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Cop Hater and The Mugger by Ed McBain (1956)

When I come to think of it, I don't read a lot of police procedurals, but I've heard great things about Ed McBain's '87th Precinct' novels; so, when I saw this omnibus of the first two in a discount bookshop, I thought I'd give it a go. And... well, I'm not sure. McBain's prose (especially his descriptive passages) can be excellent; it's the mysteries themselves that I'm undecided about.

The titles of the two novels sum up their plots: in the first, someone is shooting officers of the 87th Precinct dead; in the second, a purse-snatcher is at large -- one who goes too far, leaving a woman dead. The solutions to these mysteries are fine; it's just that they seemed to me to be solved almost entirely in the last few pages... Reading that back, it sounds a really naive complaint (because aren't most mysteries like that?); but that was my reaction when I'd finished -- that one minute we were nowhere near cracking the case, and the next minute it was all solved, without enough sense of build-up. Perhaps I'm not appreciating how the police procedural genre works; perhaps the later 87th Precinct novels (of which there are over fifty) are different -- I don't know.

One thing that did strike me about these novels was how contemporary they seemed. I've read two other books this year that date from the 1950s (I am Legend and The Broken Sword); and I didn't have to keep reminding myself that they were fifty years old, as I did with these books of McBain's. Not that I could mistake them for contemporary works -- things like the street slang used made sure of that -- but there was often just a little jarring moment of realisation all the same. Since McBain continued to write 87th Precinct novels into the present decade, I'm curious to know whether the setting remained in the 1950s, or whether it mirrored the passing of time.

1. Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (1980). My reading year got off to a good start with this piece of SF set in a future where reading has been banned (and, subsquently, largely forgotten), robots run everything, and the vast majority of humans drift through a pointless existence in a drugged haze, unless they decide to immolate themselves. The novel follows Spofforth, the world's most advanced robot, whose programming will not allow him to do the one thing he most wants, which is to end his life; Bradley, the man who arrives at Spofforth's university having taught himself to read; and Mary Lou, the woman whom Bradley teaches to read -- which, unfortunately for him, is illegal... This is not a flashy, noisy book, but it is a powerful examination of the dangers of losing one's connection to other people and history; and a hymn to literacy and the written word.

2. I am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954). A plague has turned everyone into vampires -- everyone, that is, except Robert Neville, who struggles to survive alone and to understand the cause of what happened. It's a good few years since I read this the first time; I re-read it now for the next meeting of my reading group, and got much more out of it this time around. It's quite interesting to read it just after Mockingbird, and to see what the two books share: both are evocatively written, for one thing; but, more than that, they pose difficult moral questions by placing their protagonists in extreme situations and interrogating their actions.

This comes particularly to light when I compare Matheson's novel to the recent film of I am Legend, which I saw a few days before reading the book.  The Robert Neville played by Will Smith is much more of a straight-ahead 'hero' -- yes, he does go through the emotional and moral wringer, but he pays his dues in the end; and he's not under the same level of duress as the book's Neville, who is constantly wrestling with his conscience, and is probably not someone you'd ever want to meet, even under more normal circumstances. The movie version is fine, it works well enough for what it is; but it really tells a different story from the novel, and I think the latter is more complex and satisfying.

3. Murky Depths, issue 0 (2007). Short 'promo issue' of a new magazine of 'graphically dark speculative fiction' whose main USP is that it includes comic strips alongside the more usual prose and poetry. Perhaps they tried to squeeze too much in, but I found the contents of this issue... just okay. I think the main problem is that they all appear to be 'one trick' pieces: the comic strips both lean heavily on their 'punchlines'; Lavie Tidhar's fake submission guidelines are all about the twist on that format; and Matt Wallace's tale of two bounty hunters has plenty of linguistic verve, but not so much in the way of a plot. Now, don't get me wrong: all these stories do work as far as they go -- for example, Tidhar's spoof is funny, and Wallace's prose is vivid (though pretty gory -- be warned if that's not your kind of thing) -- they just don't aim far enough for my liking. Still, I also have a copy of the (much longer) first issue proper of Murky Depths, and I'm sure I'll be reading that in due course.