Book review: “Hark!” by Ed McBain

It’s a wedding — actually, it’s two weddings — and everyone’s having a great time, laughing and dancing and smiling — except Steve Carella.

He felt no joy.

This is in Carella’s home city, the city where he was born and where he works as a detective in the squadroom of the 87^th Precinct, the subject of what became 55 novels by Ed McBain over the course of a half century.

This is in the 54^th of those novels, called Hark! and published in 2004, a book that is focused on the efforts of the mastermind criminal known as the Deaf Man to pull off a million-dollar heist while bedeviling Carella and the other squadroom cops.

He does this with Shakespearean quotes and lots of word play, using anagrams and palindromes. He’s distracting the cops and entertaining himself and taunting Carella and the others who are caught up in all the literary confusion.

 

These weddings

Except Steve also has these weddings — to plan, to pay for and, finally, to attend.

Both are second marriages. His mother Louise is marrying Luigi Fontero, a businessman from Italy where she will soon move, and his sister Angela is marrying Henry Lowell, the assistant prosecutor who botched the prosecution of the guy who killed Carella’s father in a robbery.

…[He] watched dry-eyed as Luigi slipped the wedding band onto his mother’s hand and kissed his bride, Carella’s mother…

…and watched dry-eyed as the man who’d allowed his father’s killer to walk sealed [his marriage to Angela] with a golden circlet and a chaste kiss…

 

Joyless

And, then, Carella is at the reception, working the phone back to the station to help the other cops try to figure out what the Deaf Man was going to do — they know it’s coming that day — and feeling how joyless the weddings had been for him.

He thought, My father should still be alive. But of course, his father was dead.

Luigi Fontero stopped in the doorway to the banquet hall’s small office, looked in, puzzled, and then went to the desk, and came around it, and put his hand on Carella’s shoulder.

“Steve?” he said, “Ma che cosa? What’s the matter?”

Carella looked up into his face.

“Figlio mio,” Luigi said. “My son. Dica mi. Tell me.”

And Carella said, “I miss him so much,” and threw himself into Luigi’s arms, and began sobbing again.

 

Randy and stupid

The scene is the high point of McBain’s police procedural novel, a genre that he invented back in the 1950s. It is a genre that stresses the details of the investigative process, and those are on high display in Hark!  The detectives question witnesses and run scientific tests. They follow leads and track suspects.

And one of them, Bert Kling, tracks his girlfriend because he fears she’s having an affair.

Throughout Hark! the detectives are doing their jobs, but they’re also falling in and out of love.  In the novel, they’re a randy bunch, but also stupid. At least, Kling is stupid, ruining a good thing with a beautiful, smart, sexy woman.

The genre McBain created enables readers to feel they are part of the investigation, part of the grit and legwork and confusion and sudden brainstorms.

Even more important, however, for the genre’s readers is McBain’s ability to bring his cops to life as human beings with human feelings and failings and wonders and all that’s involved in the everyday work of breathing. They not only know how these cops act as investigators but also as people.

 

“A college in the Midwest”

And some of the detectives — at least in some areas of life — aren’t exactly the brightest of lights.

Such as when the Deaf Man mentions in one of his myriad notes to the cops Nostradamus, the sixteenth century astrologer known for his book of predictions of events far in the future.

“Another anagram, right?” Genero said.

“Wrong,” Parker said. “Nostra Damus is a college in the Midwest.

 

 

A stroll down Ho Alley

Yet, the detectives, as macho as they can be at times — and as stupid — can also be sentimental and misty-eyed, such as Fat Ollie Weeks is as he strolls down Ho Alley.

Ollie, a detective for the nearby 88^th Precinct, is kind of in love with a pretty Hispanic cop so he has no thought to sample the wares of the ladies of the night along this particularly infamous street — even though he used to do so on a fairly regular basis.

Still, he is a guy, and most of these young women seem to be parading in their underwear or wearing skirts cut high on their thighs or walking about in sexy stiletto-heel boots.

If you were a red-blooded American male, how could you not get excited?

Especially when these girls reeked of everything forbidden…He meant the very concept of Anything Goes. In a society becoming more and more restrictive, here on this five-block stretch of turf, everything was permitted. Anything imagined by the Great Whores of Babylon had been refined to perfection over the centuries and was now for sale in this outdoor bazaar…

 

An earlier wedding

In a way, holy matrimony seems to be the opposite of a place like Ho Alley and of any sort of criminal activity, since, in the ceremony, the two partners are lawfully and legally wed.

Nonetheless, Carella has found it hard to keep his family affairs away from his police business. Witness his calls back to the squadroom about the Deaf Man during this double marriage of his mother and his sister.

Oddly, years earlier on the day of Angela’s first marriage to the shy and affable Tommy Giordano, Carella and the 87^th Precinct cops had to investigate and block several attempts on Tony’s life.  That story is told in ‘Til Death, published in 1959, the ninth novel in McBain’s series.

 

“Mysterious ways of womanhood”

In the lead-up to her second wedding, Angela knows that her older brother Steve is less than enamored at the idea of their mother remarrying and of her being wed to the guy who failed to convict their father’s killer.

They spar over the phone as Carella is sitting at his desk in the squadroom. And, when Steve says he loves both his mother and his sister, Angela responds:

“Do you really?” Angela asked. “Love us both”

“With all my heart,” he said.

And then he reminds her that he used to call her “Slip” because he didn’t think a thirteen-year-old girl should be wearing cotton slips.

“You gave me an inferiority complex.”

“I gave you an insight into the mysterious ways of womanhood.”

“Yeah, bullshit,” Angela said, but he could swear she was smiling.

Hark! was one of the last 87^th Precinct novels that McBain wrote before his death in 2005, a year after the book was published.

And it’s a worthy sibling of the fifty-three that came before it, and the one that came after. It’s a human story, humanely told.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.20.26