I give this book five stars not because it’s deep or life-changing. It’s entertainment. It doesn’t attempt the match the depth and insight of the great classics. I give it five stars because it’s a master class in storytelling, and for what it is, it’s very good.

I had not read Ed McBain before, though I had certainly heard of him. McBain is one of Evan Hunter’s many pen names. Hunter wrote across a variety of genres, including sci-fi, mystery, crime, children’s books, and possibly porn, though he never fessed up to it. In what must be one of the most unexpected collaborations in film history, he adapted one of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories into the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

I picked this up in a bookstore the other day because I liked the lurid, 1950s pulp style of the cover, and the opening chapter was good. I hadn’t read Ed McBain before, and I was surprised to read a first novel in which the plotting, dialog, and characters are solid throughout.

The main character, Ray Stone, is an addict who finds himself framed for a murder and has to prove his innocence. Some elements of the book are dated, such as the descriptions of fight scenes, which play out exactly as they did in the movies of the forties and fifties–a little slow, with guys in suits kicking each other in the shins and trying to wrestle pistols from each other’s hands. Some of the dated elements of the book, however, actually make it interesting. This book was first copyrighted in 1952, and slang of jazz musicians in this novel didn’t seem to appear in film until a few years later.