An Educated View:
By Martin Kich
Writing As Evan Hunter,
Writing As Ed McBain
McBain’s Isola is not a terrain that rewards idiosyncrasy, regardless of how much it tolerates it or even promotes it. Maintaining the public order is beyond the capabilities of the detectives of the 87th Precinct. They function simply to check the anarchy of the city and have no illusions about preventing it. It is the essence of the milieu in which they work. In such a milieu, the idiosyncrasies that might serve to caricature the detectives are for the most part reduced to the level of quirks. In fact, given the constant peculiarities of their environment, the detectives generally come across as rather ordinary. They are neither unblemished nor corrupt–that is, they would be equally out of place in Dragnet and The New Centurions.
Furthermore, so that new readers would not be at a loss in distinguishing the detectives, McBain relied on a device that served not only to make each detective easily identifiable but also to undercut any sense that the stereotyping is of much more than passing interest. In each novel, the detectives are routinely introduced with much the same capsule descriptions of their appearances, manners, and personal histories. (What is very curious is that the detectives did not age much, though the novels reflected the changes over four decades in their urban environment–a meta-fictional caprice if ever there was one).
Stereotypes are suggested in the descriptions of the detectives, but they do not have to be shown to be superficial because the way in which they are established in itself suggests superficiality. McBain assumes that we understand the limits of stereotypes–that they are no more reliable than an initial observation of evidence which may or may not have been arranged to conceal the real motive for, perpetrator of, or even method of the crime. (In fact, when one is dealing, as these detectives are, with many crimes perpetrated by considerably less than master criminals, one must guard even more against having any ingrained notions about human motive and behavior–that is, one has to take into account a basic unpredictability.)
Because cases are generally assigned among the group of detectives by their availability, rather artificial contests between detective and criminal are for the most part avoided. Sometimes the detectives do become very engaged by the particulars of a case, but much more often they are more engaged by the investigative process itself and by the peculiarities that mark the progress of each investigation. Seldom does the solution to a crime involve the sort of intimate matching of wits that has been the signature of the long-running television series Columbo or, on a cruder level, the sort of in-your-face confrontation of values that became the trademark of Kojak.
The closest McBain came to creating such personally (and, in most cases, artificially) charged conflict is in the recurrent appearances of a criminal mastermind known only as the Deaf Man. To his credit, McBain avoided a cartoonish focusing of the detectives’ energies on the apprehension of this criminal. In fact, though he is the type of sociopath who enjoys taunting the police with clues to his impending crimes, the detectives are simply too busy to give him the attention he craves. That he repeatedly avoids arrest is as much due to the wild variety of crimes competing for the detectives’ time as to any diabolical cleverness on his part. In effect, McBain seemed to be suggesting by his inclusion of such a potentially cartoonish criminal that however fascinating clever sociopaths may be, they are, after all, less symbolic of the terrors of contemporary life than anachronistic. At the end of Mischief, one of the most recent 87th Precinct novels, the Deaf Man is matter-of-factly riddled with bullets by a female accomplice who wants more than her split of his latest haul. In a reciprocal gesture of sexual kink, he has rather foolishly allowed her to manacle him to the bedposts. Not quite a reincarnation of Moriarty.
What makes the 87th Precinct novels–particularly the later novels in the series–both entertaining and fictionally compelling is what is on display more broadly in Mischief: McBain’s ability to depict the city’s extraordinary variety of social milieus within a narrative that has both a unity of effect and of theme. The theme is, of course, rather sardonically indicated by the title: none of the crimes is truly extraordinary (not even the crime masterminded by the Deaf Man, the heist of a large cache of damaged money earmarked to be burned–a crime which, moreover, involves the instigation of a racially charged riot as a distraction); in any contemporary history of the city, such incidents would be stripped of specifics, submerged in statistics.
How the novel achieves its unity of effect is a more complex matter. McBain manipulates point of view very subtly but extensively. An omniscient narrator clearly dominates the novel’s telling. This narrator cannot be described as objective, for he does intrude to identify, if not to comment on, the peculiarities of the characters’ perspectives and actions. Yet, he can be described as generally non-judgmental. In this sense, he is more a Studs Terkel than a Jimmy Breslin. The narrative includes a great deal of dialogue that quite remarkably serves to define each social milieu. Although the narrative does narrow at times to a limited point of view, it never approaches stream-of-consciousness. Instead, the narrative voice remains consistent–in itself, a unifying force over a plot that proceeds segmentally through very disparate stories.
What has made this approach so successful is, again, McBain’s unfailing ear for the dialogue of a great variety of speakers in combination with a very pointed selection of detail. In effect, he has conveyed through dialogue and detail what he would otherwise have had to convey through disruptive shifts in narrative voice. Ordinary objects take on the sort of totemic dimensions that they acquire when they are formally displayed or as soon as they are bagged as evidence. For instance, in the eyes and hands of a graffiti artist, a can of spray paint is something more than a tool for either mischief or art. It is, instead, something akin to the ciborium of a profane sect. For to the extent that the graffiti itself serves as a defiant assertion of identity, the force that the compulsion exerts upon the artist’s personality becomes ambiguous in its origins and dimensions, much like the influence of some religious mystery.
Of course, this sort of analysis does a disservice to the narrative, in which the significance of the detail is succinctly suggested and not so laboriously and, perhaps, heavy-handedly imputed. McBain was a gifted storyteller in the best sense of the phrase. In fact, I would argue that the later novels in the 87th Precinct series are so effectively unified because, writing as McBain, Hunter has been able to integrate elements of the diverse sorts of novels he has written under his own name. Although the remarkable continuity in the 87th Precinct series might suggest a narrowly directed talent, the continuing vitality of the series is actually a testimony to the seeming lack of continuity in the range of subject and narrative techniques in the novels he has written as Evan Hunter.
One might consider the storylines in a novel such as Mischief. These involve (again) the production of graffiti art, the group dynamics at work in confrontations between abortion protesters and pro-choice advocates, the personal and institutional effects of the dumping of old people who have become burdens on their families, the nuances in various manifestations of racism, the intricacies of hostage negotiation and the reactions to the shooting of a policewoman, the dynamics of sexual triangles, the artistic and business sides of making rap music, the distinctions made by women involved at various levels of the sex trade, and the dimensions of grief at the loss of a loved one.
Although one could connect McBain’s handling of each of these storylines to his approach in one or more of the novels he wrote as Evan Hunter, several specific illustrations should suffice. The skillful characterizations of the graffiti artists and of the rap musicians rather obviously have their roots in the urban realism of The Blackboard Jungle and in the treatment of the counter-culture in Nobody Knew They Were There.
As McBain, Hunter convincingly extended to very recent phenomena a long-evident sensitivity to youth culture, to the urban-outlaw mentality, and to the dynamics of social protest. Likewise, in his depiction of the tensions within several sexual triangles, he compressed almost to the level of vignettes the sort of starkly compelling situations that he focused on Buddwing and Don’t Crowd Me. And lastly, in his treatment of one Hispanic woman’s loss of her son, he touched on much of the irony and pathos in the immigrant’s circumstance, the topic of one of his longer novels, Streets of Gold.
*Martin Kich is a Professor of English at Wright State University–Lake Campus, where he has taught since 1990. In 2000, he was named the 17th recipient of the university’s Trustees’ Award, recognizing sustained excellence in teaching, service, and scholarship. The author of one book on western American novelists, he has contributed to almost forty other books, as well as to several dozen professional journals and periodicals. He has also published several hundred poems in literary magazines.
Contact: martin.kich@wright.edu
