Book review: “The Heckler” by Ed McBain

Wesley Gannley and Miss Finchley are bit players in Ed McBain’s The Heckler, published in 1960 as the twelfth novel in his series of police procedurals focusing on the 87^th Precinct in an unnamed city, very much like New York.

Yet, near the climax of the book, they have a delicious cameo that is emblematic of McBain’s storytelling elan.

Gannley is the manager of the Mercantile Trust Company, the bank that is being targeted by a criminal mastermind known only as the Deaf Man. Closing time is near, and, as he walks past Miss Finchley who is bending over a stack of canceled checks, he has the urge to pinch her on the buttocks.

This butt-pinching impulse, something totally improper today, occurs to several men at various times in the novel, and, although none gives in to the desire, it was back then, sixty-five years ago, at least semi-acceptable.

Times change, and The Heckler is filled with examples of that — long distance calls, gang rumbles, five-and-tens, water towers on the tops of buildings and cigarette girls at night clubs.

 

“Practically naked”

But, back to the two bit players — Miss Finchley turns toward Gannley:

She was hearing a white silk blouse, and the top button had come unfastened and he could see the delicate lace of her lingerie showing where the cream-white flesh ended.

They have a short bank-related conversation while Gannley considers asking her on a date but decides to wait.

Recklessly, he said, “You’d better button your blouse, Miss Finchley.”

Her hand fluttered up to the wayward button. “Oh, my,” she said. “I’m practically naked, aren’t I?” and she buttoned the blouse quickly without the faintest trace of a blush.

The button, it’s clear, wasn’t unbuttoned by mistake. It was a subtle form of flirting as was her maybe-not-so-subtle “practically naked” comment. And, sure enough, when the bank closes a short while later, the teller and her boss go off down the rain-drenched street under his umbrella.

Such scenes are what make McBain’s 87^th Precinct series so richly enjoyable.  Yes, there are crimes that occur that the detectives have to solve, but no one in a McBain novel is simply a way to get from Point A to Point B in the plot.

Each has human quirks and yearnings, and the novel isn’t just the puzzle of how to catch the bad guys but just as much about how all the human beings on McBain’s pages, as in life, interact.

 

“A threat equal to the Chicago fire”

Miss Finchley and her boss do help move the plot of The Heckler along since their departure and that of the bank’s security guard are the signal for the Deaf Man and his crew to go forward with their plan to steal the $2,353,420.74 in the bank’s vault, the equivalent of $25.5 million today.

His scheme which involves a great number of distractions in the form of fires and explosions results in a huge amount of chaos that

would grow into a threat to the very city itself, a threat to equal the Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake, a threat which — when all was said and done — totaled billions of dollars in loss and almost razed to the ground one of the finest ports in the United States.

Indeed, so chaotic and so numerous were the fires and explosions in the south side of the precinct that the residents

did not know what the hell was happening.  Their first guess was that the Russians were coming…Some of the more exotic-minded citizens speculated upon an invasion from Mars…

 

“The button in my ear”

In his brilliance, the Deaf Man is a true pain in the ass to the cops of the precinct — he nearly kills Steve Carella, the central figure in the squad room — and the city. And his appearance in The Heckler won’t be his last.

In a kind of cosmic irony, the Deaf Man will become the nemesis of Carella, who is married to the love of his life and the mother of their twins, Teddy, who is a deaf mute.

Five more times over the next forty-plus years, the Deaf Man will show up to bedevil the cops — in Fuzz (1968), Let’s Hear it for the Deaf Man (1972), Eight Black Horses (1985), Mischief (1993), and Hark! (2004), the fifty-third of McBain’s fifty-five 87^th Precinct books.

But is the blond-haired Deaf Man really who he seems?  Standing in a costume store, he can foresee that, later, after the caper, the police will interview the owner about the man who rented the clothes. And he thinks to himself:

And when they get to you, you will of course describe me.

The deaf man grinned.

But is my hair really blond, Mr. McDouglas? Or it is bleached especially for this jolly little caper? And am I really hard of hearing? Or is the button in my ear a further device to confuse identification?

He’s talking to himself, but he also talking in a way to the cops. And he’s talking to the reader.

 

People

It’s true that, here and there in The Heckler, references to old ways of doing things — whether calling long distance or pinching or not pinching a bottom — date the novel, but, because of McBain’s verve as a writer and as a student of humanity, the book still works as well as it ever did.

Police procedures have changed a lot since 1960, but people are still people.

And the people in The Heckler are people.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.5.25