Evan Hunter, a.k.a. Ed McBain, is one of the most prolific fiction writers about. Beginning with The Blackboard Jungle in 1954, he has penned over eighty novels, plus a number of children's books, and screenplays for such films as Fuzz, Walk Proud and The Birds. By my count, Nocturne is his forty-eighth 87th Precinct volume.
I thought I detected a slight falling off in quality in the series recently, but with this episode he is back on form with a bang. Interesting to see how the books and the characters have developed over the years, especially where profanity, violence and sex are concerned. The sleazy side of New York was always to the fore, but now its denizens are much more overtly deadly, the killings explicit, the talk littered with four-letter words, and the sexual grapplings bizarrely described.
McBain has tended to use an ensemble of detectives, pairing them off in the various novels, with one couple to the fore in one book, another couple in another, and so on. And where plots are concerned, he usually twins a double strand, with sometimes one impinging on another, and sometimes not. In Nocturne we have Carella and Hawes investigation the death of an old lady and her cat, while fat Ollie Weeks of the neighbouring 88th Precinct is on the trail of the killers of a white prostitute, her black pimp and one of her casual customers.
The detectives are working the night beat, prowling the January streets. They discover that the murdered woman was once a concert pianist, but now, stricken by arthritis, has been leading a lonely, drink-sodden life. Her only relatives are a daughter living in London and a grand-daughter in New York, who hates her.
Patient, stubborn and resolute, Carella and Hawes put her life story together piece by piece. This is McBain's strength: police procedure, the questions that must be asked to elicit information, the sifting of detail, the running-down of something that appears to be insignificant but just might be the spring on which the whole investigation turns.
Running in tandem with this inquiry, we have fat Ollie - a racist and a bigot, but a good detective - following up the slaughter of the prostitute and the two black men, and finding that three students, all attending a wealthy private school and from good backgrounds, are very much involved.
McBain's character drawing is first class, his setting of the wintry streets of New York grittily authentic, and his use of staccato dialogue superb. One believes implicity that this is how cops speak: going off on tangents to keep their sanity in the face of the horrors they must sift through (there is one very good running joke here about a film that might possibly be called Two to the Heart); boring away at small details; the use of repetition; unbelievable patience in the effort to break down peoples' inhibitions; and jokey ribaldry to paper over the cracks in the relationships of men who are in the company of one another in dangerous situations for hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
As far as the personal lives of these men are concerned, we are allowed only glimpses. Regular readers of the series will know that Carella is married to beautiful Teddy, who exists in the silent world of the deaf and dumb. Hawes is the womaniser, in this episode having a liaison with Annie Rawles of the vice squad. Kling has been unfortunate in his relationships, and is now romancing a black deputy chief in the department. Brown is too conscious of his colour, Meyer Meyer of his baldness, and so on
It is amazing that McBain has managed to keep such a long-running series so alive and fresh. One chooses to forget that in a normal time sequence, his detectives would be long past retirement age, of that they would have gone on to do other things. In the best of all fictional worlds, may they continue to clean up the sordidness of New York, and keep us, their fans, entertained.
Vincent Banville is a freelance journalist and critic
