Evan Hunter wrote some popular novels around broad social themes like juvenile delinquency, homophobia, and racism. Ed McBain wrote the famous 87^th Precinct crime novels and countless other mysteries. Candyland brings the pair together, for the first and only time.

It is a nifty idea for a novel which delivers on the page, Hunter’s faculty for writing in sensational, pinpoint detail about a particular human ill developing naturally into McBain covering its criminal aftermath. As a bonus, you get a suspenseful underlying meta-mystery of how and/or if these two plot threads will come together in the end.

Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith, 1981 ★★★★½

A Mystery Wrapped inside an Enigma

Gorky Park dances on the narrow boundaries of genre fiction, a mystery that slides into straight crime fiction where a psychotic killer is pursued by a detective who runs an entire police force but can trust no one. And it is set in Soviet Russia, so there is much social commentary, too.

The challenge for me came not in enjoying it but wondering how its author managed to hold everything together all the way to its bloody, satisfying conclusion. Gorky Park is not a thrill ride – it is much too deliberately paced – but it delivers satisfaction across genres and some unexpected insights into the human condition.

Not to mention stark Russian atmosphere. I can’t think of a novel that sucked me so completely into another time and place as this one did.

The Third Man – Graham Greene, 1949 ★★★½

Dirty Deeds in Vienna

Trust no one. Believe nothing. Whenever you imagine the worst possible outcome, rest assured the final result will be worse.

Paranoia as art had been around for most of the 20^th century; in The Third Man Graham Greene transformed it into entertainment, a mass-market hit on its own which connected to the unsettled postwar zeitgeist. A seminal work, unquestionably; but how good, really?

As a movie, which is how it is best remembered, The Third Man holds up quite well with a striking visual approach and engaging performances. As a book, what you get is a lean, well-paced mystery story enveloped in postwar atmosphere and European ennui.