Red rum and murder
Sandy Balfour
HARK!
AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL
by Ed McBain Orion, £12.99, pp. 293, ISBN 0752855867 £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848
It is common cause in what we might call the cryptic crossword community that for an anagram to be worth its salt, the anagram must itself make some kind of sense. It should not appear forced or artificial and it must read well. We love 'carthorse' for 'orchestra' and 'Britney Spears' for 'Presbyterians' and we are delighted that those who live in citadels speak with different dialects. In the United States the rules are less strict, but readers in Britain will not be
impressed, therefore, when Gloria Stanford, the inevitable corpse at the start of Ed McBain's latest novel, appears as 'A darn soft girl'? 0'.
Not even for the sake of the plot.
But so be it. Perhaps it is essential to the character of the Deaf Man that he is lousy at setting anagrams, for these teasing clues sent to the officers of the 87th Precinct come not from the author but from his recurring anti-hero, Adam Fen (geddit?), who likes to twist the police this way and that while he goes about his nefarious business. Fans of McBain will recall Fen, who made his first appearance in 1960. Like the officers of the 87th Precinct, the reader shudders slightly to hear from him again. One trusts he will one day make a lovely corpse.
Within the structure of a novel, of course, it is not only Detective Stephen Louis Carella and his colleagues who scratch their heads, but the reader too. Fen, in partnership — if that's the word — with an opportunistic hooker currently known as Melissa Summers, is bent on a very cultured million-dollar heist. For reasons that escape us, Fen teases CareIla with these intentions, using anagrams as clues. And the anagrams are only the half of it. We have also to cope with verbal and arithmetic palindromes and a succession of Shakespearian quotes of varying degrees of familiarity to try to work out what Adam Fen is up to.
As is always the case with McBain and the 87th Precinct, there is much to entertain us while we do. Fat 011ie Weeks, a personal favourite, is experiencing an unexpected renaissance — in love, on a diet and reunited by unlikely circumstance with his as yet unpublished novel. Carella is troubled (honourably) by the impending nuptials of his mother and sister. Eileen Burke, I'm pleased to report, has butterflies in her stomach, while Hawes has been loving above — or below — his league and gets shot in the foot for his pains. Kling, meanwhile, has developed a suspicion of what Sharyn Cooke is up to, and takes to following her about. It cannot be healthy.
And so on but we don't mind. Or rather, we love it. This is the 54th novel in the 87th Precinct series and McBain continues to do what he does best: to write the most engrossing, subtle and accurate dialogue, to which he brings a beautifully soft comic touch. Fans of hard-boiled police novels will have to travel far to find anything better than the squad room debates about Shakespeare, anagrams and the meaning of life. They say you should leave them wanting more.
McBain always does.
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