Ed McBain: McBain's Ladies Too: More Women of the 87th Precinct

When my publisher asked me to write an introduction to McBain's Ladies, the volume that preceded this one, I wrote to him as follows:

For some time now, I’ve resisted writing the introduction you requested, despite having set aside blocks of time in which to do it. I kept wondering why. I think I now know why.

My reluctance has nothing to do with avoiding work. A five-page intro is a leaf on the wind. I have learned over the years, however, to trust my instincts as they regard editorial suggestions, and my instincts tell me this is a bad idea. It would be a bad idea even if someone else wrote it. It is a bad idea because:

Readers — this reader at least — tend to equate introductions with works of non-fiction or collections of short stones. Ladies and Ladies, Too are neither. Readers tend to believe introductions are boring — and they are usually right. Readers tend to skip introductions — as even you and I do. So why does a publisher or an editor feel an introduction is necessary? Either he doesn’t trust the book, or he doesn't trust the reader.

That is what I wrote on August 28, 1987.

As I sit at the keyboard now, it is a bit more than a year later.

And I am writing an introduction.

You may wonder why.

I’ll tell you why.

Too many people questioned the motives behind McBain's Ladies. One reviewer went so far as to suggest that a venal publisher decided to take (and I quote) "pecuniary advantage of Joe Public. That's you." Since McBain's Ladies did not contain any "new piece of work, essay, glossary, critical piece," or even the boring introduction my publisher had requested, the argument was that we were stealing tons of money from unsuspecting readers by selling them a mere book of excerpts. I would hate to tell that reviewer how little money I received for putting together both books; the knowledge would entirely destroy his theory. But in a profit-seeking world, profit-seeking motives are naturally expected. And when they are not there, they are imagined to be there.

Another reviewer suggested that Ed McBain (that's me) had nothing further to say, and was therefore rehashing his old stuff while he sat by the river fishing. This reviewer will be unhappy to learn that a new Matthew Hope novel was published in 1988, several months after the publication of McBain's Ladies , and a new 87th Precinct novel will be published in January of 1989, a good six months before the publication of the book now in your hands. I haven't been fishing. Neither have I been aboard a yacht on the Riviera, spending the ill-gotten gains of the first Ladies book.

Several other reviewers wondered why I was taking the risk of exposing to the reader how very little I really know about women. To one reviewer, Teddy Carella was a "Stepford wife" and Bert Kling was a "token sufferer" linked to women who invariably found themselves in trouble not of their own making — as if any woman might prefer being in trouble she herself had made. To another reviewer, all of the women were "as numb as bollards except in one throbbing particular." I had to look up bollard. It is a thick post on a ship or wharf, used for securing ropes or hawsers. I did not have to look up "throbbing particular." Well, I plead guilty to knowing almost nothing at all about women. But, given my male limitations, I do try to present them as people , which is all I try to do for the men in my novels. McBain's ladies are not there, as this same reviewer seemed to think, merely "to warm a policeman's sheets, or wet a tearful pillow, all ravishing or ravaged in the line of duty." Neither are the men in my novels there merely to warm a policewoman's sheets, or to shed tears on their own pillows, as they often do. And, while they are not quite ravishing, my men are also ravaged in the line of duty. I might suggest, by the way, that if hearing-impaired Teddy ever read the words "Stepford wife" on anyone's lips, male or female, she would hit that person on the head with a hammer, which is a good weapon for a woman to keep beside her bed.

Why then?

If I wasn't doing this for money, and I wasn't doing it because I'd dried up and had nothing further to write about, and I wasn't doing it to show off my regrettable ignorance about the opposite (to me, anyway) sex, why bother to put together two volumes of excerpts that did not contain any new piece of work, essay, glossary, or critical piece? What could my motive or motives possibly have been?

I will tell you.

Both Ladies and Ladies, Too are labors of love.

I put these books together for the reader and for myself. Not every 87th Precinct reader has read every novel in the series. Over the years, I continued to receive a great many letters asking for details on the prominently featured women in the series. In which book did Teddy learn she was going to have a baby? In which book did Kling meet Augusta Blair? Who killed Claire Townsend? Who did Hawes take on that skiing trip? And so on. Often, I myself did not know the answers to these questions without checking back through the body of work. So it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to track down some of these women chronologically, focusing on the high points of their lives in a way that might be interesting for the reader and, yes, for myself. And since many of the readers expressed a fascination with some of the women who'd put in only brief appearances, most of them less than law-abiding…

Who was the woman who kept Carella chained to a radiator?

What was the name of Santo Chadderton's jailer?

Who killed Jeremiah Newman?

…why not single out a few of the more interesting ones and lead them into the spotlight as well?

There were risks involved, but none of them was the risk of exposing my admitted ignorance about women. The risks were, in fact, twofold. First, the writing would be uneven. I started the 87th Precinct series in 1956, and by the time I began putting together the two volumes of excerpts, I had been writing the books for thirty years. If my writing had not improved in all that time, it would indeed have been a good idea to go fishing. In rereading some of the older books, I found the writing barely adequate to the task. But that was the way I wrote then, and this is the way I write now. Ice is a far, far cry from Cop Hater . And when I write Exit , to be published after my death, I hope that it too will be light years away from Lullaby , the most recent novel in the series. So the biggest risk was that I would be revealing what an appallingly bad writer I was back then when both the series and I were very young.

The companion risk was that in trimming out most of the pure mystery elements, I would be left with a group of women floundering around looking for a plot. Or worse, by merely hinting at the mysteries, I would baffle the reader. The dangers of either boredom or bafflement were stronger in Ladies , which traced the women through many different books spanning a good many years, than in the present volume, where each excerpt is taken from a single different novel in the series. In the first volume, I hope I presented the stories of my women in a readable and exciting way. In the present volume, the task was easier.

Both books, by the way, were put together during the same work period. First Ladies and then, immediately following it, Ladies, Too . In other words, the zillions of dollars my publishers and I made on the first collection of excerpts was not what prompted us to foist upon "Joe Public" a second fraudulent entry. The books were conceived as a pair, and offered to my publisher as a pair, for better or worse, till death do us part.