UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct Novels

            Reference works will tell you McBain’s real name was Evan Hunter, the name under which he wrote many books—including The Blackboard Jungle—and screenplays as well.  He was born Salvatore Lombino, and changed his name to Evan Hunter when he began his writing career in 1952.

            As Ed McBain he published 55 books about the 87^th precinct in a city that is never named, but is obviously New York thinly disguised: Isola is his name for the borough of Manhattan, Riverhead for Brooklyn, Majesta for Queens.  There’s a big hospital called Buenavista instead of Bellevue, and so on.  Cop Hater was the first of these books in 1956.  My favorites are Sadie When She Died, the 26^th of the series, published in 1972, and Hark!-- the next to the last of the 87^th precinct books; McBain had finished another, published after he died as Learning to Kill.

            McBain’s main character is Steve Carella, whose family is always on his mind; between Sadie and Hark! his father dies and in the later book his mother remarries.  The reader finds out what’s on Carella’s mind, and in each book several other story lines are followed besides the crime investigation.  Often these are romances, going well or badly, of other detectives in the squad and sometimes a cop from a neighboring precinct.

            Sadie When She Died is about a victim who lived a double life, Sarah Fletcher the respectable housewife and Sadie Collins, who picked up men in singles bars.  Carella and the others know that the husband killed her, but the problem is to prove it.  Eventually they do.

            Hark! gives us story lines about Carella, Detectives Bert Kling and Cotton Hawes of the 87^th, and Oliver Wendell Weeks, or Ollie, a detective from the 88^th.  Here also we have a caper story involving The Deaf Man, a clever criminal who hints at his plans by sending notes to Carella that contain quotes from Shakespeare and word games such as anagrams and palindromes.

            McBain is sometimes considered the originator of the American police procedural, but that honor really belongs to Lawrence Treat and Hillary Waugh, who published in the 40s and early 50s.  What McBain did do was show big city police work as a cumulative, team effort, while he invented characters who were interesting and funny.  And the large number of his books means you can probably find one there you like.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Affairs of O'Malley, by William MacHarg (1940)

             The MacHarg O’Malley stories may have less backstory than any in detective literature. O’Malley, whose first name we never learn, is a Manhattan police detective whose “affairs”—that is, his cases, are told by a completely nameless narrator who may be a journalist or in some other literary field. In “Scotty Dog,” O’Malley remarks “no newspaper has ever give me the right initials yet,” suggesting he might be known by initials rather than a first name, but we never learn what the letters might be. The stories—thirty-three of them—are very short, with word counts of about 1500 to 3000 words, and were published in Collier’s beginning in 1930. An O’Malley’s case usually begins, as Mike Grost has noted, with O’Malley’s pointing out the hopelessness of figuring it out; when he has successfully solved the case and been congratulated by the narrator, he is equally pessimistic about getting any credit for cracking it (“A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection,” mikegrost.com/classics.html ).

            O’Malley’s powers of observation rival those who came before him in detective fiction, but he is less showy about them. The fact that he often keeps them to himself until late in the story means that these stories are not of the “fair play” sort where the reader has all the information he needs to anticipate the detective’s solution. He uses tried and true devices: in “The Ring,” he places an ad in a newspaper that reels the malefactor in like a big-game fish. But he is also inventive; when he is frustrated at the failure of the usual police ploy of getting x to confess by pretending that his pal y has already cracked and implicated x, O’Malley invents an account of the crime y has supposedly spoken while asleep (“The Sleeptalker”) and uses that to get x to talk. In another tale, “The Man in the Truck,” O’Malley pretends the murderer confessed and implicated the murdered man’s wife while under gas at the dentist’s. The original hackneyed device of simply telling one malefactor that his buddy has confessed and implicated him is used in “The Widow’s Share.” To quote Mike Grost again, the stories “emphasize the ideas of the detective, whether they consist of novel ways to get the killer to confess, or finding ways to track down suspects from the slenderest of clues. Almost none of them glamorize the ‘routine police work’ beloved of the…school of police procedurals.”

            Some of O’Malley’s methods use animals to get at the truth. The “Scotty Dog” always goes home to get fed after O’Malley releases him in various places in town, but when he releases the dog in one part of town, the dog goes to the penthouse apartment of the murdered man’s mistress, who helps solve the crime. The “Dumb Witness” is another dog: O’Malley telephones all the suspects and lets the dog listen to the answering voice; only one gets the dog excited. More deviously, in “The Cat’s Eyes,” O’Malley tells the suspects a story about scientists being able to analyze the brain of the cat who witnessed the crime to find out what the cat knows. The murderer isn’t sure if it's a joke or a myth, but he kills the cat, and O’Malley gets him to confess.

            In “Almost Perfect” and “The Right Gun,” O’Malley uses supposed psychics or clairvoyants to spur the murderers into action and give themselves away; in both cases it’s by trying to get rid of a gun they hid shortly after the murder. Neither they nor O’Malley really believe in such people, but with a little trickery O’Malley gets them to think they daren’t take a chance by ignoring the so-called psychic.

            The Affairs of O’Malley impressed Ellery Queen enough to make it onto his list of most important collections of detective mystery short stories. Thirty years before this book was published, MacHarg had teamed up with Edwin Balmer to write stories about a psychologist who uses instruments like the modern polygraph to solve crimes, in The Achievements of Luther Trant (1910), which also made Ellery Queen’s list. Nothing could be less scientific than O’Malley’s methods, but he also catches the crooks.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Bernard Capes, The Skeleton Key (1919)

             A maid at Wildshott, Sir Calvin Kennett’s estate, is murdered with the shotgun Kennett’s own son Hugo had carelessly left leaning against a tree when he stopped to chat with her earlier—is it an assignation? Neither of the men who imagine themselves her beaux—the valet of the Baron Le Sage, who has come to play chess with Sir Calvin, nor the butler Cleghorn—seems to have had a tryst with her. But they were both out and about and both are arrested on suspicion.

