The Frumious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
(Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky)

Ed McBain set up the plot of The Frumious Bandersnatch, the 53rd installment of his monumental 87th Precinct series, during a record launch party to promote Bandersnatch, the debut album of a young singer, Tamar Valparaiso. A recording industry mogul is hoping to transform Tamar into a new pop-music idol and to make millions off her success. The elaborate party is a scene for reenactment of a music video that combines the lyrics of Lewis Carroll's famous poem, sung by Tamar, with an enthralling dance number.

However, it turns out that someone else has quite different plans related to the party. The dance is brutally interrupted, when it is about to reach its climax:

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the ...
Don't nobody [...] move!'
Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat were coming down the wide mahogany staircase."

Mayhem ensues. I believe the readers will like the vivid writing in the entire party scene, quite lengthy but well worth it, and particularly the description of the dance.

The dramatic events during the party become instant fodder for various TV talk shows:

"[...]two guests tonight were at opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum in that one of them was a minister who represented a Christian Right activist organization that called itself the 'Citizens for Values Coalition,' [...] and the other was a homosexual who was speaking for a group that called itself 'Priapus Perpetual,' [...]

Steve Carella handles the case for the 87th Precinct until the investigation is taken over by FBI. They request Carella to remain on the case, which causes some tension between him and one of the FBI agents, whom the detective knew during their common time spent at the police academy. The plot is relatively engrossing and it turns considerably darker toward the end of the story.

The other thread in the novel portrays the romance between Detective Ollie Weeks and Patricia Gomez, a Latina detective. As much as I like the author's new emphasis (see Fat Ollie's Book ) on the bigoted and misogynist cop (after all, how long can one live with saintly characters like Carella), I don't find the thread particularly interesting, and the once amazing fact that Detective Weeks is human has lost its novelty.

Overall, I find the book quite readable and am recommending it.

Three stars

[With this review I have completed my challenge of reading (and reviewing) 60 books in 2021. Woohoo!!!]

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Pale Kings And Princes by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" I loved the way her calf tapered to her ankle. I loved the way she chewed slightly on her lower lip as she decided which blouse to put on top. Watching her was timeless. Sound seemed to stop. Light seemed clearer. "

There may be several reasons for readers to like Pale Kings and Princes (1987), Robert B. Parker's 14th installment of his Spenser series. Spenser's love for Susan would be one of them. Hawk's character would be another. For some readers also the occasionally witty writing and some clever repartees. I don't believe anyone would enjoy the novel for its silly premise of the plot that there exists a small town in Massachusetts, which is a center of a big cocaine operation, and most people in town, including the entire police force, are participants in the conspiracy. After all, we know that no conspiracy that involves more than a handful of people is feasible. Oh wait... I forgot...

Anyway, let's recap the setup of the plot. The publisher of a regional paper hires Spenser to find out who killed a young reporter who had been investigating the cocaine operation. Naturally, the local police are all on the take, so they will not give Spenser any help. But don't worry: the author conjures a clever, ambitious, and basically honest state trooper, who will help Spenser find the truth, after two more people are killed. There is also superhuman Hawk:

"'We stay here,' Hawk said, 'we gonna have to shoot up a mess of Wheaton cops.'
'I know,' Susan said.
'There ain't but maybe fifty of them,' Hawk said.
'But then all the other cops in the world will be on our case,' I said.
'We may run out of ammunition,' Hawk said."

The plot culminates in a silly shootout, which inspired me to consider an alternative title for the novel, Pale Plot and Climax.

Despite the silly concept of a massive conspiracy and all the clichés, I almost enjoyed reading the novel, relishing wittyish passages like:

"'Tired?' Susan said.
'And hungry and in the throes of caffeine withdrawal, and sexually unrequited for six days,' I said.
'There are remedies to all those problems,' Susan said. 'Trust me, I have a Ph.D.'
'From Harvard too,' I said."

Two-and-a-quarter stars.


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The Big Bad City by Ed McBain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"First thing you had to understand about this city was that it was big. [...] This city was dangerous too. [...] Bad things happened in this city every hour of the day or night, and they happened all over the city. [...] In this city, things were happening all the time, all over the place, and you didn't have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind."

August in the big city. Oppressive heat despite the late hour. Chaos in the 87th Precinct house. An altercation between two suspects in custody results in one of them getting wounded. The detectives are forced to shoot at the attacker. At the same time, nine handcuffed basketball players are led into the precinct house - the tenth has been killed, and all nine are the suspects.

