The Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Outside the hospital, the church bells tolled.

  It was Christmas day, and all was right with the world.

  But Steve Carella was dead.

  Now, I thought that was pretty classy. The original concept of the series as I’d outlined it to Herb Alexander, my editor at Pocket Books, was to use a squadroom full of detectives as a conglomerate hero. I would try to portray accurately the working day of a big-city cop, but I would do so in terms of a handful of men whose diverse personalities and character traits, when combined, would form a single hero—the 87th Squad. To my knowledge, this had never been done before, and I felt it was unique. I felt, further, that the concept would enable me to bring new men into the squadroom as needed, adding their particular qualities or defects to the already existing mix, while at the same time disposing of characters who no longer seemed essential to the mix. The squad was the hero, and no man on the squad was indispensable or irreplaceable. In real life, detectives got shot and killed. So, in The Pusher, Detective Stephen Louis Carella got shot, and on Christmas Day he died.

  Ha.

  The call came almost at once from Herb Alexander. He said, “You’re not serious, are you?”

  I said, “About what?”

  He said, “You can’t kill Carella.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “He’s the hero,” Herb said. “He’s the star of the series.”

  (Carella thus far had appeared in only one book, Cop Hater, the first book in the series. In the second book, The Mugger, he was off on his honeymoon for 158 of 160 pages, returning to the squadroom only on page 159. But all at once, he was the hero, he was the star.)

  “Who says?” I said. “The concept is …”

  Herb said, “Yes, I know the concept. But you can’t kill Carella. He’s the hero.”

  We argued back and forth. I finally yielded, and brought Carella back to life by adding three short paragraphs to the original ending, and by cutting the last line that would have sent Carella to an early grave. I still did not believe he was the hero. The concept of a conglomerate protagonist was firmly entrenched in my mind—a splintered hero, if you will, a man of many parts because he was in actuality many men, the men of the 87th Squad.

  Years later, in a conversation about successful television series, Mel Brooks said to me that the essential ingredients of any hit show were a family and a house. The family could be doctors, in which case their house was a hospital. The family could be teachers and students, in which case their house was a school. The family could be interplanetary travelers, in which case their house was a spaceship. Well, my family, in my series, was then (and is now) a family of working cops. Their house is the squadroom; their backyard is the precinct territory; their world is the city.

  In this family, Lieutenant Peter Byrnes is the father. Detective Meyer Meyer is the patient older brother. Detective Steve Carella is next in succession, perhaps closest in age and temperament to the man who was presented with a double-barreled monicker at birth. Bert Kling is the youngest brother, learning constantly from his more experienced siblings—and by the way, you should have heard the geschrei that went up when, in Lady, Lady, I Did It! (the fourteenth book in the series), I killed off the girl who’d been Kling’s fiancée since the second book in the series. But, damn it, they could try to tell me Steve Carella was the “hero,” but they could not convince me Claire Townsend was the “heroine”—so dead she remained (you should pardon the pun), causing all sorts of later character mutations in Kling. Redheaded Cotton Hawes, the detective with the frightening white streak in his hair, is a cousin who came from the provinces (actually another precinct) to become an adopted brother. There are other members of this tight-knit clan—Hal Willis, with the diminutive size of a jockey and the hands of a judo expert; hard-luck Bob O’Brien who keeps getting into deadly shootouts he neither encourages nor desires; Arthur Brown, a huge black cop who fights prejudice in his own steady, unruffled manner; Captain Frick, in charge of the precinct and nominally the squad, the titular head of the family, going a bit senile in his most recent appearance. And, to stretch the metaphor to its outer limits, we can even consider stool pigeons like Danny Gimp or Fats Donner or Gaucho Palacios part of the family, like distant uncles on the outer fringes.

