The Frumious Bandersnatch [Hardcover]

I hope this is the first of a whole new "Lewis Carroll" series for the 87th Precinct. It isn't McBain's best book by any accounting--for me, the best run was the long list of vintage novels from the late 70s through late 80s, from Calypso through Heat, Ice, etc, when he could do no wrong. But this is the best of the recent crop of titles. Hooray for a great grand master!

Diving in, you might think "The Frumious Bandersnatch" is one of the 87th's more comic outings, given its goofy name and the focus on the cult of celebrity surrounding this particular case. It's not especially intriguing as mysteries go. The singer is plucked off a yacht by a pair of masked intruders just as she finishes a lip-synched dance routine for a music industry crowd and a local TV news camera team. It takes 50 pages for the crime to occur, then another 100 pages for the kidnappers to call with their demands, while McBain lavishes his attention on the music industry and our culture of complaint. 87th Precinct detective Steve Carella finds himself used as an errand boy by a joint FBI/police task force, while the rest of the precinct is left on ice.

McBain does use one interesting character I haven't seen before, a former police academy buddy of Carella's named Corcoran who runs the police side of the task force and has gotten too big for his britches in his new post, ordering his old friend around and insisting on being called "lieutenant." This bit of intraservice rivalry is well played out, especially when the 87th jumps into action late in the book to try and break the case ahead of the task force.

But there's not much else to be said for "Bandersnatch." It has a remarkably sour conclusion for the jocular set-ups, as if we aren't expected to care about any of the characters McBain has taken such pains in sketching. The familiar faces of the 87th Precinct seem a fey bunch now. About the only character other than Carella that McBain lingers on is the crude bigot Ollie Weeks, who works out of another precinct. In the last book, "Fat Ollie's Book," we watched him try to write a novel and begin to romance a patrolwoman of Puerto Rican extraction. This time, McBain foregoes any crimesolving role for Weeks and just plays out their romance, a first for the 87th series and not a successful one. Meanwhile, 87th Precinct detective Cotton Hawes starts a romance with a television news reporter. It's a little disconcerting watching the book series that gave lessons to "Hill Street Blues" and "CSI" suddenly aping "Friends," but that's what's here.

For the last few books, McBain has been moving away from the standard 87th Precinct formula, maybe because he's seen it imitated too often. There's nothing wrong with experimenting; sometimes, as with "Fat Ollie's Book," it pays off. But I'd like a new 87th Precinct novel that starts with Homicide dicks Monoghan and Monroe making bad jokes over a body waiting for the ME to pronounce it dead, puts Eileen Burke in harm's way as a decoy prostitute, nearly allows Andy Parker to botch everything, and gives Meyer Meyer something more to do than sip coffee. That's the way it used to be, when the series was great. McBain has lost none of his wit or punch, but he could do with more engagement. Maybe a trip back to square one is in order.

Partway through the performance of the song that should launch Tara to super-stardom, the party is rudely interrupted by a couple of masked men carrying guns. They boldly stride in and kidnap the budding songstress from under the noses of over 100 onlookers.

The part of the river that the kidnapping took place happens to fall under the jurisdiction of the 87th Precinct and the detective who happens to catch the call is Steve Carella. Long time readers of this series would probably agree that Carella is the best and brightest of the 87th Precinct detectives, certainly he's the central character in most of the books and he takes the lead again here.

The case is only in the 87th Precinct's hands for a short time before the FBI become involved and takes over. Carella however is enlisted to help on the task force at the request of Barney Loomis. As can be imagined neither the FBI nor Carella are thrilled at the prospect of working together and it isn't terribly long before Carella walks out on the team turning the investigation into a head to head race between the FBI and the 87th Precinct to catch the kidnappers and find the girl.

It's only when Carella leaves the FBI task force and begins investigating using the tried and true methods that have made the series so popular and long-lived, that the pace picks up. That's not to say the first half of the book was terribly slow, but it does seem to spend a good deal of time in setting up the adversarial atmosphere between the kidnappers and the law enforcement agencies.

One tiny annoyance was the portrayal of the FBI in this book. Painting FBI agents as egotistical fools has been done many times before, particularly when the police are the heroes, and so it happens again in this case. While I thought that this was a rather clichéd scenario which led to an obvious outcome, McBain has overcome it somewhat by giving the book a rather shocking ending by throwing in a touch of the unexpected.

There is a curious side story involving a semi-regular character named Oliver "Ollie" Weeks, a police detective who works at the 88th Precinct. Ollie is in the early stages of a new romance with a uniformed officer and the story constantly flashes to the progress of their various dates. I kept expecting Ollie's story to somehow be linked to the case but it never happened. It appears that the Ollie Weeks story was just meant to simmer and may perhaps be continued in a later book. This is just pure speculation on my part, though.

There were also signs that Ed McBain was poking a bit of fun at his series, particularly when it comes to the agelessness of his characters. In one scene, Cotton Hawes was entering a building and noticed some elderly people drinking cups of coffee and wondered what it must be like to grow older, to reach your fifties or sixties. Given that the series is bearing down on its 50th year and Cotton Hawes has barely aged a year in all that time, it's no wonder he's starting to grow curious about the elderly. Meanwhile, the detectives now have the benefit of the latest technology such as mobile phones and the Internet to assist them. It's a fascinating paradox of time and technological advancement clashing with the timelessness of the characters. And I'm sure Ed McBain is having a chuckle in this book.

For fans of the 87th Precinct series and also for newcomers, I recommend THE FRUMIOUS BANDERSNATCH as a terrific example of a police procedural, written by the master of the sub-genre.