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Fat Ollie's Book: A Novel of the 87th Precinct

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Ed McBain likes the titles of his 87th Precinct series to bear more than one meaning, and "Fat Ollie's Book" is no exception. Fat Ollie Weeks, detective of the neighboring 88th Precinct, stands at the center of this novel, having caught the call on the murder of an aspiring politician. Fat Ollie, not an incompetent detective but quite willing to let others carry the load if circumstances warrant, shifts the burden of the investigation to Steve Carella and Bert Kling while he pursues a case far more important to himself - the theft of the sole existing copy of the manuscript of, well, Fat Ollie's book, a detective thriller written by him to cash in on the lucrative fiction market dominated by a bunch of women amateurs who wholly lack his real world expertise and insights. The book took him months to write, too, at least three or four months, all thirty-six pages of it, and he wants it back, no matter the effort required or whose toes must be stomped on.

Fat Ollie, it should be said, is a racist, but that is an inadequate description. He is also an ethnic, religious, and sexist bigot. He despises, in short, everyone not exactly like himself. Come to think of it, he also despises anybody who IS like himself. Oblivious to the insults he showers upon others and sensitive to slights from others, he nonetheless is not absolutely without a touch of oafish charm, just enough to intrigue a Puerto Rican uniformed female cop caught up in the murder case and just enough to keep the reader interested in such an otherwise unsympathetic protagonist.

As usual in the 87th Precinct novels, the plot twists around itself, sweeping up a collection of odd characters marching unknowingly to inevitable interaction and intermeshed fates. Along the way, we get to read - in short doses - Ollie's truly dreadful attempt at literary creation, so bad as to become bizarre fun. And we follow the developing stories of McBain's familiar stable of detectives from the more than fifty novels that have preceded this one. No 87th Precinct fan should miss this one, another top-notch entry in this series filled with dark humor.

In his fifty-second 87th Precinct novel, Ed McBain features the loathsome and obese sexist bigot, Fat Ollie, who has finally finished his own police procedural, "Report to the Commissioner." Oliver Weeks sees himself as a literary lion in the making. The protagonist of his rather brief novel is Ollie's female and slim alter ego, whom he names Olivia Wesley Watts. Unfortunately, Fat Ollie never got around to making a copy of his manuscript, which he composed on an old fashioned typewriter. When Ollie leaves the novel in a dispatch case in his car, a junkie steals the case and its precious contents.

"Fat Ollie's Book" has many of McBain's trademark touches. It is politically incorrect and filled with flippant dialogue. The author seamlessly threads three main plot lines throughout the book and they cleverly overlap at times. A prominent councilman who may be planning to run for mayor is shot while preparing for a rally. A pair of cops is hoping to interrupt a big drug sale. And, of course, Ollie is determined to find the perp who ripped off his precious book.

McBain's 87th precinct novels are always entertaining, and "Fat Ollie's Book" gets high marks for its large and colorful cast of characters, its fast moving story and its self-mockery. McBain quotes large sections of Ollie's book, and through Ollie, McBain makes fun of the conventions of the police procedural. McBain's fictional city of Isola is a homage to New York City, with its high-octane excitement, its political pressure and the desperation and chutzpah of its criminal element.

Ed McBain has won every award that is available to a mystery writer. "Fat Ollie's Book" makes it clear why McBain has remained successful for so many years, while lesser talents have fallen by the wayside. This novel, like so many others in this series, is witty, smart and irreverent, and I recommend it.

Every time I read an Ed McBain novel (and I've probably read half of the more than 50 he's written, each a gem), I wonder why it's not sitting atop a best-seller list (arbitrary as those lists may be). Mystery-lovers of the world, take notice! McBain (aka Evan Hunter) is a brilliant writer, the kind who dreams up ingenious plots and then populates them with an array of diverse characters, filled with spunk and armed with witty banter, who will make you laugh out loud and might - just might - even cause you to shed a tear or two.

In this latest winner, Detective Oliver Wendell "Fat Ollie" Weeks of the 88th Precinct has written his first novel - a police procedural. Unfortunately, just as he's taking his precious tome (all 36 - yes, 36 - pages of it) to be photocopied (somehow Fat Ollie hasn't seen fit to purchase a computer), he gets called to a murder investigation, and wouldn't you know it, someone filches the sure-to-be-a-best-seller (!) from the back of his squad car while he's off fighting crime.

Can Fat Ollie find time to recover the manuscript while solving the murder of a political up-and-comer? Heck, should he even be concentrating on the murder when the fruit of his labor has disappeared? Truth and fiction are tightly intertwined as Fat Ollie teams up with the boys from the nearby 87th Precinct (familiar to and well-loved by McBain fans everywhere) to figure it all out.

