The Con Man by Ed McBain
On the streets of Isola, a con artist operates, defrauding workers for small change, businessmen for thousands of dollars, and even women for a token amount of affection. By tricking them into parting with their money, you can travel the world, make a ton of money, and get to know lots of great people.
What remains to be seen is how far he will go…
The answer is cruelly made obvious when a young woman’s body ishes up in the Harb River. Steve Carella, a detective, is currently battling the clock to discover him before another con ends fatally.
The enigmatic tattoo on the young woman’s hand is his only lead, but it’s sufficient. Carella hits the streets in search of a con artist who swindles people out of their money—and their lives—in the city’s seediest nooks.
The Con Man, the third book in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series and a crime fiction classic, is hailed by the Daily Mirror as “the unchallenged master…
No one does it more expertly.
The Con Man by Ed McBain
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The language and attitudes in these early Ed McBain novels from the 1950s frequently look stiff, formal, and obsolete. They are now old enough to practically qualify as historical mysteries.
Did police officers actually use to speak that way? I seem to recall that Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner did, in fact, use some of these languages and exhibit some of those attitudes while watching reruns of “Dragnet” years after the series initially aired, so, okay, I think maybe they really did talk like that.
The writing is so sharp that it draws us in and keeps our attention even when the books feel dated. We have the impression that we are time travellers visiting another planet and seeing how its citizens interact.
Our attention is always piqued by the novels, and I believe that this fourth instalment in the 87th Precinct series is the best one yet. It is encouraging for my future reading of the series that each instalment has been an upgrade over the previous one.
A con artist starts out this tale by defrauding people of money—some modest amounts and some larger sums. The officer assigned to this case takes that personally and goes after his prey ferociously.
In the meantime, another, much more nefarious con artist advertises his services in magazine personal advertisements.
His objective is to find lonely women, and once he has taken whatever money they may have from them and persuaded them to get a tattoo that will identify them as his, he poisons them with arsenic and disposes of their bodies in the river.
Even when they are heavily weighed down, bodies dropped in rivers don’t always stay there. Thus, a “floater,” a poorly decomposed body that surfaces after being submerged for at least three months, finds its way to Precinct 87 and Isola police stations.
Assigned to the investigation, Detective Steve Carella and his partner Bert Kling begin attempting to determine the identity of the deceased woman, who was only wearing a bra and had no identification, as well as how she ended up in the water.
Yet another “floater” pops up before they can solve the first murder. Arsenic poisoning is shown to be an identical cause of death, and the woman had the same tattoo. Isola appears to be dealing with a potential serial killer.
