And then she would go back to the apartment where she would hang her yellow slicker and rain hat in the hall closet. And she would go into the bedroom where Bobby would be lying asleep snoring lightly— he always snored so lightly, she knew so much about this man she was now ready to leave.
I want to report a rape, she would say. I've been raped.
A taxi was approaching.
Laura nodded, and then raised her hand to hail it.
Pete Hamill
The Poet of Pulp
WHILE WE
don't often run nonfiction in this collection, "The Poet of Pulp" is such a fine piece of writing by Pete Hamill we felt duty bound to include it. Rarely has a crime writer been profiled in such depth or with such elegance. To complement an especially compelling Evan Hunter story, here is Hamill's article from
The New Yorker
.
The Poet of Pulp
How Ed McBain Made the Precinct House a Respectable Place
Pete Hamill
F
or decades, I've had a secret literary pleasure: the novels of Ed McBain. As far as I know, they're not taught; they're not part of the canon. But, in some strange way, McBain and I have been pilgrims together on a long journey through what he calls the big, bad city; the novels are as woven into my life as the Lexington Avenue express. No matter where I live, part of me is always in the 87th Precinct.
I began reading the McBain novels in the late '50s, when I was starting out as a writer. The first one I read was
The Mugger
, which started this way, from inside the head of a criminal:
The city could be nothing but a woman, and that's good because your business is women.
You know her tossed head in the auburn crowns of molting autumn foliage, Riverhead and the park.… She is a woman, and she is your woman, and in the fall she wears a perfume of mingled wood smoke and carbon dioxide.
The paragraphs that followed were a rhapsodic and gritty evocation of the city and its female nature, written in a shade of purple; today they seem more than a little ripe. But when I first read them, in 1958, they pulled me swiftly into the story and kept me there. Unlike so many of the books I was reading— by Hemingway, Fitzgerald— these novels were not set in Pamplona or Antibes; they were about the city where I lived. I stayed up most of the night reading the short novel, moving through the city with the detectives of the 87th Precinct.
As an apprentice, I admired McBain's solid paragraphs and the absence of waste or decoration. I admired his dialogue, too. McBain understood that a specially tuned ear was essential to defining the people of the city that he called Isola. He showed that speech on a printed page depended upon rhythmic approximation, and not the exactitude of a transcript. Yet McBain wasn't asking the reader to pause and take note; he was asking the reader to keep reading. Everything in McBain's work served the story.
In time, I learned that Ed McBain was a pseudonym for the mainstream novelist Evan Hunter, who had established himself in 1954, with
The Blackboard Jungle
. (Hunter's many other credits include the novel of '50s suburban adultery
Strangers When We Meet
and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's
The Birds
). But for me the McBain novels came first. They usually started with a corpse— on the floor, on the street, in a snowbank— and then moved swiftly into answering the classic questions about how the body got there. The process of unraveling the mystery was never mechanical, and the novels were at once surprising and familiar. They were about a world I knew as a New Yorker and a newspaperman— they took me to places that I'd seen a dozen times as a young reporter— and, like any great journalist, McBain gave life to that world through details.
In Long Time No See
, published in the late '70s, a building superintendent named Reynolds lets two detectives into a third-floor apartment. A blind woman is lying on the floor beside a refrigerator.
Her throat had been slit, her head was twisted at an awkward angle in a pool of her own blood. The refrigerator door was open. Crisping trays and meat trays had been pulled from it, their contents dumped onto the floor. There were open canisters and boxes strewn everywhere. Underfoot, the floor was a gummy mess of blood and flour, sugar and cornflakes, ground coffee, and crumpled biscuits, lettuce leaves and broken eggs. Drawers had been overturned, forks, knives and spoons piled haphazardly in a junk-heap jumble, paper napkins, spaghetti tongs, a corkscrew, a cheese grater, place mats, candles all thrown on the floor together with the drawers that had contained them.
The victims, of course, are not always dead, as in
Blood Relatives
:
The front of her dress had been ripped, and she tried to hold the torn sides of the
V
closed over her brassiere as she ran through the rain. It had been raining since 10 o'clock. The rain was neither cruel nor driving now; it had changed to a gentle drizzle that sent mist drifting up from the pavement. In the distance, the green globes of the 87th precinct shone through the rain and through the mist.
In McBain's city, the precinct house is an outpost of civilization. To be sure, the cops of the 87th Precinct are not saints. Their private lives are often untidy. There are racists among them, and fools and schemers, too. They would not be surprised by the cases of Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo. But such aberrations would outrage most of them; even the most racist of McBain's cops, Fat Ollie Weeks, recognizes that there are lines he cannot cross. McBain's cops work in a city where it would be entirely plausible for a crackhead to hit a stranger in the head with a brick. And without cops, McBain implies, there would be no city at all. In that sense, his novels speak for conservative values. In the end, we have cops because we have bad guys. The cop, like the novelist, can bring sympathy, even compassion, to his pursuit of even the most atrocious killer.
The lead detective of the 87th Precinct novels is Steve Carella, but the job of detection and pursuit is done by a team that includes detectives, forensic specialists, lab technicians, psychologists, and a cast of informants. This reflects actual police work, and it also follows the novelist's plan. From the first of the McBain novels, Hunter's design was to feature what he calls a "splintered" hero.
