More on McBain

After Frank Prial did his best to be snippy, James Grady comes back with a more balanced take on Evan Hunter’s legacy:

McBain’s cops resembled the real America, not the Dragnet straight arrows playing on TV sets in wood-paneled rec rooms when the 87th Precinct series began. McBain’s "hero"—though not always the focus of the novels—is Steve Carella, squad detective and husband to Teddy. She was a deaf-mute star in an era where characters with any physical "challenge" were usually written small and with more pity than passion. McBain’s "rainbow" ensemble of cops included Meyer Meyer, who’d been cursed with his double-barreled name by an angry father; fat Ollie Weeks, who never met somebody he couldn’t hate; Cotton Hawes, whose skin was black and whose soul was blue; and handsome young detective Bert Kling, who once thoughtfully explained to a girlfriend how and why a claw hammer is the perfect weapon for a woman.

In doing so, he bucked the ruling clichés of police fiction, in which cops were nearly always Irish or almost certainly white. He maintained diversity in his novels even as it evolved from pioneering to pro forma. He was also a literary pioneer in using "reproduced" pages of a police or lab report to "break" the lines of ordinary type. And he fought the idea of novels being shunted off to literary ghettos with labels like police procedurals, mysteries, thrillers, or crime stories.

Now, as most people know now, the next 87th Precinct novel, FIDDLERS, will be out from Harcourt at the end of the summer. It was to have been the first of a new multi-book contract acquired by Otto Penzler for the house (after a long run with Simon & Schuster.) Then to follow was the 2nd in the "Women in Jeopardy" series, moving from Alice to Becca. But two questions remain:

  • Will LET’S TALK, McBain’s memoir of battling cancer, finally be published in the US (it was published in the UK in May)?
  • And what of rumors that he had an 87th Precinct novel in the can which closes the series completely, slated for publication only on the event of his death?

I suppose only time will tell on either front.