Ed Mcbain - The Heckler

The first book published in 1958 was also a paperback original. But with Killer’s Wedge that same year, Simon and Schuster brought out the first of the books in hardcover. It startled the entire civilized world! I jest, Maude. It would take a long, long time before one of the Eight-Sevens hit the New York Times bestseller list. So much for rules of thumb about mystery series. And, besides, who’s counting?

Anyway, there were eleven published books by the end of 1959, when I must have delivered The Heckler because it was first published in hardcover sometime in 1960; I’m not now sure of the month. But I can remember an evening long before then—in 1955, to be exact, while I was still writing Cop Hater , the first book in the series. I was riding in a car with a friend of mine on our way to meeting his wife and my then-wife (yes, Harry Melnick’s daughter, Anita), whom we were taking to dinner. I was inordinately silent, and suddenly I snapped my fingers and shouted, “A deaf mute!” which was the equivalent back then of the word Eureka!

I had been pondering what kind of girlfriend would be right for Steve Carella, you see. Carella was merely one of the cops in the first book. I chose a deaf mute (I know, I know, the politically correct expression these days is “speech and hearing impaired,” but Teddy Carella knows where she’s coming from, and so do I) because I felt I could place her in desperate situations from which she had to be rescued by her stalwart police detective husband. I soon tired of these “Mr. and Mrs. North” shenanigans, however. Teddy was too strong a character to need rescuing all the time.

By the time I started concocting the villain of The Heckler , I knew that the person Steve Carella loved most in the entire universe was his wife, Teddy Carella, who was deaf and could not speak, but whom neither he nor she herself considered “handicapped.” It occurred to me: Hey! What if the guy who’s bugging Dave Raskin is also deaf? I had no idea at the time that the “deaf man” would become a recurring character—he’s now been in five books—or that he would grow to become Steve Carella’s nemesis, in much the same way that Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes’s. I don’t believe in the concept of good and evil. Evil is a theological term. But I knew that Teddy Carella was deaf and really good , and I figured if I could make this guy deaf and really bad , I would have a very nice contrast.

I think it’s interesting, by the way, that most people don’t waste too much sympathy on deaf persons. They’ll risk their lives to help a blind man cross the street in heavy traffic, but the best a deaf person can hope to evoke is impatience. I hope the deaf man in these pages inspires a bit more than that. Fear perhaps? Perhaps even awe. It ain’t easy being a villain.

It ain’t easy writing about one, either.

There would be more than five deaf man novels were it not for the fact that’s he’s brilliant, and I’m not. He must forever come up with these extraordinary schemes, you see, which are foiled not by the Keystone Kops of the Eight-Seven, but instead by accident. That’s hard to do. I like to think there’ll be another deaf man novel down the pike. He still owes something to a woman named Gloria, I believe, who shot him and left him tied to a bed in Mischief . Oh dear, one mustn’t do such things to someone like the deaf man, must one?

But we shall see.

Meanwhile…

Harry…thanks again.

Without you, this book wouldn’t have happened.

Ed McBain

Weston, CT

June 2002