Lady Killer by Ed McBain
87th Precinct #7
First edition published 1958
My copy 1974 (Signet 491-E9532)
Cover artist uncredited
160pgs
The Author
Ed McBain is the most frequently used pen name of prolific mystery author Evan Hunter (1926–2005), who under his own name wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. He is most well-known for his 87th Precinct series, police procedurals set in the fictional East Coast city of Isola, based on his hometown of New York City.
My dad is a big McBain fan, and took me as a young aspiring writer to hear him give a reading at The Library Limited, a large multi-floor independent bookstore in the St. Louis area that is sadly defunct, its building in downtown Clayton razed to make way for the corporate headquarters of a large insurance conglomerate that shall remain nameless. I spent hours in that bookstore as a kid, looking through their gigantic fantasy section, before I got into detective fiction. There were only five or six of us at the reading, as it was billed under Evan Hunter instead of McBain, and wound up being more of a conversation than a reading. He spent some time talking to me, a kid in awe, and told me that the key to being a writer is to write, every day. It doesn’t have to be a lot, could be a page, could be 250 words, but it has to be something. It’s something I’ve taken to heart. He made quite an impression on me, was definitely the friendliest and most generous with his time famous writer I’ve ever met.
He advocated writing every day, and write he did. Over a career that lasted more than half a century, he authored more than a hundred novels, countless short stories, and screenplays for film and television. Several of his 87th Precinct novels have been adapted to film, including Fuzz, for which he wrote the screenplay, and Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, adapted from King’s Ransom. The subject of today’s post, Lady Killer, is the seventh 87th Precinct novel.
The Book
The 87th Precinct novels are not the first American police procedural novels, but they got the microgenre down to a science and defined how it would look moving forward. The novels are all short and move quickly, drawing from a cast of stock police characters whose distinct personalities are conveyed through dialogue and action rather than lengthy description. Though the characters do grow in their personal lives throughout the series, it’s not necessary to read them in order—you can pick up any single one and experience a self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Lady Killer begins with a kid coming in off the street to the 87th Precinct house one morning to deliver a letter to the desk sergeant. It reads, in letters cut out from a newspaper or magazine, “I will kill the lady tonight at 8. What can you do about it?”
It’s up to Detectives Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes to figure out who “The Lady” is and who might want to kill her, with less than twelve hours until the crime’s appointed time. Unlike a lot of mystery stories, they do not take a straightforward path to the conclusion. There are a lot of false starts and wasted efforts, trial and error. The emphasis is on pounding-the-pavement policework rather than a special mind’s crime-solving brilliance. Carella and Hawes are competent, but they are not geniuses, nor are their fellow detectives Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling, or their shift supervisor Lieutenant Byrnes. They meet interesting characters it seems might play a part in the greater story but turn out to be dead ends—not red herrings.
As with the majority of the 87th Precinct books, they find the killer and save the day in the nick of time, just as you know they will as soon as the story starts. But it’s not the suspense of whether or not they’ll get their man that makes the story—its how it gets there.
The Cover
The excellent cover illustration, featuring the redhaired Hawes and the dark-haired Carella standing out front of a brothel full of potential Lady options, is uncredited. Some internet sleuthing found that Mitchell Hooks, who did the cover art for the edition of Ross MacDonald’s The Moving Target I wrote about previously, may have done some 87th Precinct covers in this style. Lady Killer looks like his work, but no one knows for sure.