Dragnet probably spawned plenty of fictional procedural
series, but two of the best were published as paperback
originals. You all know about one of them, Ed McBain's 87th
Precinct series, which eventually went into hardback and is
still going on. The other one began about a year before
McBain's, and hardly anyone remembers it. Too bad, because
it's a good one. The author was Jonathan Craig, and the
series is set in a (named) New York City. The main characters
are two homicide cops, Pete Selby and Stan Rayder. They work
out of the 6th precinct, and most of their cases (I think
there were 10, all for Gold Medal) are in Greenwich Village.
The book I picked to re-read (for no particular reason) was
CASE OF THE PETTICOAT MURDER (1958).
The book opens, as nearly every Selby/Rayder case with the
discovery of a beautiful nude murder victim. It proceeds with
very little action but a lot of attention of details
(both of forensics and of regular police routine). And with
plenty of cross examination by Selby. Craig was really good
with dialog, and the story moves right along. Like all the
crimes Selby and Rayder get involved with, this one has
plenty of sexual overtones. Here's Selby: "People do weird
things for sexual enjoyment; strangling themselves and others
is only one of them. The idea, of course, is to stop just the
other side of climax and just this side of death; but by the
time that point is reached, the victim is often in such a
state of excitement that he no longer recognizes it. In our
years together, Stan and I have cut down a lot of them: men
dressed in women's clothing, girls with their bodies
coveredwith obscene words written in lipstick, men and women
with their stomachs bristling with needles or forearms livid
with cigarette burns." Pretty strong stuff for 1958. (Trust
me; I was there.) But at the same time, there's Gold Medal's
apparent ban on the grosser body-function words. One
character, for example, is "peed off."
If you read several Selby books in a row, there would
probably be a sameness about them, but I highly recommend at
least one. Why didn't they hit the big time like McBain's
books? One reason was almost certainly Craig's decision to
write in the first person. He doesn't have the big cast that
McBain does. And of course McBain's plots are a lot more
varied.
Bill Crider
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