The Mugger by Ed McBain

17 March.

Back to the 87th Precinct. So far, I'm enjoying these. The writing is very good; that isn't really a surprise, but it is a continual delight to find truly brilliantly crafted sentences sprinkled in so liberally in what I had dismissed for years as formula "tough cop" stories. I'm going to have to read one of his books that I have heard of for years, but managed to avoid getting around to reading - Blackboard Jungle. It was published under another name, Evan Hunter, which is his legal name if not his original name. Another one of my gifts as a reader, besides forgetting who done it, is never getting around to reading the books that I "should" read. I had one of those "you know, I never actually read ..." conversations with someone just recently ...

Anyway, he reused a plot device from the first in the series here in the second. Gave a little twist, but it is still the same game, I think. The earliest story I read using it was by Agatha Christie, I think it was The ABC Murders or something like that - maybe. The murderer hides his target murder inside a string of apparently random killings. For example, some guy wants to kill his wife, so he murders a whole bunch of women who have the same first name - or who shop at some particular store - or who belong to the same club - or something. In McBain's first 87th Precinct book, Cop Hater, the victims were all cops. In this one, the murderer disguises his murder as one of a long series of muggings (sort of fits with the title, right?). The muggings and the murder are unrelated, but the detectives of the 87th pursue the red herring for quite some time. The case is solved almost by accident when someone makes a connection.

I read a piece he wrote about the genesis of the series and all the research he did. According to him he made himself a complete nuisance at a real NY precinct trying to get enough information to make his books plausible. There are moments in the reading when I think he may have picked up too much of the jargon because I am not always sure that what I seeing is actually some obscure east coast big city cop reference - or what I have seen called "electronic transcription artifacts." I had the same problem with JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy and her intense "Britishness."