About six months ago Kathy brought me two Ed McBain books. I've now finished the first one, . It wasn't part of the 87th precinct series, but it was still good. Mostly.
1) "… and a man holding a pair of dice in his hand is—for the moment, at least—in control of his own destiny." (page 52) Interesting to think about. And on the flip side, there are those who live their lives believing always that they hold a pair of dice in their hands. Okay. They can be interesting, too.
2) Downtown has one particularly interesting plot choice. The protagonist, Michael J. Barnes—a Florida orange-grower who is in NYC on business—runs into tons of trouble. Each time he's really in trouble, he flashes back to an incident in Vietnam, the explanation of which comes at Michael's most frightening NY moment. Both plot lines build gradually, and the timed crises work well—even if it's pretty obvious what the one in Vietnam will be.
3) And once Michael relives that horrible moment, he's thinking "…because no cause on earth was worth doing something as terrible as that but behind him Charlie kept saying it was okay Yank no need to worry Yank nobody's gonna hurt you Yank. (page 272) I like stream of consciousness in small doses. The above is about right. Novels by James Joyce contain far too much.
4) In McBain's books I always sense the author is having fun. One character, never appearing until close to the book's end, is named Mama. Michael and his cohorts are always guessing what she is like. Plump and jolly is the consensus. It's a good surprise when Mama urns out to be a drug-selling Spanish man with a huge moustache. His actual name is Mario Mateo. You can figure out Mama from that.
5) And then, IMHO, McBain comes close to ruining the whole book with the last sentence. A subplot is that Michael is to fly from NY to Boston to spend the rest of Christmas with his mother. They've had an odd relationship. When Michael left for Vietnam, she donated his clothes to charity, figuring he'd never come home. After he did, she was distant. At the very end of the book he calls his mother to tell her, "I'm alive again." Oh, barf!
Summing up, Downtown's an okay book—when it's not compared to any in the 87th precinct.
