Book review: “See Them Die” by Ed McBain

By chapter 16 of Ed McBain’s 1960 novel See Them Die, the reader has gotten deeply invested in the book’s characters, particularly China, a sweet, beautiful, happy nineteen-year-old, and Jeff, the callow, wistful twenty-two-year-old U.S. Navy sailor.

They meet cute.

Jeff is from Fletcher, Colorado, and, sobering up in a luncheonette after a night of drinking, he’s out of his element on a Sunday morning in this Puerto Rican neighborhood in the huge city that is the subject of McBain’s 87^th Precinct novels.  He sees China step out of La Gallina, a bar/whorehouse where she’s a cook, and he’s struck by her soft beauty, and he gets the wrong idea.

After a bit of the usual boy-meets-girl talk, he says, “Well, let’s go to bed.”

China realizes what’s going on, but she finds this gawky sailor attractive in his innocent way, and the two flirt. She has to go home to change for 11:30 Mass. He offers to go to church with her, but she says, No, let’s meet afterward here at the luncheonette at noon. They have a date.

By the start of chapter 16, on page 143 of a 157-page book, the reader wants this romance of two kids in a rough world to work, and McBain addresses that….

 

“Two will die”

But, first, let me explain that the mystery in See Them Die has to do with the book’s opening scene. McBain describes this very hot July Sunday and this very rundown street in a rundown neighborhood at 8:40 in the morning and adds:

Two people will die on this street today.

The mystery is who will die, and McBain trots out a crowd of characters. There are the detectives of the 87^th Precinct, of course, but they play a small role in the story until the end. There’s a thirty-five-year-old thug named Pepe Miranda who severely wounded an old woman when he robbed her and then escaped a police arrest.

There are China and Jeff. There are the Latin Purples, a would-be gang led by seventeen-year-old Zip and made up of three underlings, Sixto, Papa and Cooch. Zip wants to make the gang’s name so he develops a plan to murder another teen, Alfredo Gomez, on the steps of the church after the 11:30 Mass.

Alfredo tells his mother he has to go to Mass even with the threat from Zip because he will be branded a coward for staying home. The mother asks Frankie Hernandez, a native of the community and an 87^th Precinct detective, to come to their apartment to reason with Alfredo.

There is Luis Arandez, the luncheonette owner, and Frederick Block, a born salesman caught in a traffic jam when the cops corner Pepe Miranda, and two employees of La Gallina, Marge and Mary who, as the term goes, are dressed to kill and make no pretenses about their occupation

The girls were not the bashful type. They moved with a fluidity of breast, hip, thigh and leg that aided the dresses in their task of nonconcealment.

There are two teen girls who make eyes at Zip and his boys, Elena and Juana, and two young boys, Chico, eight, and Estaban, nine, who want to be Latin Purples when they get older, and two members of an actual gang from a nearby neighborhood, the Royal Guardians, Tommy and Li’l Killer.

And, throughout See Them Die, the reader is wondering who of these characters will die.

And also how the many subplots will develop: Will Alfredo go to Mass? Will Pepe escape again? Will Frederick Block accept Marie’s offer? And will the flirting of China and Jeff bear fruit in a romance?

Like a claustrophobic stage play

I explain all this in order to warn the reader that, in my following remarks, I will be hinting at the answers to some of those questions or, full out, giving the answer away.

The action of the novel takes place in a four-hour period at a small corner in the big city, and See Them Die has the feel of a claustrophobic stage play in which, as the story unfolds, a host of actors move on and off the stage and the audience sits closer and closer to the edge of their seats.

So, if you’re planning to read the book, you might want to stop here in order to be able to fully experience the story’s tension.

 

God talk

It’s a rare crime/mystery novel that talks about God, but that’s what McBain does at the start of Chapter 16 — remember, that’s where this review started — by writing:

If you’re God, you’ve got all these little things to take care of, you see. Oh, not the business of getting the sun to rise on time, or the stars to come out. And not riding herd on the seasons so that they arrive when they’re supposed to, and things like that. Those are the big things, and the big things almost take care of themselves.

It’s those damn little things that get so bothersome. And if you’re God, you can’t just ignore them, you know. You can, of course, move in mysterious ways your wonders to perform. This means that you can leave a few loose ends here and there and nobody will question them because you are, after all, God.

 

“You ought to work a thing out”

McBain continues in this vein, suggesting that, with so much to worry about, nobody’s going to complain if there’s a little sloppiness here and there. Nonetheless, McBain goes to bat for his readers who don’t yet know what he knows — what’s going to happen (or not happen) between Jeff and China.

Only sometimes, no offense meant, you ought to work a thing out and not just let it happen, you know? Like take that Puerto Rican girl and that sailor, take them for example. Now, being God, you could fix them up real fine, couldn’t you?…

He looks at her, and she looks at him, and their eyes lock, and slowly they walk across the street to each other…

How’s that God?

That’s great.

But that isn’t the way it happened.

 

The two who die

Okay, but, at least, neither Jeff nor China were among the two people who die on this Sunday.

One is Frankie Hernandez, shot to death by Pepe on the fire escape when he tries to sneak up on the apartment where the fugitive is hiding.

The other is Pepe who is shot a dozen times on the street in front of the building when he tries to flee;

The white undershirt seemed to sprout blood like poppies in an instant. His own gun kept bucking in his hand, but there was blood dripping down his face and into his eyes, and he just fired blindly and sort of groped out toward the crowd as if he was reaching for salvation and didn’t know whose face held it.

Again, McBain uses a word here that doesn’t often appear in a crime/mystery novel, “salvation.”

At this point, the reader knows Pepe as a human being because, in the few minutes before this, he’d shown himself vulnerable and as confused as any other human being when he was talking to the man whom he thought was a priest but was, in fact, a cop in a cassock.

 

“Like a Christ who had climbed down from the cross”

Pepe comes face-to-face with Andy Parker, an 87^th Precinct detective who is always angry and afraid:

Miranda’s gun clicked empty, and he looked at Parker in supplication, blood dripping into his eyes and bubbling out of his mouth, the mouth open, the hands limp now, the head twisted to one side like a Christ who had climbed down from the cross.

“Give me a break,” Miranda whispered.

And Parker fired.

McBain wrote 52 books about the 87^th Precinct detectives. They’re hugely entertaining and endlessly fascinating, but there is a variation in their quality. Some are good and fun, and others are very good.

With its crowd of characters, with its claustrophobic suspense, with its sweet flirtation of Jeff and China, with its God talk, with its references to salvation, with its ability to get the reader to see that, in some way, Pepe is like Jesus, See Them Die is a cut above the vast majority of the 87^th Precinct books.

It’s a revelation.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.16.25