  In this family, there is also a black sheep, a bad cop, a lousy cop, a rotten cop necessary to the balance of the squad. His name used to be Roger Havilland. In Killer’s Choice (the fifth book in the series), in keeping with my concept of cops coming and going, and perhaps because I’d earlier been prevented from killing off Carella and still resented it, I killed off Havilland in a spectacularly satisfying way:

  Havilland knew only that he was flying backwards, off balance. He knew only that he collided with the plate glass window, and that the window shattered around him in a thousand flying fragments of sharp splinters. He felt sudden pain, and he yelled, with something close to tears in his voice, “You bastard! You dirty bastard! You can go and …” but that was all he said. He never said another word.

  One of the shards of glass had pierced his jugular vein and another had pierced his windpipe, and that was the end of Roger Havilland.

  Much to my regret.

  A family has to have a ne’er-do-well brother or uncle or cousin in it. If there are good cops, there have to be bad cops (as in real life) and they can’t be bad cops working in some faraway precinct, they have to be bad cops in your own bailiwick. In a later book (and I can’t honestly remember which one), I reincarnated Roger Havilland in the shape and form of Andy Parker. I promise (maybe) that I will never kill Andy Parker. He is too necessary to the mix. Similarly, Fat Ollie Weeks of the 83rd Precinct is another bad cop, a recent addition to the family, without whom the squad could not properly function. I’m not sure whether he’ll ever succeed in getting transferred to the Eight-Seven, as he is constantly promising (or rather threatening) to do. He may be more effective where he is, a country cousin who causes the immediate family to wince, or sigh, or both, whenever he puts in an appearance.

  That is the family, and this is their house, as described in Cop Hater in 1956; the house hasn’t changed much over the years, but neither do real-life detective squadrooms:

  Where you were was a narrow, dimly-lighted corridor. There were two doors on the right of the open stairway, and a sign labeled them LOCKERS. If you turned left and walked down the corridor, you passed a wooden slatted bench on your left, a bench without a back on your right (set into a narrow alcove before the sealed doors of what had once been an elevator shaft), a door on your right marked MEN’S LAVATORY, and a door on your left over which a small sign hung, and the sign simply read CLERICAL.

  At the end of the corridor was the detective squadroom.

  You saw first a slatted rail divider. Beyond that, you saw desks and telephones, and a bulletin board with various photographs and notices on it, and a hanging light globe and beyond that more desks and the grilled windows that opened on the front of the building. You couldn’t see very much that went on beyond the railing on your right because two huge metal filing cabinets blocked the desks on that side of the room.

  This is where the men of the 87th spend part of their working day. The rest of their day is spent in the city. The city is a character in these books. As any reader of the series already knows (and as any new reader is promptly informed at once), the city is imaginary. This has not stopped a great many people from remarking on the fact that it strongly resembles New York City. It does. The similarity may be due to the fact that it is New York City—with a liberal dash of geographical license. When I began writing the series (and please remember that I knew from go that this was going to be a series, or at least I knew there were going to be three books about these cops because that’s how many books were contracted for, the future being in the hands of the gods, who—thank God—smiled), I came to a decision about real cities as opposed to imaginary cities. I had done a lot of research on cops and police departments, and I knew they chang
ed their rules and regulations as often as they changed their underwear—say once a year (come on, guys, you know I’m kidding). I knew that a series needed a familiar sameness to it, not only of character and of place, but also circumscribing the rules within which the hero (my squad) had to work while solving a mystery. (There are no mysteries, my cops are fond of repeating; there are only crimes with motives.) I recognized at once that I could not change my police working procedure each time the cops in New York City changed theirs. Keeping up with the departmental or interdepartmental memos or directives would have been a full-time job that left me no time for writing. So I froze the procedure (except for scientific techniques, which are constantly changing, and which I keep up with and incorporate to the best of my ability) and I made my city imaginary because, Harold, the procedure here in this here city is this way, and it never changes, dig? And these are the rules of the game in this city, the same rules for the reader as for the cops. A cop can’t search an apartment without a court order, and he can’t interrogate a prisoner in custody without first reading off Miranda-Escobedo, and he can’t expect the lab (which is run by former Lieutenant, now Captain, Sam Grossman, another member of the family) to come up with the identity of a murderer on the basis of a smudged fingerprint of the left thumb—and neither can the reader. Those are the rules. We play the game fair here. We’re sometimes frustrated by this damn city with its complicated bureaucratic machinery and its geographical complexity, but it’s there, as imaginary as it may be—and out there are killers.

