Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Ed McBain's farewell

By JEAN HELLER
Published September 18, 2005

FIDDLERS

By Ed McBain

Harcourt, $25, 259 pp

Fiddlers is Ed McBain's last novel. The last time we will ride with Steve Carella and Meyer and Kling and Fat Ollie Weeks of the 87th Precinct. The last time we will spend time with Carella's deaf-mute wife, Teddy, or their twin children. The last time we will tag along on the search for murderers on the mean streets of Isola, a thinly veiled stand-in metropolis for New York City. It's the last ride, but it's a good one.

Someone is killing older people: a blind violin player, a sales rep for a cosmetics company, a college professor, a priest, a former high school beauty queen. A mix of men and women who, at the moment of their deaths, range in age from their 50s to their 70s. None of the victims knew the others. They lived in neighborhoods all over the city. They have nothing apparently in common except a killer who walks up to them and shoots them twice in the face with a silenced Glock.

As the body count rises, the pressure mounts on the 87th Precinct to solve the crimes. The police commissioner accuses the precinct of laxity in not resolving the matter fast enough. He says the cops are "fiddling around, just fiddling around," apparently the source of the novel's title.

The detectives know there has to be some link among the victims and the killer, but if it goes back decades, how are they going to connect the dots?

Meanwhile, we meet the killer, a man who is living life as if there is no tomorrow, spending lavishly and enjoying his hedonistic excesses almost as much as he is deriving satisfaction from his lethal sideshow. Along the way, he meets a hooker who figures she's better off sticking with the rich guy than turning tricks, and the two seem to fall in love.

Eventually, all the bread crumbs that stretch from the present into the past form a nexus that breaks the case, and justice is served. As it always is in the 87th Precinct. The question all the detectives want to ask the killer is, "Why now?" The answer is as ironic as the life of the author who wrote it. And amazingly satisfying.

McBain was the author of more than 50 novels, most of them 87th Precinct stories. As Evan Hunter, he wrote the Matthew Hope series about a luckless lawyer. He also wrote Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

While he didn't invent the police procedural, McBain certainly raised the genre's bar. He specifically didn't want a single protagonist, he said, because police work is a team effort. So he populated the 87th with an ensemble protagonist, a move that gave rise to such wildly popular television shows as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and the CSI triptych.

McBain died of throat cancer in July. He was 78.

[Last modified September 17, 2005, 09:00:06]