Ghosts by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)

[Calenture]

Photo by Bill Richmond

First published 1980; this BCA edition 1981

It was four days before Christmas. The woman who had been stabbed lay on the sidewalk by the apartment block where she lived. Looking like ghosts themselves, the detectives who stood in the falling snow round her body wanted to get away and finish their Christmas shopping. The crime was unseasonably early; suicides don’t start till Christmas Eve and then taper off until New Year’s Eve when there’s another rush of them.

But Marian Esposito was no suicide. Nor was the author of the best-selling Deadly Shades, whose body, stabbed in nineteen places, was found only minutes later – upstairs in his flat in the same building.

Detective Steve Carella of the Eighty-Seventh Precinct sometimes thought the city grew corpses like mushrooms. Even by his standards, he was in for some shocks before seeing the last of these two highly unseasonable killings.

A pair of near-nymphomaniac sisters, he could, so to speak, take in his stride. But a journey with the author’s mistress, a professional medium, to the old house which had figured in Deadly Shades, proved the most terrifying experience of his life. And if he did not end totally convinced by parapsychological phenomena, he solved his case when he found there are more kinds of ghosts than one.

Hmm, not sure if that cover blurb doesn’t render my write-up redundant... oh well.

Christmas in Isola. Outside an apartment building, the body of a young woman lies in the snow. The boys from the 87th squad investigate; but almost before the dead woman is cold (and it’s cold in Isola this Christmas) another murder is reported in the same apartment building. The second body is that of Gregory Craig, author of a best-selling book, Deadly Shades, about a haunted house he stayed in some years before.

Detectives Carella and Hawes catch the squeal and are the lucky ones elected to spend Christmas tracking down the perpetrator of an apparent double-murder.

Craig’s girlfriend Hillary Scott bears an uncanny resemblance to Carella’s wife Teddy (the Carella relationship has to be one of the most attractive in detective fiction). Hillary Scott is a medium and she claims that a ghost murdered Gregory Craig.

The ghost has also apparently ripped-off over eighty-thousand dollars worth of designer jewellery.

Inexorably, the plot leads towards the old house where Gregory Craig lived whilst writing Deadly Shades. It also leads to one of the most frightening experiences of Steve Carella’s life.

This is one of the best 87th Precinct mysteries, tense and funny by turns (the chapter where a gang of crooks steal an entire street is a gem). It’s also brutal at times, with that precise, near-documentary feel which McBain (Evan Hunter) carries off so well.

Don't worry; no need to worry about any 'rational ending' spoiling this one.

[Johnlprobert]

Does anyone know what that font is called that has been used for the title 'Ghosts' on that cover?

It was used a fair bit on the Hammer films and Tyburn pictures title sequences & I've been trying to find out

[stuyoung]

I've only read one McBain novel, Tricks, set at Halloween where among various other story threads a gang uses their trick or treat costumes to blend into the crowd after robbing liquor stores. The novel was quite good fun and I've picked up a bunch of other McBain's since but haven't found the time to read them yet.

[Michael Connolly]

Ed McBain's Calypso (1980) is really a horror novel, very similar in theme to a Japanese horror film of 2001, which I won't name as I don't want to give anything away. You won't forget the shocking end of Calypso in a hurry.