Long Time No See

McBain strives for literature, but always entertains. More often he reminds us that human interaction can be better. Sadly, his writing rings true today, as if we haven’t learned, improved, or thought. His characters go through their feelings, prejudices, and reconciliations with their human interactions. And those emotions, thoughts, and actions are not much different than many folks are going through now. That makes it worse. How little we’ve learned. How pathetic we are. McBain’s writing is a marvel. Good story telling. Good lessons. Great entertainment. 43 years after publication it reads as if it is current.

When James Harris left the army after a stint in Vietnam, he had been blinded and was suffering from serious psychological problems. Ten years later, he’s living on his disability pension, on the small amount of money his wife makes, and on the pan-handling he does every day on the streets of Isola. Then, one cold winter evening, he and his seeing-eye dog, Stanley are making their way home when someone–a lunatic, perhaps?–chloroforms Stanley, then slashes Harris’s throat and leaves him bleeding to death on the street.

Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct lands the case and begins the job of trying to determine who might have wanted the blind man dead. He and Detective Meyer Meyer interview Harris’s widow, who is also blind, but she appears to have no information that might be of any help.

Later, Carella and Meyer return to the Harris apartment to escort Mrs. Harris to the morgue so that she can officially identify her husband’s body. But they now discover Mrs. Harris dead, also with her throat slashed, and someone has tossed the apartment, obviously looking for something.

The detectives begin digging into the relative pasts of both Mr. and Mrs. Harris in the hope of finding something that might shed some light on their murders. They turn up some interesting background on each of the victims and some potential suspects, but the deeper they dig into the case, the more confusing–and hopeless–it seems to become.

This book, which first appeared in 1982, is a little more than halfway through the long-running 87th Precinct series, and it’s a pretty good read. McBain still has a habit of including perhaps a bit too much of the penal code in the narrative and he occasionally wanders a bit too far off on a tangent, but those are small complaints. The plot is a clever one, and Steve Carella will need all his wits about him if he’s going to find a solution to this case. As always, it’s fun to watch him in action.

Ive read a dozen or so Ed McBain books about the 87th precinct and always have one on my iPad. This book, though, had a bit too much of the background and atmospheric description McBain does so well. I usually like his use of adjectives and adverbs for the color they add, but this time it seemed they too often slowed the story down.

Long Time No See is a well laid out, well written, believable police procedural . And if, like me, you love to discover and follow interesting characters through an entire series, McBain’s police procedurals do very nicely. Long Time No See is just one of a whole string of mysteries tracing the cases out of the 87th precinct. Interesting how the author uses the narrator’s descriptions of ‘the City’ as a device to establish the character of the narrator who then accompanies the reader through the 87th precinct series. .

I found this book very compelling. The psychological interpretations interesting. The characters are quite different than usual. Very intriguing story.

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