  Take a look at this city.

  How can you possibly hate her?

  She is all walls, true, she flings up buildings like army stockades designed for protection against an Indian population long since cheated and departed. She hides the sky. She blocks her rivers from view. (Never perhaps in the history of mankind has a city so neglected the beauty of her waterways or treated them so casually. Were her rivers lovers, they would surely be unfaithful.) She forces you to catch glimpses of her in quick takes, through chinks in long canyons, here a wedge of water, there a slice of sky, never a panoramic view, always walls enclosing, constricting, yet how can you hate her, this flirtatious bitch with smoky hair?

  There are half a dozen real cities in this world, and this is one of them, and it’s impossible to hate her when she comes to you with a suppressed female giggle about to burst on her silly face, bubbling up from some secret adolescent well to erupt in merriment on her unpredictable mouth. (If you can’t personalize a city, you have never lived in one. If you can’t get romantic and sentimental about her, you’re a foreigner still learning the language. Try Philadelphia, you’ll love it there.) To know a real city, you’ve got to hold her close, or not at all. You’ve got to breathe her.

  That’s from Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man, published in 1973. (The Deaf Man is my Moriarty, but also a member of the family, so to speak. Without him, the cops in my precinct would never be made to look like fools, and all families must appear foolish at times.) But take a look again at the city paragraphs above. Somebody there is talking, about this “imaginary” city as if it were “real.” Who is that person talking? Is it Carella? Is it Kling? Is it Meyer or Hawes? I’m glad you asked that question. It is the voice of another character in the series. The character is omnipresent, like the characters that are the city and the weather. The character has no right to be there at all, because every writing instructor in the world will tell you author-intrusion is the cardinal sin. That character is Ed McBain. He likes to put his two cents in. I sometimes feel he is speaking for the reader as well as himself.

  So how can anyone possibly say Carella is the hero of this series when there are so many other characters that go into its realization? Nobody can. But I’ll tell you something. Sometimes, when somebody yells at me, or when I’ve had the oil burner repaired unsuccessfully twelve times, or when I’ve had to write six letters trying to get a change of address on a credit card, I find myself wondering what Carella would do in such a situation.

  Does that make him a hero?

  Fred Fellows

  Hillary Waugh

  JUST AS LOCKED-ROOM PUZZLES, “Had-I-But-Known” stories, and private-eye novels have had their vogue, the police procedural enjoys enormous popularity today. Ed McBain writes about the 87th Precinct squad, John Ball chronicles the adventures of Virgil Tibbs, Elizabeth Linington’s books feature Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, and Michael Gilbert has given the world Patrick Petrella. What separates Chief Fred C. Fellows from his fellow cops is that his police work takes place in and around the small town of Stockford, Connecticut, while most sleuths pursue criminals in the world’s great cities. Fellows may not have all the latest technological equipment at his command, as he would in an urban police department, but his keen eye, attention to detail, and active mind make him more than a match for the local bad guys. His office is located in a tiny room in the basement of the town’s city hall.

  Hillary Waugh’s first police procedural novel is an early milestone in the development of that subgenre of detective fiction. Last Seen Wearing … , published in 1952, introduced Frank W. Ford, who did not become a series detective. Later, Frank Sessions began to appear regularly in police novels set in New York City, starting with “30” Manhattan East, in 1968. Sessions is more brutal than Fellows, perhaps reflecting the tougher environment in which he works.

