Afterword


















WAY BACK WHEN—early in 1959, it must have been—I was still married to a woman whose maiden name was Anita Melnick. Her father’s name was Harry Melnick, to whom this book is dedicated. He’s dead now, but he got a big kick out of the book when it was first published. I hope my former wife enjoys it as much now. Memories don’t come cheap, you know.

Harry used to own a women’s dress shop on West 14th Street in New York City. All at once, most of the things that happen to Dave Raskin in these pages started happening to my father-in-law. Eventually, all the pranks stopped. Harry never found out who had targeted him for all the practical jokes. Nor was there a bank under his loft. But he had provided me with an idea—and the springboard for a new character.

Before I wroteThe Heckler , eleven 87th Precinct novels had already been published. We were trying to establish a new series, you see. A rule of thumb for any new mystery series is that if you haven’t hit the bestseller list after five tries, go hang up your sweat-pants, Gertie.

I wrote the first three books of the series in 1956, and the next two in 1957. By my count, that came to five books—and still no bestseller. Maybe because they were still being published as paperback originals. I don’t think there evenwas a paperback bestseller list back then. Progress, lads, progress!

The first book published in 1958 was also a paperback original. But withKiller’s Wedge that same year, Simon and Schuster brought out the first of the books in hardcover. It startled the entire civilized world! I jest, Maude. It would take a long, long time before one of the Eight-Sevens hit theNew York Times bestseller list. So much for rules of thumb about mystery series. And, besides, who’s counting?

Anyway, there were eleven published books by the end of 1959, when I must have deliveredThe Heckler because it was first published in hardcover sometime in 1960; I’m not now sure of the month. But I can remember an evening long before then—in 1955, to be exact, while I was still writingCop Hater , the first book in the series. I was riding in a car with a friend of mine on our way to meeting his wife and my then-wife (yes, Harry Melnick’s daughter, Anita), whom we were taking to dinner. I was inordinately silent, and suddenly I snapped my fingers and shouted, “A deaf mute!” which was the equivalent back then of the wordEureka!

I had been pondering what kind of girlfriend would be right for Steve Carella, you see. Carella was merely one of the cops in the first book. I chose a deaf mute (I know, I know, the politically correct expression these days is “speech and hearing impaired,” but Teddy Carella knows where she’s coming from, and so do I) because I felt I could place her in desperate situations from which she had to be rescued by her stalwart police detective husband. I soon tired of these “Mr. and Mrs. North” shenanigans, however. Teddy was too strong a character to need rescuing all the time.

By the time I started concocting the villain ofThe Heckler , I knew that the person Steve Carella loved most in the entire universe was his wife, Teddy Carella, who was deaf and could not speak, but whom neither he nor she herself considered “handicapped.” It occurred to me: Hey! What if the guy who’s bugging Dave Raskin isalso deaf? I had no idea at the time that the “deaf man” would become a recurring character—he’s now been in five books—or that he would grow to become Steve Carella’s nemesis, in much the same way that Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes’s. I don’t believe in the concept of good and evil. Evil is a theological term. But I knew that Teddy Carella was deaf and reallygood , and I figured if I could make this guy deaf and reallybad , I would have a very nice contrast.

I think it’s interesting, by the way, that most people don’t waste too much sympathy on deaf persons. They’ll risk their lives to help a blind man cross the street in heavy traffic, but the best a deaf person can hope to evoke is impatience. I hope the deaf man in these pages inspires a bit more than that. Fear perhaps? Perhaps even awe. It ain’t easy being a villain.

It ain’t easy writing about one, either.

There would be more than five deaf man novels were it not for the fact that’s he’s brilliant, and I’m not. He must forever come up with these extraordinary schemes, you see, which are foiled not by the Keystone Kops of the Eight-Seven, but instead by accident. That’s hard to do. I like to think there’ll be another deaf man novel down the pike. He still owes something to a woman named Gloria, I believe, who shot him and left him tied to a bed inMischief . Oh dear, one mustn’t do such things to someone like the deaf man, must one?

But we shall see.

Meanwhile…

Harry…thanks again.

Without you, this book wouldn’t have happened.

Ed McBain

Weston, CT

June 2002

Загрузка...