This was short. And today was a holiday. I haven't been doing two in a day here lately. Actually, I finished the Fyfield book early this morning before I went to bed, and I just finished this one early before going to bed. It's all right, tomorrow is one of my late days - a student day instead of a teacher day.
I enjoyed Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear so much that I decided to try more of McBain. My minimal research revealed why I had him pegged with the "tough" mysteries - it seems that his best known works are those in his "87th Precinct" series. I have liked police procedurals, so I decided to give those a try as well as getting the first of the Matthew Hope series in which Gladly is a late entrant.
It appears that McBain created the police procedural genre and the ensemble cast concept which has had great success in television. I think it likely (at least possible) that the "87th Precinct" books are the model for "Hill Street Blues," one of my all-time favorite TV cop shows. And naturally I'm trying to compare it to the Dell Shannon police procedurals which I have read and reread. This book appeared in 1956 and is a little dated technologically, but that is inevitable given the changes of the last sixty years, I did not find that a problem in the reading.
He did use a "trick" which bugs me. The book opens with a cop getting up to go to work, pausing to check up on each of his children and to admire his sleeping wife. A page or so later, after the unsuspecting reader (such as me) decides that this guy is going to make a good primary character, McBain blows him away. Shock value, certainly, and feasible with the ensemble format, but was it really necessary? Maybe so. Background information suggests that the detective that survives the book (which is littered with widows) continues to be a focal character throughout the series. I certainly hope so - he has just married a remarkable girl, and I like them both!
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