19 JANUARY 1985, Page 29

Top cops

Stan Gebler Davies

Lightning Ed McBain (Hamish Hamilton £8.95)

Ed McBain has chosen an elegant way of accusing his televisional imitators of plagiarism. One of the more obnoxious detectives to appear in his 87th Precinct series of police novels (37 to date) com- plains in this latest offering that his persona has been stolen by the script-writers of Hill Street Blues. 'The point is this guy's name was Charlie Weeks,' bitches the fat, malo- dorous and vicious 011ie Weeks. 'On the show. Charlie, not 011ie, but that's pretty close, don't you think? . . . What Weeks says at one point is, "Freeze, niggers, or I'll blow your heads off." Also, he man- handles suspects. I mean, he's a regular shithead, this Charlie Weeks. So am 1 a shithead? is 011ie Weeks a shithead?'

Point made. Certain other similarities are cited. Both television show and novels are set in an imaginary city (plainly New York) and both have a collective hero in the form of a bunch of cops from a precinct station. McBain invented this compendium character some 30 years ago when asked by Pocket Books to come up with a hero, private eye or policeman, to replace Perry Mason, the invention of Erle Stanley Gardner. It was thought at the time, erroneously, as it happens, that Gardner had not long to live, and Pocket Books, with the crassness typical of publishers, especially American publishers, sought to find a replacement before he had quite two feet in the grave. McBain obliged with Carella, Meyer Meyer, Kling, Goldblume et al. The for- mula, as he remarks, has been much imitated, on the box and in the cinema as well as on paper. Curiously, no satisfactory film has been made of any of his own work in America, but the French (they would) made a reasonable stab at it and Kurosawa set one 87th Precinct story successfully in Yokohama.

An 87th Precinct story takes about a month to write, though he knocked one of them off in nine days (Ladykiller), without himself being able to tell the difference, so he could get on with a vacation. The straight novels he writes under the name of Evan Hunter take him eight months and, by that corollary of Murphy's Law which dictates that a writer's work is worthwhile in inverse proportion to the amount of importance he attaches to it, are worth roughly one eighth of a McBain.

A good deal of research goes into the McBain productions, and the author spends a fair amount of time hanging around cops. In Lightning, wherein the villains perpetrate rape and murder (apparently) by hanging, he lists the con- tents of a Johnson Rape Evidence Kit (wooden cervix scraper, slide holder with two slides, pubic hair collection lifter, seminal fluid reagent packet, etc.) and distinguishes between the types of fibre preferred by hangmen for use in their ropes. The medullary index of a hair from a white man's scalp is 0.132 and from a woman's 0.148, but if you come up with a short, curly hair with a fine root and a medullary index of 0.114, what you are looking at is a caucasian female pube. This you might guess anyway, but guesswork is not for detectives or conscientious thriller- writers. Such details may not be riveting, but they do establish that the author has some inkling of how the police and forensic labmen work. McBain, like Conan Doyle before him, lays it on with a trowel where lesser writers fake it or don't bother.

Another innovation McBain imposed on the police novel, now commonplace, but very rare when he began to write, was the interweaving of two plots. It was, of course, borrowed from the theatre and is ideally suited to the cinema and the box, where it has to be assumed that patrons have not the diligence or intellectual capac- ity to devote more than five minutes to any one story. McBain's command of filmic and theatrical as well as literary technique owes much to his having furiously studied all the university courses on literature (labelled by the Americans 'Humanities') he could find after being let out of the US Navy in 1946. He fried his brains so thoroughly, he admits, that he fell for a while under the spell of James Joyce but, thankfully, recovered.

One plot in Lightning concerns a serial rapist — that is to say, a rapist who attacks the same woman on more than one occas- sion. This chap, who is very serious about the business, rapes nine of them. Often. A lady cop sets herself up as decoy while

another notes a vital clue: all the victims are Catholic.

The second plot concerns a murderer who has it in for young female athletes and leaves them hanging from lamp-posts. The assembled crowd of policemen all looked up under the dead girl's dress. She was wearing red panties under her red dress. 'Still,' 011ie said, 'it's rare up here in

• Eight-Three you find anybody dead but a nigger.'

The murderer's hang-up turns out to be

. . . but that would be giving it away. McBain's plots are well worth following through to the end. Like all thriller plots, they have holes in them, but not big ones, and, anyway, that is part of the fun. Chapter Six consists almost entirely of sex, which is McBain's way of pointing out that cops are human too, but the rest of the book is grown-up stuff and enjoyable, as always. McBain thinks he is the best thriller-writter in America and he is prob- ably right.