The Gutter and the Grave - Ed McBain

Written in 1958, Ed McBain's The Gutter and the Grave is a classic PI crime drama from this period. Matt Cordell is as seedy as they come. He's at a particularly low end; a drunk, his reputation shattered and licence revoked, he still hasn't gotten over his wife leaving him. He's a bum, unshaven and living in a slum in the Bowery in New York, but a friend comes there looking for him. Jonny Bridges, a tailor, is concerned that someone has been dipping into the till, and he since he only has one full time employee Dom Archese, he doesn't really need a PI to work it out. Reluctantly however, Cordell is persuaded to look into the matter, but he no sooner turns up at the shop than they find Archese shot dead but not apparently before he was able to chalk the initials JB on the wall beside him.

Despite his misgivings about the timing of this, Cordell knows he can't afford to let himself get involved with the police, so he lets Bridges handle the inevitable charge alone while he tries to find out who is behind the murder and the missing money. This leads to complications with Archese's wife Christine, her sister, Laraine, a talented and beautiful singer in a jazz band who, despite not being at his best, Matt inevitably gets mixed up with. Matters only get more confusing when he gets a different account of how the land lies from rival PI Dennis Knowles and his associate detective Fran. Somehow - as only happens in hard-edged PI crime thrillers like this - Fran is also unfathomably attracted to the romantically tragic figure of the down and out Cordell.

Someone is lying, or all of them are lying.

Which is what makes The Gutter and the Grave a terrifically entertaining book. It's fairly standard fare for the genre, but highly readable as our PI gets pummelled by thugs, has a few run-ins with the cops and trades some quips wonderfully with Detective Miskler, who is as dry as they come, all the while brooding over a cheating wife he has divorced, but bedding and necking beautiful dames who wear little clothes and tend to throw themselves at him. One really nice original detail I loved in the book was the description of the swinging hepcat jazz scene in New York, which just saturates the work in it own period colour and mood.

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