Book review - Romance

Ed McBain’s 1995 novel of the 87^th Precinct, Romance, is up to his usual high standard, a bravura mixture of police procedural, social commentary, slick characterisation and humour.

It begins with Detective Bert Kling attempting to fix a date with Sharyn, a black Deputy Chief Surgeon. He’s concerned about the difference in their rank, not the difference in their colour; she’s merely wondering about the colour issue. They agree to meet. It’s a phone call, and we’re in omniscient point-of-view mode so we get the emotions of both characters; it works well. So, a budding romance...

Next, we’re in an interview between a detective and a concerned redheaded actress who has been receiving threatening phone calls. Soon, we realise that these two characters are acting in a play called Romance. It isn’t a very good play; subsequently, the actress in the play is stabbed. McBain has fun depicting the ‘arty types’ on both sides of the script, with plenty of back-stabbing.

‘Carella wondered if the smile was an actress’s trick. Or even an actress’s tic. He realised all at once that with an actress, you could never tell when she was acting You could look into her eyes from now till doomsday and the eyes would relay only what she was performing, the eyes could look limpid and soulful and honest, but the eyes could be acting, the eyes could be lying. (p188) Of course the same could be said of an actor; but Carella is busy interviewing an actress…

Actress Michelle Cassidy isn’t happy with the play or its author. She turns up at the 87^th Precinct to inform Kling she’s been receiving threatening phone calls, just like in the play. Later, she is stabbed, though not fatally… Great publicity when the play is mentioned on the front page of the newspapers and in TV newscasts; then a murder happens and it’s a publicist’s dream though a nightmare for the detectives of the 87^th.

Many of  regular the 87^th Precinct gang figure in here, too: Carella, his wife Teddy, Ollie Weeks (‘the bigot of the universe’), Meyer, Lieutenant Byrnes, and Monroe and Monaghan (the homicide duo)…

Strange, how times change. ‘Nobody was quite ready to take offense back then…’ (p171) This was about something as ‘innocuous’ as calling women ‘girls’. I wonder what Carella would make of the offense brigade today on anti-social media? And as hinted at earlier, there’s evidence of racial tension as well as anti-Semitism. Maybe times don’t change that much, after all…

Great observation throughout, to be expected. ‘The dog immediately began barking at Kling, the way all little dogs do in an attempt to convince people they’re really fierce German shepherds or Great Danes in disguise.’ (p223)

It’s good to meet these characters again after a lengthy absence. Not everything is what it seems; there’s a twist on the obvious twist. The story neatly ends with Kling and Sharyn no longer on the phone but in a romantic - and sensual - situation.

Even Hunter (Ed McBain) died in 2005, aged 78.

Writing - serious about series

Fellow blogger and author Liz Harris recently posted her disenchantment with series books, prompted by Linwood Barclay’s novel Broken Promise (see her blog). She’s a fan of Barclay (I believe his writing style needs work, yet despite this he has the knack of drawing the reader in to keep turning the pages). But she was disappointed to find the book was the first in the Promise Falls series – some covers say this, some don’t, the latter being misleading, perhaps. Even so, Liz found the end of the book akin to ‘continued next book’ which can be deflating for a reader. Many readers, and Liz among them, want a resolution at the end of each novel. Yes, the series can present new challenges for the protagonists in later books, but some issue should be resolved in the current volume.

Series books by their nature are difficult to categorize for readers. For one thing, there are different kinds of series, all of them having their advocates.

Types of series

(not exhaustive)

1) Main character(s) engaged in solving crime/mystery/fighting common enemy. These are probably the most popular, because there is usually no continuity between books, yet they do supply the reader with familiar characters and environment. Police procedural and some historical books fall into this category. Ed McBain’s Precinct 87 and Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe, for example.

2) Main character(s) have intertwined stories to tell, which eventually define a resolution at the conclusion for all concerned. Nora Roberts is adept at these – quartets and trilogies, and even sometimes duets, relating to families (no pun intended).

3) Main character(s) in a dynasty/exotic location combat threats from outside, which can be warlike, business, personal or even supernatural. These can be interlinked sagas as penned by Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, et al.

4) Main character roams the land and becomes involved in murder, mystery or mayhem. Each tale is stand-alone; the character rarely changes through experience. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest Saga, for example.

Why read/write a series anyway?

Regular characters in a series have been around in genre fiction for decades, which proves the popularity of the concept. TV and film franchises benefit from series productions, again emphasizing the attractiveness to the audience.

Readers feel comfortable meeting again familiar characters who encounter variations on a theme – murder, mystery, etc.

Writers build up a ‘bible’ for their characters, which includes their past, the current situation, and often where they’re going. The writer is familiar with the characters. I don’t believe it’s lazy writing, because you still have to present obstacles for the protagonist, and these difficulties must be overcome according to the character’s known traits.

Will the series end?

Depending on the type of series, it’s possible that some readers will not tackle the first book in the series until they know the last one is published or imminent.  This hasn’t prevented The Game of Thrones books amassing a vast readership (before the TV series, in fact), or Archer’s ‘Clifton Chronicles’. Fans of popular authors will buy in, regardless. It’s tough for relative unknown authors to gain this readership until they’ve amassed several books in a series.

A finite series I’ve recently read is Night Hunter by Robert Faulcon (six books published between 1983 and 1987; all reviewed in this blog). It’s a supernatural quest series, with a resolution published three years after the penultimate book.

