I'm going to have to start concerning myself with titles again. It is interesting reading two series by the same author more or less simultaneously - actually, alternating, I suppose. The 87th Precinct stories have terse cop names - appropriately. The fairy tale titles of the Matthew Hope books are a little problematical. The title series suggests that the title came first and the story was fitted around it to a certain extent. The Brothers Grimm made the final clue the dwarf's name and the evidence against the killer here hung on figuring out what his true name was. The killer does point out that it isn't his legal name, he had changed it, but when he needed an alias he went back to it - and besides, his chosen legal name was a translation of his birth name. There is also a pointed reference - one of the witnesses is an illustrator, who happens to be working on a new edition of Grimm, and specifically Rumpelstiltskin. The final bit of cleverness is in the last few lines of the book. Hope and the cop, Bloom, are shaking their heads over a man who could perform such appalling acts. Bloom says something about the fact that the man had been "a giant" in his chosen field, and Hope caps the whole thing with, "Yes, but he was a dwarf inside." Cute, McBain, very cute.
I have the impression - quite possibly totally erroneous - that the title of the first of these may have been an after the fact sort of thing. The ex and her kids referred to the new wife as Goldilocks, and to them, certainly, she was an interloper. So the title could easily have arisen from the story itself. This time the fit seems much more conscious.
On another note, it strikes me that McBain spends a lot of time complaining about the weather in Florida: too hot, too cold, too wet. Maybe he is conducting a defensive campaign like we real New Mexicans carry on habitually. We make sure that visitors enjoying the sunshine and blue skies are fully informed about the wind and the dust storms and tumbleweeds and range fires, and the general lack of precipitation in any form in the hope that they will be alarmed enough to go back home and stay there, since one of the major charms of the place is the population - rather, the lack thereof. And if all those folks who see our home at its best retired here, we would be no better off than Arizona in no time. I think it is too late to save Florida, so he might as well give it up. Of course, the books were written some time ago, and maybe there was still a faint hope back then.
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