Only rarely does a literary character appear to be fashioned not just with words but with blood and bone – made so alive that you find yourself wondering what he’s doing now, after you’ve read the final page.
So it is with Steve Carella, the conscience of the squad room in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels.
For 49 years, we have been by Carella’s side as he hunted a psychopath known as the Deaf Man, sagely counseled his detective buddies, winced at the bigotry of Fat Ollie Weeks and raised a family with Teddy, his deaf sweetheart. It was 1956 when we first met him in “Cop Hater”; in “Fiddlers” – the 55th book in the series – we must finally bid Carella and his creator farewell.
The series had slipped in recent years, its author slowed by a heart attack and throat cancer. But McBain, who virtually invented the modern police procedural, had too much pride to let his creation dribble to a close. “Fiddlers,” published two months after McBain’s death at 78, is a fine story well told – one of the better books in a saga that has consumed more than 3 million words.
The new tale begins when a blind violinist at a nightclub is shot twice in the face with a 9 mm Glock. As the bodies pile up, each killed with the same gun in the same manner, Carella and his buddies in the 87th hit the pavement for some old-fashioned leg work.
The result is vintage 87th Precinct: the dialogue crisp, the pace swift, the humor wry, and every character – even the minor ones – superbly drawn.
McBain did something for his characters that he could not do for himself: Carella, Cotton Hawes, Bert Kling, Artie Brown and the other detectives of the 87th barely aged through the decades. But their imaginary city of Isola aged with the author; its ethnic makeup and social problems mirrored the evolution of McBain’s native New York City over the last half-century. You can read the entire series as an epic social history of a great American city.
The 87th Precinct novels alone would have made their author one of the most prolific writers of our time, but they represent only half of his output. There are also the mainstream novels and children’s books written under his legal name, Evan Hunter, the early paperback originals churned out as Richard Marsten, Hunt Collins and Curt Cannon, and the 13 books in the crime series featuring Florida attorney Matthew Hope, along with several teleplays and screenplays, including his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on “The Birds” (1963).
In the final Matthew Hope novel, “The Last Best Hope,” published in 1997, McBain brought Hope and Carella together to solve a murder; and in one passage, he wryly made Carella a literary critic:
“She was somehow intimidating, a big-boned, sharp-nosed woman with graying hair … wearing Ben Franklin specs and a green sweater that looked like the one the expert in Hitchcock’s movie was wearing in the restaurant scene, when they’re all trying to find an explanation for the havoc the birds were causing. … The super here at 831 Crest looked altogether like that lady in the movie, except for the eyeglasses. Mrs. Bundy. He’d read somewhere that a screenwriter, some New York hack, had named her after a street in Los Angeles.”
Carella is a fine detective, but he doesn’t know diddly about writing.
McBain must have known that “Fiddlers” would be his final curtain call, but there is no tying up of loose ends. Will heartbroken Bert Kling patch things up with his forensic scientist girlfriend? How will Carella deal with his 13-year-old daughter’s drug problem? Is Fat Ollie Weeks finally going to get lucky with the dish from patrol?
Meanwhile, the Deaf Man, the nightmare of several 87th Precinct novels, is still out there somewhere, never to be apprehended. And Steve Carella has been left alone to ponder why the case has gone stone cold.
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