            No one seems to know anything about the maid, Annie Evans, who had a written recommendation when she was hired two months previously, though the writer of the recommendation cannot be traced, and no one knows of any family of the murdered girl. Nor does anyone know anything about the background of Baron Le Sage, whom Sir Calvin met by chance abroad, as did Vivian Bickerdike, Hugo’s friend, who is surprised to run into the Baron again in London, and then to find they are both on their way to Wildshott by invitation.

            Sergeant Ridgway, a Scotland Yard man closing up a recent case in the vicinity, accepts Sir Calvin’s invitation to take up this case. Ridgway and Bickerdike suspect that the girl may have been pregnant—the autopsy report at the inquest was very coy on this point—and that Hugo may have been responsible.

            The Baron departs, leaving his valet to his fate, but Ridgway comes up with an alibi for the servant, witnesses who put the gunshot earlier, at a time only Hugo could have fired it, and Cleghorn is also released, while Hugo is arrested.

            In Paris, the Baron learns information that enables him to work out the mystery. He takes no particular credit for this, claiming to have been by coincidence at the center of a web of clues. “The Key I found in a skeleton Key,” he says, “of the usual burglarious pattern,” underneath the murdered woman’s body.

            Ridgway has a socialist bent, and thinks “if…things were properly distributed…there’d be no need perhaps for police-officers at all.” Imagination is another sort of key in the narrative. One chance remark is that “charity is as much a matter of imagination as of feeling.” A turn of phrase or even a whole sentence or paragraph occasionally reminds me of Meredith: “Grievance, mutely felt, had thrown her into another camp than that of her order,” the author says of Audrey, Sir Calvin’s daughter. The vocabulary is Victorian educated, with plenty of French and Latin words and phrases. I did a lot of dictionary work with this one. Hipped= depressed; Bashaw=Pasha or bigwig; Macuba snuff and Rapee (fr. “grated”) a coarse, pungent, dark snuff; jimp=slender; lenitive=laxative; à la sourdine=muted; distinctions are made among a bunch of words for a group of trees or shrubs: coppice=one that’s frequently cut to the ground for firewood; copse=a small group of trees; grove=such a group without underbrush such as an orchard; thicket=one with underbrush; spinney=copse planted as cover for game birds; dingle=a deep wooded valley or dell; list slipper=one made of cloth and usually worn for quiet; objurgation=scolding; wyvern=a winged two-legged dragon with a barbed tail; fanfaron=swagger; facula=a lighted or bright spot on  surface; espalier=a fruit tree or ornamental shrub trained to grow along a wall or lattice; spraint=the dung of the otter; frit=frightened; boggle=bogey=specter or phantom.

UNCOMMON MURDERS: Guillermo Martínez, The Oxford Murders, translated by Sonia Soto (2005)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

            The Oxford Murders was published in 2005 but looks back to events that happened in Oxford in the early nineties, when the unnamed narrator arrived from Buenos Aires to work on a graduate degree in mathematics. His graduate supervisor has recommended he lodge with the widow of her former professor. His landlady turns out to have been one of the cryptologists who helped Alan Turing crack the Germans’ Enigma Code. On the first night after his arrival, she greets him warmly, feeds him dinner, and trounces him at Scrabble. A few days later she is murdered, the main clue being a message that her friend, the famous mathematician Arthur Seldom, says he received, summoning him to her house, including a mathematical symbol, and stating that this would be the first of a series.

            The landlady’s granddaughter Beth, who plays in an Oxford orchestra, has admitted that she feels trapped in her role of caretaker for her grandmother. The narrator’s tennis partner and lover, Lorna, who has a great interest in crime literature, is reading Arthur Seldom’s book on mathematical series, which contains a chapter on serial killers, and her copy is filled with “furious underlinings and illegible comments in the margins.”  Thus Martínez begins to build the list of suspects, which includes a Russian graduate student in math who is convinced his genius has been ignored by Arthur Seldom.

            Seldom tells the police inspector that the murderer must have found his book insulting and is trying to prove something to the mathematician. Seldom had argued that serial killers are crazy rather than logical. He suggests to the police that finding and announcing the next term in the series publicly might stop the murders. A second death has already occurred at this point.

            A third death occurs at a concert by Beth’s orchestra at Blenheim Palace; the dead man is the triangle player. Seldom is about to announce the fourth term of the series, which is merely the simple numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and their Pythagorean symbols, when the climactic event of the book happens, a killing in which the perpetrator dies. The police inspector is convinced he’s solved the Oxford Murders, but the truth is more complicated and more surprising.   

            The narrator’s foreignness gives a nice perspective to the English scene: the light that seems to be dimmed as soon as his plane dips into the sky over England, the incomprehensible cricket games where it is impossible for the uninitiated to even tell whether the game has begun or the players are merely desultorily warming up, the beauty of Oxford and the surrounding countryside, the ubiquitous Indians and Pakistanis. All this is delivered in Martínez’s very clear style in what appears to be an excellent translation by Sonia Soto. The movie made from the book was not a success, probably because the story turned into a purely English mystery, with the Argentinean narrator made into an English math student.