Times Change, and McBain Is on the Case

Ed McBain has been at it a long time. Under the name on his birth certificate, Evan Hunter, he wrote “The Blackboard Jungle” back in 1954; as McBain, he has written, including this one, 49 novels about cops and crooks in the 87th Precinct of a big, bad city that closely resembles New York.

Fans will be glad to know that McBain, at 72, hasn’t lost a step. “The Big Bad City,” which keeps up with current slang and post-O.J. law enforcement issues, not only upholds the conventions of the cop-novel genre that McBain had a lot to do with establishing in the first place, but also breaks out into riffs of pure enthusiasm such as we would expect from a much younger writer.

In this novel, Dets. Steve Carella and Artie Brown handle the main case, the murder of a young woman found strangled in a park. Carella, a former altar boy, deduces from engraving on the ring she wears that she is a nun. She is living outside her convent and working with terminal patients at a hospital. Then the coroner finds something that, in this context, hardly fits: She had breast implants.

Typically for an 87th Precinct story, the main case isn’t the only one. Other cases intrude, and McBain doesn’t try to make them all connect. They just happen simultaneously, as they would at a real police station, and buzz around the officers’ heads like a swarm of bees.

Meanwhile, Sonny Cole, a robber who shot and killed Carella’s father in an earlier 87th Precinct episode and got off thanks to the incompetence of the assistant district attorney, decides that he can’t ever rest easy as long as Carella is alive. Cole begins to stalk the detective, looking for the ideal killing ground: “Do it clean, man, cause you the first one they goan come lookin for. Clean piece, no partners, in, out, been nice to know you.”

McBain does many of the things we expect in this sort of novel. He supplies expertise about hospitals, “women religious,” police procedure and guns. He kills off a goodly number of people. He is dismissive of the press, police-brutality complaints and African Americans who play the race card. He sneers at political correctness.

But he also surprises us. All his characters, even the bad guys, have a measure of humanity. This may seem old-fashioned--McBain eschews the recent trend toward ever more monstrous villains--but it’s also refreshing. In fact, he has Carella muse: “He . . . could count on the fingers of one hand all the serial killers he’d encountered in all his years on the force.”

Cole, for instance, is a psychopath. He “had no desire to hurt any innocent person,” but “it never once occurred to him that Carella’s father had been an innocent person . . . that Carella . . . was himself an innocent person.” Yet it bothers Cole to see the love Carella has for his wife, Teddy, who is speech- and hearing-impaired. A lamp glowing in Carella’s window “touched his heart cause he seemed to recall a similar lamp when he was coming along, maybe in his grandma’s house. . . . Took him back . . . to someplace he couldn’t hardly remember.” Such moments may not redeem Cole, but they do make him real.

Carella and Brown discover that the slain nun once left her order for a year to pursue an alternative vocation as a rock singer. Hence the implants. Touring the South, she and her band ended one gig on the same night the tavern owner fell off his back porch into a swamp and was eaten by alligators.

The detectives interview the surviving band members and sink into a swamp of a different kind: a “Rashomon”-like series of stories that agree on many details but reach radically different conclusions. McBain didn’t have to do this--he could have wrapped up “The Big Bad City” quite nicely without it--but it shows how much fun he’s still having. Which means fun for us, too.