Ed McBain's The Con Man

"Meanwhile back at the morgue..."

The first chapter introduces two cases: Arthur Brown and Bert Kling interview a young black woman working as a maid who's been conned out of five dollars by a pretend preacher, and Steve Carella is called in where a dead body of a woman is found floating by the docks.

 

Brown is determined to find the con man; Carella first has to determine if what he's looking at is a crime, but it is. His floater didn't drown, but went into the water already dead from arsenic poisoning. ("Back at the morgue...")

 

Then a second woman is found floating in the harbor, also dead from arsenic poisoning. Both women have tattoos on their hand.

 

This is the fourth of McBain's series of 87th Precinct novels. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it was a particularly strong entry in the series. McBain can occasionally be didactic about police methods--he does famously precede his novels with:

 

"The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."

In this one, we learned how fingerprints are taken from dead bodies, which was grisly, and maybe interesting? But there was too much about how con men do their thing, which didn't have much to do with our particular con men. But the final chase was certainly thrilling enough...

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1957). Policeman.

 

I suppose that's Steve Carella on the cover in plainclothes, and Fred di Angelo, the beat cop to whom the body was first reported behind him.