As if to rinse my head out of the The McBain Brief, I quickly read Lullaby, the fortieth (!) novel in the 87th Precinct series. Written almost forty years later than some of the short stories in The McBain Brief, Hunter McBain’s proficiency has definitely increased.
As usual, the novel follows the squad of the 87th Precinct in The City. Again, McBain introduces several plotlines into the story, which he might or might not connect later. Carella and Meyer catch a squeal for a double murder–a baby and her babysitter–on New Year’s Eve, or rather, New Year’s Day. Kling prevents a bunch of gangbangers with baseball bats from killing a guy, and the guy’s none-to-happy to have been saved.
I love the 87th Precinct series and McBain’s depictions of The City. Harsh, brutal, and strangely romantic. Of course, I have a City that I love, and I see our love story in McBain’s characterization. This story takes place in a particularly harsh portion of winter, where leaden skies threaten and deliver snow (I miss you, baby).
McBain’s writing style is not only poetic in theme, but in style, too. You have to look for it, which you do if you have an English degree, but check out the line breaking for effect:
Angela Quist was an actress.
Who lived in a loft.
But Angela Quist was in reality a waitress who took an acting course once a week on her day off, and her loft was a twenty-by-twenty
space sectioned off with plasterboard partitions from a dozen similar small spaces on the floor.
Or this:
And suddenly there she was. Standing there. Standing in the door to the room, a knife in her hand.
He had to go for the knife.
Anyone who’s had a poetry class knows repetition and its impact. But most poems don’t have knives, at least not ones printed in anthologies. At poetry slams, the poems have knives and the poets have knives and everyone applauds politely. But I digress.
Much like McBain does, digressions and streams of consciousness that flow around sandbars but back into the general plot. To great effect.
So it’s the fortieth book (and since it’s been fourteen years since publication, many more have come since then). Is it a good place to jump in? Well, if you’ve not dabbled in the 87th Precinct before, perhaps your first should be something earlier (the first three appeared in 1956). McBain’s dilated the time a bit, so the same main characters haven’t aged that much; elapsed time has been maybe a decade. But some of the returning characters are evolving somewhat, so you’ll not know about Bert Kling, who started out a patrolman, and his lifes and loves, or about other characters reminisced. Still, you have to start somewhere, so if you can pick this up in hardback for a buck at a garage sale, do so.
