Guns - Ed McBain

The focus of Ed McBain's take on crime in Guns is, unsurprisingly, on guns. You can look at the logistics of carrying out a hold-up on a New York liquor store in a number of ways and Colley has been weighting the options up. The fact that it's in the middle of an August heatwave could play a part in how things play out, he's a little superstitious that it's the thirteenth job he has worked on with Jocko and their driver Teddy, but the one factor that is inevitably going to be the most significant on this or any job is the use of guns. But Colley trusts these guys and, after all, they even gifted him with the gun he carries after being released from prison, so despite his reservations outside the store, Colley is in.

He's right to be worried though because the thing with guns is, while it gives you enormous power and control, what happens when someone else in the liquor store also has a gun? And what if it's two cops holding guns? The first 30 or so pages of Guns are a masterclass of classic crime fiction, establishing character, situation, introducing foreboding with all those undercurrents and considerations of what it means to hold a gun and pull an armed robbery. And considering the direction of travel, the next problem Colley has to get his head around is consideration of what it means to shoot a cop.

The same forensic approach to situations and the underlying implications of what every next minute brings, the menace and foreboding growing minute by minute, is carried through subsequent chapters as Colley desperately - and increasingly desperately - tries to find ways to pull himself out of the hole he is in. And since it's all about guns, they feature and relate back to many other issues with crime, gangs and drugs from Harlem to the Bronx. Poverty in those communities is also a factor in crime, the psychology of gangs is explored and the attraction of violence, but there are always choices to be made. Having a gun however tends to push you in a certain direction. 

That direction is one that can only lead to trouble, and that's where Guns takes Colley. The remainder of the novel is a series of escalating deteriorating events that are fast moving and explosive. It's very much from the perspective of a criminal on the run, in thrall to the power in his hands. There is a sexual undercurrent throughout, Colley aroused by women and guns, confident of his powers of attraction to women, the two going almost hand in hand throughout.

The approach is wonderfully cinematic but despite the lurid content the novel has considerable literary merit. The psychological and sociological underpinning is there, but it never gets overly academic either. Make no mistake, Guns is bloody and violent, with very strong direct writing, offensive attitudes, racist and misogynistic language that would be problematic now, but McBain takes it to the necessary lengths for the situation, authentic but also pushing it into pulp of the noirest hue.

Reading notes: Guns by Ed McBain was first published 1977. I read the Pan Books paperback from 1980.