The Hecklerby Ed McBain
Rating: ★★★½
Series: 87th Precinct #12
Publication Date: January 1, 1960
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 288
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime
"There are crazy people all over, you know that, don't you?" Spring was intoxicating the city air, but the harassing anonymous telephone calls planting seeds of fear around town were no April Fool's joke. Crank calls and crackpot threats reported to the 87th Precinct by a respected businessman were not exactly top priority for detectives Carella and Meyer -- until a brutal homicide hits the papers. Connections are getting made fast and furious, and there's a buzz in the air about the Deaf Man, a brilliant criminal mastermind. Now, the 87th Precinct is buying time to reveal the voice on the other end of the line -- as the level of danger rises from a whisper to a scream....
The 87th Precinct series spanned nearly 50 years. The first book, Cop Hater, was published in 1956; the 55th, and final, book, Fiddlers, was published in 2005, after the death of the author at age 78.
A few years ago, the bulk of the series went on sale in its ebook format for $.99 each and I bought most of them. At this point, most of them are available on the KU library, so I’ve been able to borrow the ones that weren’t on sale for free. This is book 12, and was published in 1960’s. If you’re counting, that means that McBain published 12 books in 4 years, which is a pretty remarkable pace, even for books that tend to be around 250 pages.
I decided to read this series, in part, because I was interested in how an author might treat the changes in policing in real time. In my real life, I am a retired prosecutor. Between my first year as a new Deputy D.A., in 1996, and the year I retired, almost 28 years later, in 2023, policing, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system underwent massive changes. Those massive changes were on the heels of earlier, even more massive changes. The forensic sciences, crime scene investigative tools, recording and photography, the introduction of women into both policing and the legal field, and changes to the legal landscape make the policing of 1956 – or 1960 – almost unrecognizable to what we do today.
I obviously wanted to use one of the books in this series for my Century of Crime project. My plan for the project is to limit myself to one book per series, so I’m filling 1960, but will continue to read the series into the future.
As to this book, it’s a fun one. It’s my understanding from my research that the primary antagonist introduced in The Heckler, the Deaf Man, continues to appear off and on until the end. There is also a fun little reference to the Sherlock Holmes canon and the story “The Redheaded League,” that provides some structure to the mystery.
Nonetheless, this is a book that was very clearly written by a man and published in 1960. Women are purely decorative and substantively irrelevant. There are no women in the squadroom. If a woman is mentioned at all, it is either as a wife or as a sexual object. I’m hoping very much to see this change over the course of the series.