McBain's sense of humor is beyond priceless, if that's possible, and this story is a grand piece of entertainment. I enjoyed every page. Don't miss it.

Those who pull an Ed McBain book off the shelf, or take one to the check out, are unlikely to be disappointed. This 2002 offering is as good as they usually are and funnier than most. Occupying most space, in terms of physical bulk and narrative focus, is Oliver Wendell Weeks, a cop otherwise known as Fat Ollie. Affecting a style of delivery modeled on that of W C Fields (who remembers him?), and able to boast that his music teacher successfully taught him the first three notes of "Night and Day", Fat Ollie has further displayed his talents by writing a police procedural novel. Unfortunately for him it is stolen, but fortunately for us its full text is interlaced with everything else that unfolds in this rich McBain extravaganza. Thrown in also are comments about Internet sites like this one, and those who read and write reviews thereon.

This book contains the worst crime fiction Ed McBain has ever produced, and that's meant as a complement. After all, it takes a gifted writer to write prose as bad as McBain produces on behalf of one of his less noble fictional creations, Detective First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks. Weeks figures if he solves the crimes, what's the trick in making one up on paper and getting it on the best seller's lists? Not only does he have a well-worn list of "how-tos" for creating crime fiction ("BE SURE TO AVOID AMBIGUITY"), he's been doing his homework surveying the marketplace by reading Amazon.com reviews.

Clearly this guy is in trouble...

Weeks has been floating around McBain's 87th Precinct novels for a while, and now he gets center stage. Though he's with the 88th Precinct, and much disliked by the 87th Precinct detectives (and many readers) because of his nasty manner and blunt racist approach to life, he's still a decent detective.

Weeks kind of works as a protagonist only if you are playing it for laughs, and McBain is here. "Fat Ollie's Book" is one of the more comic 87th Precinct offerings. People still die, and others mourn, but this time there's more emphasis on laughs, incongruity, and malaprops, particularly when it comes to Weeks' novel. He decides it should star someone like himself (maybe not quite as fat) but female, since he discovers women buy more mysteries than men.

It's not exactly like Weeks transforms himself into Phil Donohue. His opus, "Report To The Commissioner," includes references to the narrator's ample bust and what a hot dish she is in general. She's writing from a locked room, you see, waiting for someone to kill her, and the first thing she wants you to know is there's a run in her stockings...

Then someone steals his manuscript, and Weeks goes on the warpath to get it back.

As a crime drama, "Fat Ollie's Book" is problematic. There's a couple of cases being worked on in tandem with Ollie's crisis, neither which holds much interest. The other detectives, like Steve Carella and Bert Kling, go through their paces but don't manage anything particularly interesting this time around. A problem with this book is that Weeks is probably the most colorful character anyway, and pushing him up to the foreground, especially as entertainingly as this, makes the others pale by comparison.

But as a crime comedy, "Fat Ollie's Book" is a nice reminder of a key reason so many of us visit the 87th Precinct: McBain's one funny writer, and he can spin a yarn.

Pity poor Ollie can't. But at least he can dance, play "Night And Day" on the piano, and come up for a derogatory epithet for anyone else on the planet.

McBain has done it again with his latest 87th Precinct book, although this time the primary character is Oliver Wendell Weeks, aka Fat Ollie. Fat Ollie is a fun character - his inner thoughts about those other than himself are hilarious to the extreme. Love the fact that he doesn't think he's biased against anyone - just discerning. The way he constantly debates with himself the rules of grammar (he's a writer now) was just funny as heck. I'd like to see more books featuring this character. Carella and Kling are only on the periphery here and there's not much of a mystery, but Fat Ollie takes up the slack and does it well.

One of the bits of information bestowed upon the reader perusing FAT OLLIE'S BOOK is that Steve Carella is 40 years old. Given that he was around 25 when Ed McBain published COP HATER, the first 87th Precinct novel, in 1956, that certainly demonstrates an ability to age gracefully! Like Carella, the 87th Precinct series and McBain have aged well and, if FAT OLLIE'S BOOK is any indication, still have plenty of life.

