Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe

Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe

published 1967

 

 

Oh but this is a proper book, a real novel, a great crime story and one to remember.

Jim Noy over at Invisible Event blogged on it. In my comment on his (very much recommended) post I said ‘I have read Westlake books that I loved, and Westlake books that I threw across the room in despair. Hard to tell in advance which this would be’

Tucker Coe is one of the multiple pseudonyms of Donald E Westlake. Brothers Keepers (2xposts on the blog) is a wonderful book by him. His Parker/Stark books are (to me) throw across the room examples. There you go.

But this short book was as good as Jim led me to expect. I can’t just keep repeating what he said (bad blog etiquette) but I will quote his opening line:

Would sir care for some crippling sadness with his impossible crime?

As Tucker Coe, the author wrote several books about disgraced ex-cop Mitch Tobin: this is the second in the series. He is called in to help a distant cousin, Robin, a young woman who, with friends, is starting up a coffeeshop in the West Village of New York: very cool and trendy nowadays, back in 1967 not so much. (It is taken for granted that the coffee shop will fail, rather than turn into Central Perk). When Tobin turns up to see why a difficult cop keeps hanging around, he finds himself at the scene of a dramatic and bloody double murder. Young Robin is very much in the frame, because it seems no-one else could have got in or out of the apartment above the coffee shop. Reluctantly Tobin starts looking into the case, helped by the coffee-shop crew.

Having referenced the TV series Friends, it is almost more like an Enid Blyton adventure – these are much-loved by both Jim and me, perhaps that’s why we liked this one so much? The last thing you would be expecting: the young people gather in the Tobin kitchen, and his wife gives them iced tea and cookies while they talk about the victim and his contacts. There is even a fat girl to take the role of Fatty from the Five Find-Outers books. Vicki is ‘short and stout and dressed all in black’, but although they are all seen as Bohemian Village types, she would ‘with only minor changes of dress – and, probably, speech – fit right in at any rural church picnic in the country.’ Later, a character says Vicki should work harder in the café ‘sweat some of that extra lard off her’. We certainly hadn’t heard of fat-shaming had we?

But Tobin focuses on Hulmer Fass, a very charming young black man, supersmart and witty, who drives him around and eases the way when he has to talk to black witnesses. Their relationship is a delight.

I’ve been looking at long-hot-summer books and this is certainly one: the book is short, and takes place over a couple of days, and you feel you are sweating through Manhattan with them.

Tobin goes to visit a religious group who used to live in the coffee-shop building, and has fascinating encounters with the leader of the cult. He meets with some old friends of one of the victims, and talks to the pimp of another. 

Westlake/Coe can create a vivid character in a few lines – many people here are only in one scene, but they live on in your memory.

One associate, dressed in bright colours and drinking in a bar, discusses the murders: ‘Oh the hooker! God wasn’t that a touch? Pure Dostoievski’. He is in the book for around 5 pages but stays in your mind. He says ‘I’ll wear my lemon-lime shirt. It’s short sleeves, yellow and green vertical stripes. I doubt there’s be more than on such shirt in the [bar] in the middle of the day.’

There was a strange description of the mother of Robin the suspect:

‘She had dressed herself in the sort of clothing that wage-earner wives buy themselves every fifth Easter, lavenders and pinks and plums which fade and are somehow gray despite their colours before the last of the Easter dinner leftovers are out of the refrigerator.’

I thought this was weirdly snobbish and strange, and so I decided to give Rita an equally strange hat, a very abstract version but rather splendid:

 

 

Top picture was taken in St Mark’s place in 1967 – from the collection of a photographer called James Jowers. His pictures of the time and place are great favourites of mine: I’ve been using them since early days of the blog - recently in the post on after Delores by Sarah Schulman. (and before you tell me, I know it’s East Village rather than West Village, but I still feel the photo is right)