Ed McBain: The Mugger

Away back in the dim, distant past, a magazine called Manhunt published a story about a former private eye named Matt Cordell, whose gun license had been revoked after he’d pistol-whipped his wife’s lover. Cordell was a drunk living on the Bowery and reluctantly solving cases for old friends who kept popping up to plague his blotto existence. I always thought of him as a defrocked shamus. The pseudonymous editor of Manhunt was someone named “John McCloud” (I know his real name but will not reveal it under threat of extreme torture) who fancied the Matt Cordell stories and bought some half-dozen of them. One of the stories was called “Now Die In It,” a wordplay twist on the expression, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” McCloud — in the trade the banter was, “He wandered lonely as McCloud” — ran the story in 1953. The byline on it was Evan Hunter.

You will be wondering by now what all of this has to do with The Mugger. Well, by the time I sat down to write the second book in the 87th Precinct series, I knew that I wanted to accomplish several things.

1) Cop Hater had used a classic smoke-screen plot as an introduction to the series, with cops the victims of a killer who seemed out to get cops — a way of bringing my full (at the time) complement of cops onstage as both investigators and potential victims. Having set up the characters who would be around, more or less, in every book, I now wanted to experiment with my theory that the squadroom itself could function as a “hero,” with different cops taking the spotlight in each book. Carella, who’d figured largely in the first novel, would be absent this time around — off on his honeymoon, in fact. A patrolman who’d put in a brief appearance in Cop Hater would become involved in a case that he would solve, thereby earning him a promotion and a leap into the squadroom as a rookie detective. To accomplish this, I needed a very strong plot. In fact, in order to elevate the status of the patrolman and keep alive the detectives already introduced in Cop Hater, I needed two strong plots. (Please stay with me; I’m getting there.)

2) The plot involving the detectives would derive from the title The Mugger. (To this day, I will often start a novel with only a title, winging it from there.) The plot involving the patrolman would focus on a murder — it had to be a serious crime in order to earn him his promotion — and it seemed to me that a perfectly serviceable and unusually strong murder plot had been used by me earlier in a story titled (you guessed it) “Now Die In It.”

At the time, I didn’t know if there were any laws about cannibalism, but it seemed to me that many writers before me had expanded short stories into novels or one-act plays into full theater pieces, and anyway I was a firm believer in wasting not, wanting not. Besides, my patrolman (who was Bert Kling, of course) was a far cry from Matt Cordell, who — in the hardboiled private eye tradition of the day — would as soon sock a woman as kiss her. It seemed to me that a new character would give added dimension to a plot I’d already used once. Seeing the same things through Kling’s eyes would make it all seem fresh and different.

As the book turned out, and I didn’t know this when I began writing it, the two plots merged — or seemed to merge. I can’t tell you more about either just now, or I’d spoil both for you. Let me say only that, for me, the combination seemed to work as a unified whole. I hope it still does. And I hope that Matt Cordell, lying in a gutter someplace with a bottle of cheap wine, will forgive me the petty theft.

“He who steals my purse” — but, after all, I didn’t steal his name.

— Ed McBain

The city could be nothing but a woman, and that’s good because your business is women.

You know her tossed head in the auburn crowns of molting autumn foliage, Riverhead, and the park. You know the ripe curve of her breast where the River Dix molds it with a flashing bolt of blue silk. Her navel winks at you from the harbor in Bethtown, and you have been intimate with the twin loins of Calm’s Point and Majesta. She is a woman, and she is your woman, and in the fall she wears a perfume of mingled wood smoke and carbon dioxide, a musky, musty smell bred of her streets and of her machines and of her people.

You have known her fresh from sleep, clean and uncluttered. You have seen her naked streets, have heard the sullen murmur of the wind in the concrete canyons of Isola, have watched her come awake, alive, alive.

You have seen her dressed for work, and you have seen her dressed for play, and you have seen her sleek and smooth as a jungle panther at night, her coat glistening with the pinpoint jewels of reflected harbor light. You have known her sultry, and petulant, and loving and hating, and defiant, and meek, and cruel and unjust, and sweet, and poignant. You know all of her moods and all of her ways.

She is big and sprawling and dirty sometimes, and sometimes she shrieks in pain, and sometimes she moans in ecstasy.

But she could be nothing but a woman, and that’s good because your business is women.

You are a mugger.

Katherine Ellio sat in a hard, wooden chair in the detective squadroom of the 87th Precinct. The early-afternoon sunlight, burnished by autumn, tarnished as a Spanish coin, filtered through the long grilled windows, shadowing her face with a meshed-square pattern.

Her face would not have been a pretty one under any circumstances. The nose was too long, and the eyes were a washed-out brown, arched with brows that needed plucking. The lips were thin and bloodless, and the chin was sharply pointed. It was not pretty at all now, because someone had discolored her right eye and raised a swollen welt along her jawline.

“He came up so very suddenly,” she said. “I really don’t know whether he’d been following me all along or whether he stepped out of an alley. It’s hard to say.”

Detective 3rd/Grade Roger Havilland looked down at the woman from his six-foot height advantage. Havilland owned the body of a wrestler and the face of a Botticelli cherub. He spoke in a loud, heavy voice, not because Miss Ellio was hard of hearing, but simply because Havilland liked to shout.

“Did you hear footsteps?” he shouted.

“I don’t remember.”

“Miss Ellio, try to remember.”

“I am trying.”

“All right, was the street dark?”

“Yes.”

Hal Willis looked at the woman and then at Havilland. Willis was a small detective, barely topping the five-foot-eight minimum height requirement. His deceptive height and bone structure, however, gave no clue to the lethal effectiveness with which he pursued his chosen profession. His sparkling, smiling brown eyes added to the misconception of a happy gnome. Even when he was angry, Willis smiled. He was, at the moment, not angry. He was, to be absolutely truthful, simply bored. He had heard this story, or variations of it, many times before. Twelve times, to be exact.

“Miss Ellio,” he said, “when did this man hit you?”

“After he took my purse.”

“Not before?”

“No.”

“How many times did he hit you?” “Twice.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Yes, he…” Miss Ellio’s face contorted with the pain of remembrance. “He said he was only hitting me as a warning. So that I wouldn’t scream for help when he left.”