Book review: “King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain

Steve Carella is the most gentlemanly of detectives, and, in the squad room of the 87^th precinct, he is respected by his peers.

But, after witnessing Douglas King refuse numerous times to provide the $500,000 ransom to free the eight-year-old son of his chauffeur Charles Reynolds, after watching the distraught father get down on his hands and knees to beg and hearing King reply only, “Could you leave me alone?” — after witnessing all of that, Carella says to King:

“Does it make you feel like a big turd, Mr. King?”

“Shut up!”

“It should.  Because that’s what you are.”

“Goddamnit, Carella, I don’t have to listen to —”

“Oh, got to hell, Mr. King,” Carella said. “Just go to hell.”

The thing is, a couple of kidnappers came to King’s fancy neighborhood to kidnap his eight-year-old son Bobby but, by mistake, took the boy’s good friend Jeff instead.  Now the kidnappers — Sy Barnard and Eddie Folsom — have decided to demand the money from King anyway.

But King, who is in the middle of a big move to gain control of the shoe company where he has worked since he was in the mail room, needs all the money he has, and then some.  And he won’t pay.

And is looking like a zero.  Like a loser.  Like a turd.

 

Clean hands

Even his wife Diane thinks so.  She tries to argue with him, saying Jeff was only taken because the kidnappers thought they were taking Bobby.

“Yes, but they didn’t take him, did they?  They goofed.  They took Jeff.”  King paused. 

“Honey, when I was in the service and the guy standing next to me got killed, I didn’t feel responsible for his death.  I was simply tickled to death the bullet hadn’t clipped me.  I felt no guilt and no responsibility.  I hadn’t fired the rifle that discharged the bullet that killed him. 

“My hands were clean.  And they’re clean now.”

 

“Think of himself as a bad guy?”

King’s Ransom, Ed McBain’s 10^th book in his series centered on the detectives of the 87^th Precinct in a city very much like New York, tells the usual story of crime and investigation with a lot of police personality and cop techniques along the way.

But the novel, published in 1959, also toys with the idea of responsibility, with the idea of good guys and bad guys.

For instance, late in the book, Folsom’s wife Kathy is trying to keep Jeff warm and fed and trying to get her head around this kidnapping.  Until the two men showed up at the secluded farmhouse with the boy, she’d known nothing about any kidnapping.

Eddie Folsom, in the eyes of Kathy Folsom, his wife, was not a crook.  It is probably difficult to understand that because the good-guy-bad-guy concept is a part of our heredity, drummed into our minds together with the knight-on-a-white-charger ideal, and the only-bad-girls-lay taboo, and the slit-dresses-are-sexy fetish.

There are good guys and bad guys, damnit, we all know that.  Sure.  But does the bad guy ever think of himself as a bad guy?

Kathy knew Eddie as a man and loved him as a man and thought of him as a man who earned his living as a thief.  But that didn’t make him a crook, right?

Now, though, with the kidnapping, Kathy is beginning to think of him as a crook.

 

A kind of nobility

As the novel unfolds, questions like this are raised by McBain, and, in the final pages, the good-guy-bad-guy is blown to kingdom come.

An obvious good guy, one of the cops, comes across as a coarse, buffoonish, insensitive lummox who gets under everyone’s skin. An obvious bad guy tackles Sy to enable his arrest.  Jeff, the victim, takes sides with Kathy and Eddie.  And Sy, in custody, displays a kind of nobility.

It all leaves Steve Carella shaking his head.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.24.24