Money, Money, Money : A Novel of the 87th Precinct

The first Ed McBain novel I read was the last he ever wrote. Fortunately for me there are more than 50 87th Precinct novels for me to work through: this is my third or fourth.

McBain seems to have written to a formula, but he executed that formula brilliantly. Several stories going on at once. Each of the characters is sharply defined, but a few get extra detail, like Detective Steve Cardella. Cardella has a deaf (yeah, I know: politically incorrect) wife, twins who grow up fast, a sister (in this one) about to be engaged to the prosecutor who let her (and Steve's) father get away with murder, an aging mom who falls in love. Some of the other characters we know nothing about, but like a good movie, McBain keeps them all moving.

This story is about a dashing young woman who winds up naked in an enclosure filled with hungry lions; a lot of dope dealers; a book salesman who winds up very dead in a garbage can; a burglar out for the big score and a few terrorists.

No sense in giving away the whole book: just go read it and have a nice, time courtesy of the late and lamented Ed McBain. It will be a while before we see his likes again.

Jerry

A nice solid procedural about counterfeiting is constantly interrupted by silliness. Escaped lions at the zoo, Carella's anger and whining (so out of character) about his mother and sister's choice of beaus, and of course, any story featuring Ollie Weeks is guaranteed to be filled with its share of stupidity. McBain's books are always worth a read, as they are well-constructed, with rock solid plots and a storylines that are always filled with enough complexity to be satisfying, but this is a fairly weak entry.

This was my first McBain book and I loved it. As an old-time fan of Joseph Wambaugh, I found much entertainment in the character, Fat Ollie. He was animated, but real. I find myself chuckling as I think about him, even while I write this review. The plot was interesting, although the Al-Qaida connection is very spooky (released before 9/11).

I am headed out to get another McBain book as soon as I'm done with this review (Fat Ollie's Book)

Ed McBain's 51st entry in the 87th Precinct series shows the author in fine fettle, robust even. It's an enjoyable, somewhat unusual novel, a good page-turner as McBains nearly always are. If it's less than his best, it's not from lack of trying.

Someone is moving funny money through the streets of Isola. A woman gets fed to the lions. A guy turns up dead in a garbage can. A peaceful burglar gets an odd visit from a Secret Service agent. A group of terrorists from the Middle East plot an explosion at a city landmark. Just another day at the office for the 87th Precinct.

There's a lot to chew on here, and like the poor woman in the lions' cage, it ends up getting scattered in many directions. Focus is usually one of McBain's strengths, but after a promising start, it kind of gets lost. Perhaps it is because he wanted to tell a story that had little to do with the 87th Precinct, a story about counterfeiters and spies and terrorists. The novel begins rather oddly on a dirt runway in the American Southwest, and the 87th Precinct detectives don't even show up until the book is well underway. They take a back seat for much of the ensuing narrative, while McBain focuses his attentions on one of his more interesting villains, a nasty coked-out drug dealer named Wiggy The Lid, and a white-shoe publishing house where all is not as it seems.

Even this gets tangled up, however. I'm not sure I understand what happened in the novel, why this person did that, but as best I can tell, the pieces don't all connect in the end the way these books usually do. The resolution feels muddy. There's some noises made about government conspiracies, which frankly reeks of Oliver Stone paranoia but grabs you all the same, then it's just dropped without further mention. "Money, Money, Money" feels like an experiment, at times a worthy one, but as a novel it's more than a den of lions can chew on.

The introduction of a terrorist subplot is notable. The copyright of "Money, Money, Money" is 2001, and I suspected McBain threw the subplot in because of a wish to acknowledge 9/11. Yet "Money, Money, Money" hit the bookstores earlier that summer, which renders his take on a group of al-Qaeda operatives plotting to detonate a bomb in a concert hall rather eerie. "We are teaching them we can strike anywhere, anytime," the terrorist leader explains. "We are telling them they are completely vulnerable."

More eerie is the fact this subplot has no apparent purpose in the novel. It doesn't connect with the other plot threads, except that it seems this particular al-Qaeda group has the benefit of counterfeit cash in funding their deadly work. McBain just throws the terrorist plot in there, it seems, because he sensed it was something important that needed to be dealt with. He was right, of course.

But "Money, Money, Money" is not a better book for this Nostradamian turn. It's certainly interesting, vibrant, readable, at times funny, with Fat Ollie Weeks, the miserably uncouth and bigoted cop, getting more center-stage attention than usual. Reading "87th Precinct" novels is always worthwhile, and this is no exception. But this is no standout, either, however elevated its ambitions.

Ed McBain is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. His body of work truly makes him a living legend. Whether writing under the name Ed McBain or his alterego Evan Hunter, his name on a book assures it of a certain style and the highest degree of quality writing. His most famous creation has to be the cops in the 87th precinct. Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer have been with us for over forty five years. They have aged very slowly over the decades. Yet the all the cases remain immediate to this day. As a body of work, the fifty previous books have been a bit uneven. Some were merely good and some are true masterpieces (such as Nocturne). MONEY, MONEY, MONEY represents the fifty first volume of this classic series. It is not the very best one but still is far better than the vast majority of books written last year.

Cassandra Jean Ridley, ex- Gulf War pilot, is trying to make a quick buck. She has agreed to fly drugs out of Mexico under radar for a cool quarter of a million dollars. The work, though not without risk, appears quite easy. In fact, life is great until Cass is robbed by a burgler who makes off with two of her fur coats and some cash she was given. This eventually leads to a run in by the burgler with the treasury department questioning whether the cash is counterfeit. All roads lead back to Cass.

Carella and Fat Ollie Weeks investigate the death of a woman mauled and eaten by the lions in the local zoo. Her death appears drug related and after finding the body of a bookseller in Diamondback, the "almost exclusively black section of the city" their investigation takes them to the doors of Wadsworth and Dodds , a book publishing company that sells books that nobody wants to read.

One of the major strengths of Ed McBain's writing style is his propensity for creating unforgettable characters. He does so through dialogue and descriptions. For example, Steve Carella is always described as having "eyes that slant downward giving him a sort Chinese appearance, though he certainly wasn't Oriental". Meyer is bald and Cotton has a white stripe through his red hair where he suffered a knife injury many years ago. The dialogue is extremely realistic and powerful. The story is quite fast paced which is another McBain trademark vs. the more languid introspective writing of Evan Hunter. In this volume, however, I think McBain may have been attempting to do a bit too much as another plot gets intertwined into the primary investigation. This leads to some improbable coincidences. Nonetheless, nobody writes as good as McBain even when he is not quite at his best.