Certainly, you’d think that before the author could ‘sell’ the series idea to a publisher, they’d have some appreciation of the conclusion.  J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are in effect one novel in seven parts. I imagine the resolution was conceived at the outset, even if much of the glorious detail that runs throughout was not.

Of course, some series don’t need a final book, because they’re not a continuing saga but individual incidents in the main protagonist’s life (indeed, some characters don’t age though their authors do!) The character simply fades away – Charteris’ The Saint and Simon Brett’s Mrs Pargeter, to name two.

Series where the protagonist ages and evolves through his experiences are especially popular in crime fiction, because their back stories of family schisms affect the protagonist – Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks, for one; there are plenty of others.

I read all types of series and certainly don’t feel deprived if I haven’t reached ‘the end’. As in life, we enter other people’s lives, sometimes stay around, and at other times move away, not always consciously, but it happens. Art imitates life – so some stories will remain incomplete. I can live with that.

Having said as much, I do prefer to attain a resolution in the series books I write, though there always has to be an exception (see Floreskand below)!

The Avenging Cat series

Contemporary thrillers. Catherine Vibrissae has set herself the task of destroying the man who was responsible for her father’s death. To begin with, she sabotages his dubious business interests, but over time it seems to get more personal – on both sides. Each tale has a conclusion, though it promises more to come, for her vendetta is not complete.

#1 – Catalyst

#2 – Catacomb

#3 – Cataclysm

Work-in-progress - #4 – Cat’s Eye

The Tana Standish psychic spy series

Set in the 1970s/1980s, this features Tana Standish, a psychic British secret agent, who as a child survived the Warsaw ghetto of 1942.  Her credo is simple: fight evil. Unfortunately, she soon learns that the Soviets have a special secret unit in Kazakhstan that is employing psychics to spy on the West, and they have targeted her as well…

#1 – The Prague Papers (Czechoslovakia, 1975)

#2 – The Tehran Text (Iran, 1978/1979)

Work-in-progress - #3 – The Khyber Chronicle (Afghanistan, 1979/1980)

The Chronicles of Floreskand

‘by Morton Faulkner’

Co-written with Gordon Faulkner, the creator of mythical Floreskand, this series spans a fantasy continent that has been evolving for forty years. These stories have resolutions at the end, yet a great deal is left hovering for later books, with recurring characters and unintended consequences from earlier events.

#1 – Wings of the Overlord

#2 – To Be King

Work-in-progress - #3 – Madurava

Love them or loathe them, series books will be around for a long time yet. Long may that be so!

To play fair with the reader, however, publishers should make it clear that a book is part of a series.

Book review - The Empty Hours

Here we have three mysteries from Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct. 

‘The Empty Hours’ concerns the corpse of Claudia Davis, who was young and rich. Detective Steve Carella works with the usual precinct detectives to crack a case that ‘had been crazy from the beginning. Some of them are like that.’ McBain believed that coincidence and a good memory help cops as much as detailed field work, and this case is a good example of both.

He had the knack of creating images and situations, sometimes bizarre, sometimes poignant, with very few words. ‘The shop was small and crowded. Badueck fitted into the shop like a beetle in an ant trap.He was a huge man with thick, unruly black hair…’ (p53)

I do wonder if he was being playful, or was it mere coincidence, when one of the victim’s cheque stubs was numbered 007. (p55) Bearing in mind that this short story was probably penned in 1960, long before the James Bond mania took hold.

He also liked to through in irony. For example when Cotton Hawes questioned a witness in a women’s hair salon. Hawes was a redhead with a white streak in his hair as a result of a knife assault. ‘… he felt like a customer who had come to have  his goddamned streak touched up…’ (p63)

‘J’ (1961) begins with the murder of a rabbi in an alley next to the synagogue. Inevitably, Meyer Meyer accompanies Carella on this case. There are plenty of amusing and fascinating asides about Meyer and Jewishness. The murderer must surely be a Jew-hater – particularly since the letter ‘J’ was painted on the brick wall next to the corpse.

Here, as elsewhere, McBain gives us poignancy: ‘His shoulders shook with the sobs that came from somewhere deep in his guts. Carella turned away because it seemed to him in that moment that he was watching the disintegration of a man, and he did not want to see it.’ (p129)

‘Storm’ (1962) features Cotton Hawes on weekend vacation to a ski resort with a lady friend, Blanche; he has booked separate rooms in the Rawson Mountain Inn. Unfortunately, the heating only seems to work in one of the bedrooms… Before long, however, he is faced with the death of a female ski instructor, stabbed with a ski pole. McBain then gives us two pages of how Hawes got to know death intimately over the years, starting as a rookie and then as a young detective. He’d vomited in the early days, but not any more; he’d seen too much. But then, and now, he still got angry. Anger that could consume him. And here, out of his jurisdiction, he has to contend with the local police who seem incompetent.

McBain’s 87^th Precinct novels and stories are written in the omniscient point of view and yet have plenty of interior ratiocination on life, love and death from the regular characters. We get to know these guys, their fears and foibles, and their determination to bring the perpetrators to justice.

And that’s why he can write about any one of the precinct characters – as in ‘Storm’ – because he knows them so well.

McBain (real name Evan Hunter; he also used about six other pen-names) wrote his first 87^th Precinct book in 1956 and was prolific and greatly respected as a writer. He died in 2005.