In clumsier hands, splintering the tasks and talents of the squad could lead to novelistic anarchy. That never happens in McBain's narratives, which are carefully focused on the quest for understanding and resolution; they are as simple as myths. Carella, who is usually at the center of each novel, is the best detective on the squad— intelligent, skeptical, proud of what he knows, modest about what he doesn't, at peace with the bad hours and the lousy pay. He knows that he must work with all the other cops. They include Bert Kling, whose doomed romantic life provides a continuing narrative; Detective Meyer Meyer, a patient, serious, and gutsy cop who is Jewish and prematurely bald, and whose sense of humor helps him through the inevitable bad patches; Cotton Hawes, a big, handsome, sometimes reckless bachelor with many women in his life; and Artie Brown, the only black man on the squad, who often struggles with bigotry, black and white. In minor roles there are women cops, police brass, and technicians.
The characters, in short, are part of an ensemble; as in life, the stories may be overlapping, unconnected, and parallel. In McBain's 1971
Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!
there are (if I've counted accurately) fourteen plot lines. If this sounds familiar, it's because the concept has been appropriated in various ways by television cop shows like
Homicide
and
N.Y.P.D. Blue
. In
Hill Street Blues
, the main policeman was named Furillo, in what I took to be an homage to Carella.
Hunter did not invent what came to be known as the "police procedural" (a label believed to have been coined by Anthony Boucher, who reviewed crime novels for the
Times Book Review
from 1951 to 1968). He doesn't like the term; it makes the novels sound as if they were about the mere clerking of crime. There were police detectives in American letters well before the first McBain novels began appearing, and readers and writers of crime fiction were also aware of Georges Simenon's Inspector Jules Maigret, the pipe-smoking French detective who was featured in more than seventy books written between 1931 and 1972. But McBain's novels were more realistic than their predecessors, in that he used a full range of the modern tools of detection. Above all, they were much better written. And, beginning with the first McBain,
Cop Hater
, published in 1956, the novels moved beyond the archetype of the Master Detective, a literary tradition that included Maigret (although Simenon and McBain resemble each other in several ways: productivity, craft, professionalism). McBain's people were cops— real cops. And when a crime is committed in the real world cops, not amateurs, are called in to deal with the mess.
This had not usually been the case in American crime fiction. During Prohibition and the Depression, the private eye— Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe— had come to dominate the popular imagination. Most urban police departments— along with big-city political machines— had been corrupted by the easy money that flowed from the bootleggers during the '20s; in many towns during the Depression, police power was marshaled against unions, leftists, protesting war veterans. The private eye was not an agent of the state, and thus had a special appeal for the children of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants— that is, of people who came from countries where the police were an oppressive force. Many Americans grew up, as I did, wary of ever going to the police for help.
But readers and writers of crime novels were changed by the experiences of the Second World War and Korea. In the armed forces, they learned that winning a war required the skills of many specialists. For such men (and many women), the platoon was the central unit of survival— and of eventual triumph— in the same way that the family was the basic unit of civilian society. The men of the 87th Precinct are described in the early books as veterans, and they form their own platoon. They are also a kind of family.
The precinct's job is to ward off threats to the family of the squad and the wider family of the city. The city around the detectives changes; they do not. In more than forty years, Carella has aged only a decade. In the fiftieth 87th Precinct novel,
The Last Dance
, being published this month by Simon & Schuster, Carella's fortieth birthday is behind him, barely.
But, if the elasticity of the calendar reminds us that we are reading fiction, McBain's picture of the dense, layered, sometimes scary city suggests that his achievement is much bigger than its fifty parts. In fact, I read this latest McBain as if it were a piece of a larger project: a multipart novel about New York in the second half of the century. That grand novel is now about 3 million words, and it does not seem too much of a stretch to compare it to, say, Eugene Sue's
The Mysteries of Paris
, in which crime and misdeeds and the pursuit of the guilty are used to illuminate a great city during a particular era. Sue— and Balzac— took readers to places where nobody else could go. In his own way, in our time, so does Ed McBain.
Over the past four decades, McBain has taken us into boardrooms and crack houses; into glossy law offices, the Broadway-like theater (which he revisits in
The Last Dance
), import-export firms, the music business, publishing, network television, art galleries. He has made vivid the lives of strangers, various and bizarre. He has challenged us to think about the precarious value of human life in a huge American city— a place populated by blind beggars, youth gangs, predatory rapists, Jamaican drug posses, con men, blackmailers, race hustlers, kidnappers, burglars, and stool pigeons.
Along the way, the reader can see how the city's language changes: the topical references change; the immigrants change; the names change. There are seven daily newspapers in the early novels; by the time of
The Last Dance
, there are three. One can trace the arrival of television, drugs, and racism. Almost from the beginning, the books are imbued with a nostalgia that is the permanent curse of so many native New Yorkers. In a city where all is in flux, New Yorkers of every generation carry around the memory of a lost city. In 1977, Carella (in
Long Time No See
) was feeling nostalgia even about murder:
There used to be a time when most murders started as family quarrels resolved with a hatchet or a gun. Find a lady dead on the bathroom floor, go look for her husband. Find a man with both legs broken and a knife in his heart besides, go look for his girlfriend's husband, and try to get there fast before the husband threw her off the roof in the bargain. Those were the good old days.
Still, McBain is too much of a New Yorker to become maudlin. Near the end of
The Big Bad City
, the forty-ninth 87th Precinct novel, published last year, Carella sits with the black detective, Artie Brown. Carella is remembering old cases, riffing about cops who died and bad guys who were punished:
Jesus, remember the times? I remember them all, Artie. I remember all of it, all of it. Every single minute. It goes by too fast, Artie. I'll be forty in October. Where did it all go, Artie?"
He looked up.
"Artie?" he said.
Brown was snoring lightly.