Book review: “Fiddlers” by Ed McBain

On July 6, 2005, Evan Hunter died of laryngeal cancer at the age of 78 at his Weston, Connecticut home.

He was called Salvatore Lombino at birth. Later, he legally adopted the less ethic name Evan Hunter which he used for his serious fiction. But he wrote some hundred genre novels under a variety of pen names. The most popular was Ed McBain, the name he used for his 87^th Precinct police procedurals, a genre that he was credited with inventing.

The series began with Cop Hater in 1956, and it concluded with the 55^th installment, Fiddlers, published two months after Hunter/McBain’s death.

Reading Fiddlers, I couldn’t help but think that McBain was using this last 87^th Precinct novel to comment on life and death and illness and sex and, well, life again.

 

Scrappy and funny

As a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, I interviewed McBain over the phone two or three times, and he came across as a scrappy writer, proud of his talent and his output, as intensely alive to the world and as endlessly fascinated with people as you would guess from reading his books.

He also had a sense of humor.

That might have been in play when he constructed this final story since it turns out — there are hints of this early and often in the book — that the bald-headed serial killer who is murdering an odd range of five people with two shots to the head with a Glock handgun feels he has nothing to lose.

That’s because he’s dying of stomach cancer.

 

“Ready for the box”

McBain was in his late 70s when he was writing Fiddlers, and he fills the book with crude jokes by his detectives about the advanced age of the victims, two of whom were in their fifties, one in her sixties and two in their seventies.

One of the detectives starts calling the killings the Geezer Murders, and Steve Carella ruminates about how they “were people getting on in life.” Indeed, he thinks:

Given your average life span of what — seventy, seventy-five, eighty tops? — this put middle age somewhere between thirty-five and forty…Fifty was fast approaching old age. Sixty was, in fact, old. Seventy was decrepit. Eighty was ready for the box.

That was the sort of snappy language that the 87^th Precinct cops had used for the half century during which McBain was scripting their lines.

“Eighty was ready for the box.”  Yeah, don’t you think McBain was making a comment here?

None of these victims had been skipping off to kindergarten with a lunch pail in one hand and a box of crayons in the other. In all truth, the ages of the victims made the case sort of boring. Like watching Woody Allen kissing a beautiful blonde in one of his movies. If someone’s about to die soon anyway, what was the sense of going to all the trouble of killing him? Or her?

Yeah, old people are boring, writes the guy in his late seventies.

 

“Ambulance”

In contrast to all those old people, there is a subplot of the efforts of a number of 87^th Precinct cops to get in bed with some woman.

Such as Bert Kling who has ruined his relationship with his girlfriend because he tailed her movements out of jealousy — “Man, you don’t tail a woman you love,” Carella thought as Kling poured out his woes — and then stumbles into great sex with a woman he meets in a bar who might be a librarian…or a prostitute.

Such as Fat Ollie Weeks who is falling in love with another cop Patricia Gomez, to the point that he’s lost ten pounds on a diet she suggested and he’s turned to Andy Parker for romance advice — which, for Parker, comes down, simply, to the question of getting her into bed.

“If you wanna get in this girl’s pants, you first gotta create an ambulance.”

“A what?” Ollie said.

“An ambulance. In French, that means a setting…To them, ambulance means lighting, music, mood, the whole setting.”

In other words, ambience.

 

“Disappointed”

One budding relationship that, at the moment, is stopping short of sex involves Cotton Hawes, 34, and Paula Wellington, 51.

They talk about their age difference but are clearly attracted to each other so they go out on a date. And, over dinner, Paula explains that, as a member of the Woodstock generation, she lived a fast and loose youth, but not so much anymore.

“What I’m saying is, we’re not going to bed with each other tonight.”

“Okay.”

She sipped at her coffee.

“Are you angry?”

“Disappointed,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said.

 

Another level of humor

If, like me, you think McBain was having fun with this last 87^th Precinct novel, you could read another level of meaning — and humor — into the Cotton-Paula romance.

Hawes has been a member of the detective squad since the fifth book in the series, Killer’s Choice, published in 1958 — well before the Woodstock era, before the Beatles, before JFK, before Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s.

Say Hawes was 30 at that point, that would mean that, by 2005, he’d be 77, and his April-November relationship with Paula would actually be a December-May one.

The same would be true for Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer and even young Burt Kling, all of them now in their late seventies or early eighties.

McBain couldn’t have predicted that his 87^th Precinct series would last for half a century. Nonetheless, it didn’t make sense for the cops to get old because — as mentioned earlier — older people are boring.

So, for fifty years — with the agreement and connivance of his readers — McBain kept his detectives at the age at which they entered the series, even while the world changed.

Everyone was in on the joke.

 

“Fiddled”

Speaking of jokes, Fiddlers, the title of this final 87^th Precinct book, like many of the others, is a play on words.

It refers to a statement by the killer at the end of the book:

Q: Why did you kill these people?

A: They fiddled with my life.

Q: I’m sorry, they…?

A: They fucked up my life.

 

“Fiddlers fleeing”

The term, though, was used much earlier in the book by nineteen-year-old Regina Marshall, the hooker girlfriend of the man who, unbeknownst to her, is the killer.

She came to The City to be a singer but had a hard time catching on.

“I was playing little dives out on Sands Spit, ever been out there in January or February? I’m singing about fiddlers fleeing while all I got is a piano player at an upright behind me…”

The phrase “fiddlers fleeing” is a reference to the 1936 Irving Berlin song, now a standard, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” an elegiac rumination at the end of the long night.  It begins: “There may be trouble ahead.”  But, until then, the song says, “Let’s face the music and dance.”

 

“Before the fiddlers have fled”

Is it foolish for me to think that it was no accident that McBain used this song as a touchstone in his final book in the series?

Before the fiddlers have fled,

Before they ask us to pay the bill,

And while we still have the chance,

Let’s face the music and dance.

As his career as a writer is closing and his life is nearing its end — as it is coming time to “pay the bill” — McBain is choosing music and dance.

Not only for himself.  “Let’s face the music and dance” is an offer to the reader to join him in this final turn around the dance floor.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.14.26