FAT OLLIE'S BOOK, while being "A Novel of the 87th Precinct" is also technically a novel of the 88th Precinct. FAT OLLIE is Fat Ollie Weeks, a detective assigned to that particular precinct house. He is held in good-natured contempt by his fellow officers for various reasons, most of them legitimate ones. Weeks becomes embroiled in the affairs of the 87th Precinct when he answers a call concerning the murder of Lester Henderson, a city councilman. Weeks' automobile is broken into while he is at the scene of the crime. The thief makes off with two of Weeks' possessions: an attaché case that he does not value much and the only copy of his manuscript, Report to the Commissioner, which he values very much. Weeks is, of course, incensed and spends almost as much time methodically tracking down the thief as he does Henderson's murderer. He is assisted in the latter endeavor by a couple of the lads of the 87th --- this is, after all, a novel of the 87th Precinct --- as well as by Officer Patricia Gomez, a newly minted cop who found the murder weapon in the Henderson case and who becomes, against all odds, the willing object of Weeks's love interest.

With respect to his search for his erstwhile manuscript, well, Report to the Commissioner indirectly becomes the catalyst for the involvement of a couple of prostitutes in a cocaine rip-off. McBain, as always, brings all of this off so wonderfully that he makes it look easy --- which it isn't --- and makes it wonderful, which it always is. McBain also leaves some threads unraveling within the personal lives of some of his characters, just to be sure that the reader will be back for the next installment. Be back?! Hah! Read one and try to stay away!

McBain shows no signs of wear, tear or rust as he approaches his half-century of chronicling the 87th Precinct. He seems incapable of writing badly, though there is an example in FAT OLLIE'S BOOK of what he is able to do in that regard, when he sets his mind to it. Let's just say that Weeks isn't half the writer that McBain is and count us the luckier for it.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

I just finished this book and thought it one of the best of the 87th Precinct novels so far. Oliver Wendall Weeks, aka Fat Ollie, is so obnoxious, he's hilarious. He's obese but considers himself simply a large man who hates fat people. As McBain describes him, he is an equal opportunity bigot. McBain gives his reader something you can count on him to provide with each book: the joke. I always look forward to that.

In this installment, Ollie has written a book, all 36 pages, which reads like an actual police report. Ollie's car is burglarized while he's investigating the fatal shooting of city councilman Lester Henderson, and his manuscript is stolen. The burglar, Emilio Herrera is also a transvestite and somewhat dim-witted. He thinks Ollie's book is an actual police report. From there, the book just gets better and better. The investigation into the councilman's death is mainly handled by the best of the 87th detectives: Steve Carella and Bert Kling.

There isn't much of a mystery here - I figured that out rather quickly. But this is a wonderful book which is so funny in places, you'll laugh out loud.

This is the best 87th Precinct novel so far -- even though much of it is actually the 88th Precinct. The characters are superb and McBain's sense of humor is enthralling. He braids a murder investigation into the theft of a manuscript -- and we are just as interested in both. But beyond the actual plot, the characters are what make this novel so good. We are glad to see some of our old favorites -- Carella, Kling, Parker, the snitches Cowboy Palacios and Fats Donner -- but the "fleshing out" (so to speak) of Ollie Weeks is superb. And the incidental characters are a hoot! I can't wait for McBain's next!

Who shot city councilman, Lester Henderson, as he practiced crossing the stage to the podium, waving and smiling, follow spot glowing, during a rehearsal at Martin Luther King Memorial Hall, for his mayoral candidacy announcement that evening? As first on the scene, all around offensive, foul mouthed and bigoted Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks catches the case and begins to run with it, interviewing witnesses, barking obnoxious orders, and getting a sense of the scene and what had just happened there. Ollie's feeling pretty pumped, grabbing a high profile, headline making murder case. That is, until he returns to his vehicle and finds the only copy of his just completed first novel, Report To The Commissioner, missing. It seems that while he was inside the hall working one crime scene, someone outside was creating another. Some low-life broke into his car and stole all thirty-six pages of his soon to be bestseller masterpiece. And to complicate matters, the not-too-bright thief doesn't even realize he's holding a novel. He thinks he's just found his ticket to the good life; a police report detailing a soon to be bust involving 2.7 million worth of diamonds..... Award winning, master storyteller, Ed McBain, finally gives one of his most colorful and entertaining characters a book, actually two books, of his own. This is a police procedural that has it all... seemingly unrelated, complex, and intriguing story lines that are deftly woven together, creating a stunning climax and satisfying ending; clever, vivid, often laugh-out-loud scenes, and brilliant, meaty characterizations including the ever quirky and engaging cast from the 87th precinct. But it's Mr McBain's smart, crisp, humorous writing, and witty and irreverent dialogue and asides that make this, as well as all his novels, stand out and sparkle, and once you begin reading, be prepared to finish Fat Ollie's Book in one sitting. This is Ed McBain at his very best and no one in the genre does it better. Make sure you put Fat Ollie at the top of your "must read" list and enjoy!