The Fourth Deadly Sin [Paperback]

I read The Fourth Deadly Sin before I knew of Sins 1-3. I won't let 1-3 go unread. Lawrence Sanders' style of crime prose captivated me first with Anderson Tapes' crime reporter-type story telling. The Passion Of Molly T. made me a complete fan. The Fourth Sin is unlike any crime drama that I've ever read. The vivid descriptions and Sanders' use of intelligent language (I admit, I needed a thesaurus several times) allow you to view Delaney, his wife Monica, Abner Boone and other characters as if you were beside them at all times. Not a single character in this book is cardboard. All are shown with flesh and soul. And with all this detail, the plot still moves you like a locomotive. Magestically gaining speed, rolling though the hills and valleys and screaming it's whistle at top speed towards the end. Sanders is good. Really good!

I hate to break up the bashing-session for Lawrence Sanders' FOURTH DEADLY SIN, but...well, no, I don't, actually. This prolific and unfortunately half-forgotten author deserves better than to be called a hack, and the book in question is much better than it is being given credit for here. In fact, it was this novel which turned me onto Lawrence Sanders, one of the best pure prose-writers of his or any other generation.

Like any successful writer, especially of easy-read bestsellers, Sanders was under a lot of pressure from his publishers to churn out copy, and was therefore capable of firing up a cigar, doing a shot of Bushmills, and pounding his typewriter until it coughed up the required 250 pages - quality be damned. Throttling your muse in this fashion seldom coughs up anything of lasting value: I remember reading THE TIMOTHY FILES and, with the exception of some of the descriptive writing, thinking it was the literary equivalent of eating popcorn and cotton candy for dinner. It may taste good going down, but where the F is the substance?

My answer to that, however, is "So what?" Sanders (who died in 1998) was writing in a genre with clearly-defined rules, rules which often all but preclude plot originality, character depth, or thoughtful prose, except in the most skillful and economical of novelists. Yet he managed to produce all three on a regular basis, and THE FOURTH DEADLY SIN is actually a pretty good example of all of those traits.

The DEADLY SIN series, four books in length, revolved around a retired (for the last three books) New York Chief of Detectives named Edward X. Delaney. Delaney, whose greatest passion is a well-made sandwich, is precisely the sort of old-school, thick-skinned, cigar-chewing detective you'd hate to share a cab with in real life, but as a reader, you can't get enough of. The crusty cop exterior is misleading, however; he's intelligent, well-read, has surprisingly expensive tastes, and is actually quite sensitive when he isn't reaming out uncooperative witnesses with expletive-ridden tirades. Bored by his early retirement, Delaney isn't unhappy about occasionally being tapped by his old friend and mentor, Deputy Superintendant Thorsen, to tackle the occasional unsolved homicide "under the radar." The fact that he's paid in Scotch is just a bonus.

The plot of T4DS, in a nutshell, is this: A wealthy, well-connected shrink named Ellerbee is murdered with a hammer in his Manhattan office, and the suspect list is as long as his Rolodex. Thorsen's protégé in the NYPD, Deputy Chief Suarez, is up for a big promotion but unable to crack the high-profile case, and that is making the ambitious Thorsen look like a sucker who backed the wrong horse. In hopes of rescuing his golden boy's reputation, and strengthening his own position in the Department, Thorsen puts the now-civilian Delaney on the job. The old Irishman must sift through crazy suspects to find a killer who might be even crazier - or just as sane as he is.

T4DS is a fairly straightforward whodunnit, differing from 1 and 3, which were actually psychological studies of the murderer; and it does recycle characters, and in some cases, entire passages of dialogue, from prior SINS. But since it was actually the first book in the series I ever read, and since the books themselves are meant to be stand-alones, I don't let this bother me too much and neither should you. The real reason to read any Sanders book is for the beautiful and evocative writing - when Sanders describes something, you see it, be it a gorgeous blonde, an ice-cold beer, or a New York street. The atmosphere of 1980s Manhattan is perfectly captured by his pen, and it isn't a cliché to say the city itself is a major character in the novel. If some of the others turn out to be right out of Central Casting, it doesn't detract much from the read.

The animosity towards this novel seems silly to me. Sanders was a formula writer, yes, but the formula was damn good. His sheer skill elevated the material, but even when it didn't, he was still no hack. In 4DS, he may not have produced anything more than a page-turning potboiler, but who gives a damn, when his description of a triple-decker sandwhich can actually make you hungry?

I enjoyed reading my very first Lawrence Sanders novel: The Fourth Deadly Sin published in 1984 in hardcover by G.P. Putnam and Sons. I liked the fact that Sanders worked so hard to make the novel reader-friendly; I liked reading about the six murder suspects and their fascinating, odd-ball mental illnesses; I especially liked the two incidents of vigilanty justice administered at the hands of the police, at the expense of the criminals.

The novel is all about finding the identity of the person(s)who ball-peen-hammered-to-death Dr. Simon Ellerbee, eminent New York psychiatrist at a hastly called 9:00 PM appointment/session set by the Dr. and one of his patients who could turn out to be the murderer/peener. As if Ellerbee's brutal murder wasn't bad enough, the good Dr. was rolled over on his back following his death/peening, and popped one last time in each eye with the peening end of the hammer.

There were a few things about the novel that troubled me: that Edward X. Delaney, Chief of Detectives in charge of the criminal investigation was older/retired and seemed so laid back. But at the same time, I enjoyed his methodical, but leisurely approach at discovering and assembling the complete "jigsaw picture puzzle" of clues to the crime. Another troubling point: That three quarters of the novel passed without a real clue as to who the killer was. This left me with a sinking feeling that Delaney's methodical approach might not work if the selected suspects were all innocent. And near the end of the novel when the killer's indentity was known, I realized how Delaney (and myself) had been set up by the killer and Lawrence Sanders.