As I noted at the the time, the prolifc author of the 87th Precinct novels and others, Ed McBain, died earlier this year. His last book, Fiddlers, has now been published.
The last McBain is probably not the best McBain (for me that would be either Lightning or Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man). But it improves greatly over last years Frunious Bandersnatch and Hark! And is a fitting "end of the bookshelf.".
The knowledge that this will be the last "Novel of the 87th Precinct" is impossible to dispel. But McBain, in their "farewell appearance" is too much of a professional to let his characters get so out of character as to be maudlin.
This is, finally "just" another character-driven McBain police procedural. Except that it isn't. Without giving anything away, it seems safe to assume he felt a certain kinship with his final villain.
McBain may or may not have invented the form, but he made it his. He created characters that, over the course of almost 50 years, readers came to care about, and all while sketching them in with only the sparsest of lines. How much do we know about Steve Carella outside his "almost Oriental" eyes and his deaf wife, Teddy? The answer is not a lot...and yet everything. Because we've been living with him on the job for years.
His chronicler, Ed McBain (AKA Evan Hunter), has given him and his colleagues a fitting send-off.
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