The body of a strangled young woman is found in a city park. Detectives Carella and Brown lead the investigation. Detectives Meyer and Kling are trying to find the perpetrator in a string of residential burglaries. Sonny, a small criminal, who had killed Carella's father during a robbery ( Widows), is out of prison early. He plans to kill Carella so the detective does not kill him in the act of revenge. The three main story lines of the novel are thus set up.

While it turns out that the strangled young woman was a nun some details soon discovered seem incompatible with the finding. I don't usually pay much attention to the plot, but I have to admit that this story line is captivating, superbly paced and structured, and its denouement is quite logical and plausible, unlike the silly artificial twists and turns in most crime novels. Furthermore, there is yet another story nested within this plot thread.

The perpetrator of residential thefts is known as Cookie Boy in the media because of his "signature" - in the burglarized apartments he leaves a box of cookies he baked himself. Yet his newest burglary does not go as planned and the reader gets a fascinating story within a story about how things go monstrously wrong.

Carella is turning 40, which may bring the reader to realize that the 87th Precinct series time runs much slower than in the real world. Carella was in his late twenties in 1956, when the first novel in the series ( Cop Hater) was published, so it took him 43 years to age about 10 years.

In my view, Big Bad City (1999) is a very good novel, one of the best installments in the series!

Four stars.


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Taming a Sea-Horse by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] maybe I had seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.
I called Susan at home.
'I'm sitting in my office with only one light on,' I said, 'and I'm quoting Prufrock to myself.'
'My God,' she said, 'tell me about it."

In Taming a Sea-Horse (1986), the 13th installment of the Spenser series, Robert B. Parker relies on character continuity to set up the plot. Patricia Utley, the owner of a call-girl business, whom we first met in Mortal Stakes, hires Spenser to find April Kyle (see Ceremony), who disappeared from her stable of "girls." When Spenser talks with April, she seems to be in love with a certain Robert Rambeaux, a Juilliard music student. Rambeaux stupidly tries to outmacho Spenser, and our hero needs to beat him up a little. I appreciate the author's pun of getting a Rambo beaten up. Yet the entire Rambeaux episode reads like a fragment of a 1940s noir.

The plot is typically implausible and quite silly, but at least Spenser does not have all those governmental agencies helping him this time around. There is a lot about the sex business and Spenser uses his muscles, stamina, and boxing training to do his trademark righteous things. The plot even takes him to the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.

With Susan Silverman permanently back with Spenser, the reader can enjoy their banter:

"'Dr. Silverman,' I said [...] 'You are a highly educated Jewish psychotherapist approaching middle years. And here, in this sophisticated island hideaway, I find you talking dirty and giggling like an oversexed teenage shiksa.'
'Talk to me, baby,' Susan murmured, 'whisper in my ear'"

For me, the best thing about the novel is not the silly plot or the series of beatings but the reference to T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I had not known that poem, and I am thankful to Mr. Parker for getting me to read it!

Two stars.

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Mischief by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] slain by the person the newspapers were currently calling the Sprayer Slayer. In America, everything needed a title because everything was a miniseries concocted for the enjoyment of the populace."

A good entry in Ed McBain's monumental saga of the 87th Precinct! Like in several previous novels, Mischief (1993), the 45th title in the series, has multiple parallel storylines that do not intersect, other than through the characters of the detectives.

A blurb on the cover screams "The Deaf Man Returns," and indeed one of the parallel threads is the story of the Deaf Man, the archnemesis of the 87th Precinct cops. As usual, the Deaf Man (the author has fun inventing the aliases - one of them used here is Harry Gimperde, a pun based on the criminal mastermind's impairment) is planning to cause a major calamity. And, as usual, Steve Carella is the Deaf Man's main target.

The thread that opens the novel deals with serial murders of graffiti writers:

"He shot the boy one more time, in the chest this time, and then he reached down to pick up the can in his gloved hand, and pressed the button on top of the can, and squirted red paint all over the boy's face oozing blood, his chest oozing blood, red paint and red blood mingling [...]"

It is a complex plot thread, with quite surprising twists and turns.

Another storyline features "Granny dumping" - leaving elderly people, who are unable to care for themselves and are too burdensome to care for, in public places, such as in front of hospitals or nursing homes. I hope that in real life police treat these cruel acts with the same seriousness as the 87th Precinct detectives do.

We also have the storyline of a rap group preparing for a concert - that thread is connected to one of the previous stories. The reader will also find two interesting vignettes: one featuring Teddy Carella (the detective's wife) engaged in an act of social activism, and the other about a dramatic hostage situation and Eileen Burke's role in direct negotiations with the hostage taker.

