Tricks [Paperback]

There were great classic crime dramas, like "Ice" and "Poison," taut psychological thrillers like "Lullaby," and then this, 1987's "Tricks," which is hard to classify but perhaps the most entertaining of all 87th Precinct novels. While other 87th Precinct novels have major and minor storylines, "Tricks" presents us with three very different central plots. All are cleverly connected to the deceptively simple title, a McBain trademark: There's a magician who disappeared as part of his big finale during a show and seems to be turning up in pieces around the city. There's a group of trick-or-treaters shooting up liquor stores and then vanishing into the night in their innocent-looking children's disguises. Then there's undercover detective Eileen Burke, looking for "tricks" of another kind, namely those slashing prostitutes to death in Isola's dangerous Canal Zone.

Each story works in a different way. The one with the undercover cop is a suspense story focused on Burke, a recovering rape victim who is probably McBain's best female creation. The one with the missing magician is a nicely-crafted mystery that caught me in the end by complete surprise. The trick-or-treater story, bloody as it is, is funny as well in a brutal Quentin Tarantino sort of way.

It's nice to have this book not as three good short stories, though they are that, but as a glimpse of detectives in action during a particularly bloody and strange Halloween. The sequences work off of each other in tandem, forming a kind of rhythm that gels into something bigger than any one of the stories. There's long sections of dialogue set in the precinct house where conversations about two different cases are alternately quoted and blended one into the other without identifying the speakers. Writer's vanity? Perhaps, but it works at establishing both tension and dramatic pace.

There's also McBain's trademark humor. At one crime scene where part of a human torso is found in a garbage can, a homicide detective regales a visibly sickened colleague. "You won't need an ambulance for this one...All you need is a shopping bag."

The medical examiner arrives. "What have we got here?" he asks.

"Just this chest here," the homicide detective replies.

"Very nice. Do you want me to pronounce it dead, or what?"

And then there's Andy Parker's eventful Halloween night out, at a party with a onetime murder witness he has the hots for which turns out to be less of a break from duty than he expects. Parker's a funny and rich character here, not the 87th's finest but not someone you can pigeonhole as a miserable failure, either. You actually root for him here despite yourself.

Even the minor characters breathe in "Tricks." At one point, two detectives visit two old guys at a school at night, a custodian and his checker-playing buddy. It's an inconsequential scene in the narrative, but McBain still fills out some five pages with tiny details that add color, interest, and life. The custodian thinks the cops are on to him stealing school supplies. He mops his brow. The cops wonder what he is hiding. The checkers buddy explains he is a widower who has nothing better to do. The vignette ends, and so it goes.

It's hard enough to end one good story in a satisfactory way. How McBain manages to do it so brilliantly in triplicate boggles the mind. With the lack of a clear central focus, this may not be the most representative of 87th Precinct novels, but it is very enjoyable and even a non-crime fiction fan will likely savor and marvel at its many twists and turns.