  Most of Hillary Waugh’s 57-y ear-long life has been spent in New England, where he was elected first selectman of Guilford, Connecticut, as a Republican in 1971. He did not seek reelection two years later because it took too much time away from his writing.

  Fred Fellows

  by Hillary Waugh

  IT IS NOT EASY to reconstruct the genes and genealogy of a character of fiction twenty years after his birth, especially when the decade of his heyday is already a decade gone. Unless one keeps a diary account of the pangs of creation, any number of relevancies become lost to memory. This is not to say that the origin of Stockford, Connecticut’s Chief of Police Fred C. Fellows is not well remembered, for it is. Rather, it is to remark that the more I think back upon his career, the more the fragments that contributed to his makeup are recalled to mind.

  To get a picture of Fred and what he’s like, it’s necessary to trace his heredity through an almost forgotten father to a vividly remembered grandfather. Mostly it is the grandfather we must consider, for his influence was probably the stronger on Fred and certainly he had a great influence on me.

  Frank W. Ford was the grandfather (note the similarity of the FF initials. That’s undoubtedly Ford’s influence) and, unlike grandson Fred, who was built up piece by piece like Frankenstein’s monster (but with happier results), Frank Ford sprang, Athena-like, from his creator’s head, fully clothed and armed, already in command of all he surveyed.

  It started very innocently. I was writing my first police procedural, a book ultimately titled Last Seen Wearing. …The year was 1950 and my goal was to show how the disappearance and murder of a college girl would be handled, as in real life, by the local police of the town involved. The technique was to report the case in the manner of those fact-crime writers who filled the pages of the pulps with their write-ups of real-life murders. The only differences were that my case was to be of novel, rather than short story, length, and it was to be fiction rather than fact.

  So far, so good. The book was started, the scene was set: a girl is discovered missing from her college, the efforts of the school authorities to locate her fail, and the police have to be called in.

  Up to this point, I had given no thought to the police themselves. I only knew that the chief was a gray-haired, bullet-headed man of 58 who had a crew cut and whose name was Frank Ford; and that his second in command was a taller, thinner, younger detective sergeant named Burton K. Cameron. They were scheduled to be the main investigators of the case and I did not expect anything more from them than professional competence. I did not, in fact, want anything more from them than that.

 
; They started out in proper fashion. The chief, upon learning of the disappearance, assigned Cameron and plainclothesman Donald C. Lassiter to the case and they went to the campus to begin their investigation. Fine and dandy; everybody was doing his job and behaving properly.

  But then Cameron returned to headquarters and what happened there turned everything around. It was quarter to five Saturday afternoon and Ford had not yet gone home. He was sitting on a table waiting for the detective sergeant to show up and when he got off the table, he said, “About time you got in—”

  I stopped him in mid-sentence. “Wait a minute, Chief,” I told him. “You can’t say that. That’s not an appropriate remark. Let’s take it from the top again.”

  Cameron repeated his entrance and Ford got off the table. “About time you got in,” he grumbled.

  “Hold it, hold it,” I said. “Listen, Frank. You have to understand something. A girl has disappeared from the campus. This is a serious matter. Your first concern is the welfare of this girl. Your opening remark should be ‘What’d you find?’ or ‘Is there any trace?’ or something. You can say it your own way, of course. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but that’s the gist of what your response should be. Realize it, Frank. You shouldn’t be griping because you’ve been hanging around headquarters an extra three-quarters of an hour. First things first. Now, let’s try it again. You get off the table and you say—?”

  “About time you got in.”

  I went around with him a couple of more times and then gave up. “All right, Frank,” I said, “if you insist on using that line, I’m going to let you. But I’m warning you: I think you’re going to lose reader sympathy. I think you’re going to be wrong for the role. I’m going to give you the reins and let you show me what you can do, but don’t be surprised if you get jettisoned and I put a new man in as chief.”