From the plot point of view, the novel culminates with a dramatic situation and its rather unexpected resolution. However, to me, the strongest ending moment comes when the author recites a litany of lofty ideals that are said to have inspired the birth of the U.S. of America:

"In this land of the free and home of the brave, men and women of every religion and creed would loudly sing the praises of freedom while reaping all those amber waves of grain. [...] Men and women would come to respect each other's customs and beliefs while simultaneously merging into a strong single tribe with a strong single voice [...] Here in America, the separate parts would at last become the whole, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Quite biting and bitter sarcasm, and let's not forget that 28 years ago, when the novel was written, the divisions in the American society were likely not as deep as they are now.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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A Catskill Eagle by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'This is the first time my ass may depend on whether Freud was right.'
'And Sophocles,' Susan said.
'Him too.'"

Continuing a mad rush to complete my 2021 challenge of 60 books - now five left for 19 days - I read only "easy" books, ones that do not require much thinking, such as Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels. A Catskill Eagle, the 12th installment in the series, begins very strongly, promising a thrilling, madcap story.

Susan had left Spenser for a job and probably for another man in California (see Valediction ). Yet now Spenser receives a dramatic letter from her: Hawk (now a regular character in the series, an all-powerful and uber-cool Spenser's helper) is in jail in a small California town, accused of killing a security consultant, and both he and Susan need help quick. The passage on page 3 sets the tone of the novel:

"I [...] looked at my apartment.
Bookcases on either side of the front window. A working fireplace. Living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. A shotgun, a rifle, and three handguns."

No need to say that guns do play a role in the story. So does poetry, and even Freud and Sophocles. The essence of Spenser's style: pummeling and shooting baddies while quoting Robert Frost. Still, the setup of the plot is clever and there is a humorous passage that describes how Spenser gets arrested. The zaniness continues for almost the entire first hundred pages. Well, the bad guys are killed left and right, but that's on course for a Spenser story, only here it comes earlier than usual.

The story takes Spenser from Boston to California, then Connecticut and Boise, Idaho. Alas, about one-third into the novel, the humor begins getting a bit tenuous, and the plot implausibility index rises to extreme heights. Police and even FBI and CIA are all helping Spenser. Lieutenant Quirk's outburst:

"'The entire City of Boston Police Department is at your disposal. We've decided to give up crime-stopping altogether.'"

sounds like sarcasm, but, in fact, it accurately reflects the events in the plot.

To sum up: a great beginning followed by silly, deeply improbable plot. Not one of the better installments in the series. As a bonus, the reader will learn some details of Spenser's birth.

Two stars.



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Widows by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"On the street outside, the crowd behind the barricade was getting restless. This was already three o'clock in the morning, but no one was thinking of sleep. The only thing on anyone's mind was Showdown at the O.K. Corral. Toward that end, and with the seeming purpose of rattling everyone in sight so that the only possible outcome would be a loss of blood, a loss of life, further fuel for the inevitable fire to come."

Accurate and bitter social observations elevate Ed McBain's Widows (1991), the 43rd installment in the 87th Precinct series, to the above three-star rating. The accounts of two hostage situations are dispassionately written and believable. The hysteria of the crowd that watches unfolding events and yearns for a bloody climax is scary even for cynical observers of human nature. So are the interventions of actors from outside, which whip up the crowd's frenzy to further their unrelated political goals. All that on the ever-present backdrop of poverty and racial issues.

As it often happens in the 87th Precinct novels, the plot is multithreaded, with the threads intersecting at various junctures. There are three main stories in Widows: the novel begins with Detectives Carella and Brown catching the case of murder of a young woman. A bundle of erotic letters is found in the room, where the body has been found, and the case grows to include further victims.

The second main thread focuses on a personal loss of one of the detectives, and the investigation connected with it, difficult because of racial undercurrents. The novel was published in 1991 and it shows how little has changed in 30 years, except for current "euphemization" of the language.

The third thread features Detective Eileen Burke, who's beginning her new job on a hostage negotiating team. One of the strongest fragments in the novel is an account of her handling the negotiations with an old man holding a hostage. I am wondering if the author was influenced by Fellini's film Amarcord (1971) and its memorable scene when an elderly man hiding in a tree is yelling Voglio una donna! Brilliant and sad scenes, both.

There is some gentle humor:

"[...] how could you keep an eye on your sister to make sure some sex fiend wasn't dry humping her while you were busy trying to dry hump Margie Gannon? It got complicated sometimes. Adolescence was complicated."

Overall, I recommend the novel, not only because of two captivating and well-written hostage crisis vignettes, but also for the interesting denouement of the first thread.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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