Book review: “Lady, Lady, I Did It!” by Ed McBain

The title of Ed McBain’s 14^th novel about the detectives of the 87^th Precinct in a fictional city very much like New York seems almost silly or grotesquely comic.

After all, McBain’s detectives spend much of their time investigating murders and other crimes of violence, and the book’s title — Lady, Lady, I Did It! — sounds like something no killer would say. Or, if a killer were to say it, he would seem to be looney in some way.

But the title has to do with a child’s game, as the reader learns midway through the 1961 novel:

Further up the street Kling saw three pint-sized conspirators, two boys and a girl, rush up to a doorway on street level, glance around furtively, ring the bell, and then rush across the street to the opposite side. As he passed the doorway, the door opened and a housewife peered out inquisitively. From across the street the three children began chanting, “Lady, lady, I did it; lady, lady, I did it; lady, lady, I did it; lady, lady, I did it…”

The title throws the reader off because the novel isn’t about a looney killer or a child’s game, for that matter.

Lady, Lady, I Did It! deals with serious stuff — a botched abortion, a casual anti-Semite, the mass murder of four people in a bookstore, the rape of a teenager, the beating of a cop, the beating of a suspect and a killing that hits home directly and sorrowfully for the 87^th Precinct guys.

 

A sweet start

It starts out sweet enough on a warm Friday afternoon in October with Detective Bert Kling taking a phone call from his fiancé Claire Townsend, a social work graduate student.

“Will you guys please shut up?” Kling said. Into the phone, he said, “Oh, the usual. The clowns are at it again.”

Claire Townsend, on the other end of the line, said, “Tell them to stop kibitzing. Tell them we’re in love.”

Claire jokes that, tonight, when she gets to Bert’s apartment, she’ll be wearing a disguise to trick his landlady, and she describes her clothing and adds that she’ll be wearing a new bra called Abundance.

“O.K. ‘Bye, doll.”

“Abundance,” she whispered, and she hung up. Kling put the receiver back into the cradle.

 

“A bright red”

A short time later, Kling is one of two detectives who rush to the bookstore where three people are already dead and a fourth is dying.

One of the dead is a woman in a red blouse who is surrounded by the books she’d been carrying when shot. Kling kneels beside her.

He saw suddenly that the blouse was not a red blouse at all. A corner that had pulled free from the black skirt showed white. There were two enormous holes in the girl’s side, and the blood had poured steadily from those wounds, staining the white blouse a bright red.

Kling lifts a book that had fallen on her face. “Oh my Jesus Christ!” he says.

There was something in his voice which caused Steve Carella [the other detective] to run toward the back of the shop immediately. And then he heard Kling’s cry, a single sharp anguished cry that pierced the dust-filled, cordite-stinking air of the shop.

“Claire!”

 

202 policemen

With that, the killing of four people in a bookstore becomes a particularly important and personal case for the cops of the 87^th Precinct because “Kling was a policeman” and every other cop knew “he was part of the club, and you didn’t go around hurting club members or the people they loved.”

They didn’t call it The Bookstore Case, or The Claire Townsend Case, or the Massacre Case, or anything of that sort. It was The Kling Case. From the moment they started to the moment their day ended, they were actively at work on it, listening, watching, waiting.

Although only four men were officially assigned to the case, the man who’d done that bookshop killing had two hundred and two policemen looking for it.

 

“I did it”

The case, though, moves slowly, with the investigation extending into November. But, eventually, the title makes sense.

The rapist, confronted with evidence, admits “I did it.”

The abortionist, outmaneuvered by detectives, admits “I did it.”

And so does the killer of Claire Townsend and the other three people…after Bert Kling beats him bloody.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.5.26