Cut Me In (Hard Case Crime Book 122)

Literary agent Josh Blake finds his partner Del dead in his office one morning, three bullet holes in his head. Josh never much liked Del, but an important contract worth thousands of dollars is also missing from the office safe, and Josh must solve the murder if he wants to get it back.This book suffers from uninteresting characters, unbelievable situations, and lack of consistent tone. It cannot decide if it wants to be a hardboiled noir murder mystery or a social satire.Nobody seems to really care much about the murder… not even when more bodies begin to pile up. Instead, there is a lot of farce about the publishing industry. For example, there is a desperate young writer character who keeps coming to blows with Josh in every groan-inducing scene in which they meet because the agency will not publish his bloated first novel.Even the missing contract is a sort of slap in the face to agents. Josh is trying to use the contract to essentially blackmail a Hollywood producer. He is threatening to cheapen a valuable literary property by turning it into a low-budget tv series if he does not get a 25% cut of a movie deal. In other words, Josh is willing to scuttle a lucrative deal for his client—the writer—for his own financial gain.Women keep throwing themselves at Josh in the most preposterous come-on sequences, but he ignores most of them because he is so intent on finding his missing contract. Yet, apparently no one thought to make multiple copies of it when it was first written. (I could go more into this glaring plot hole, but to do so would actually spoil one of few good twists, so I will leave it at that).The final resolution of the mystery is transparent and flimsy.Included at the end of this book is the short story “Now Die In It”, featuring Matt Cordell from The Gutter and the Grave. It is much better than this novel, and it made me wish Hard Case Crime had brought out all the Cordell stories in a single volume rather than republish this dud.

I haven’t read a whole lot of Ed McBain, but that’s an error I mean to correct, particularly after reading Hard Case Crime’s latest reprint, Cut Me In. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this reprint of McBain’s 1954 novel, which was originally published under the pen name Richard Marsten. In the early days, before he became known for his 87th Street Precinct series, McBain published under such names as Evan Hunter, Richard Marsten, and Hunt Collins. Back in those days, many authors did so, either because they were writing for wildly different audiences or under contract under one name or another.The publisher’s blurb for Cut Me In talks about having to find a killer because that’s what you do when your partner, Del Gilbert, is murdered. For many of us, that brings back memories of Spade and Archer, particularly when you find out that the partners didn’t particularly like each other and the surviving one had scandalous thoughts about the dead one’s wife. And, to top it off, the police detective is suspicious. But, McBain did not give us a remake of any Maltese Falcon novel. Indeed, Josh Blake and Del Gilbert are not detectives at all, but literary agents. Kind of a different twist for a hardboiled pulpy crime novel.This novel works really well, starting with Robert McGinnis’s excellent understated cover art. What really makes it though more than anything else is the top-notch pulpy writing. I never realized how good McBain really was. There is something about the way he writes in this novel that makes you see, feel, and hear the descriptions, beginning with the girl sitting at the kitchen table with the steam rising from the coffee cup, her legs crossed, the ankle straps, the nylon stockings stretched taut against the curve of her leg, the pale orange lipstick that accentuated her blondness and added just a touch of color to her full lips. Then there’s the description of how Blake feels with the buzz saw inside his skull and the decaying caterpillar in his mouth. Then, Blake talks about the top of his skull blowing off when he sees the safe open in his office. And, all throughout the novel McBain throws in these terrific pulpy phrases so, as the reader, we can feel the tension in the room, the distraction, the eyes roaming, the sounds coming through the windows. You can feel the shock when someone hears news and it is almost as if she were hit in the stomach and she holds onto her glass as if she were holding a life preserver. There’s other sounds too – like the shrill clamor of the telephone slicing into the air, shredding the silence, leaving nothing but the heat.What’s amazing though is that the novel written and first published over sixty years ago feels fresh and new today. It’s not stuck in a time warp as so many old-time novels feel. There’s nothing necessarily that places this in the fifties except when you realize no one has cell phones.It is an easy book to read and the pages just fly off your hands as you thumb through it. This is precisely the kind of book I look to find in Hard Case Crime’s catalog. There might at times be a bit more dialogue and a bit less action than one would want, but not enough to detract from the read. Plot-wise, it gives you some themes that you will find in other crime novels from that era, the partner murdered, the widow, the mistress, the cynical homicide detective, the innocent man who unfortunately finds the body and has a motive for murder, but the writing and the feel are what puts this novel on the top shelf for me.As an added bonus, at the end of the novel, Hard Case Crime also gives us a short novella) featuring Matt Cordell (The Gutter and The Grave). This is a classic 1950s hardboiled detective story with teenagers hanging out at the ice cream parlor. It's definitely worth reading.

It is hard to associate the poor quality of storytelling here with Ed McBain. Published in the early fifties, and out of print for almost 60 years, 'Cut Me In' features murder and mayhem in the publishing world. The writing it raw, unpolished, and more like something James Hadley Chase would have churned out. There is almost no sense that the writer who created this would go on to create the 87th Precinct series - one of the very finest police procedural series of novels ever written. To accompany this low-grade piece of pulp writing, 'Cut Me In' also features an equally raw novella from much the same period of McBain's career. These Hard Case Crime titles are very hit and miss. There is a reason so much of this material has been out of print for so long: it just isn't very good.

Classic McBain. A fantastic story with a great cover. What’s not to like?

Great book as are all of his books, the man was a genius.

Just love all Ed McBain books nice to find others that I have never read, just wish there where more.

Brilliant