Sadie When She Died (87th Precinct Mysteries) (Mass Market Paperback)

by Ed McBain (Author) "Detective Steve Carella wasn't sure he had heard the man correctly..." (more)
Key Phrases: routine investigation, Miss Orton, Gerald Fletcher, Sarah Fletcher (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
SADIE WHEN SHE DIED was reviewed in DAILY EXPRESS on 15th February 03 - "Thewelcome return of an old favourite" WWW.TANGLED-WEB.CO.UK featured a review on their site from 21st March 03 including a summary of the plot. Several radio stations including BBC Radio SOLENT and BBC Radio SHROPSHIRE are using copies of SADIE WHEN SHE DIED with two other titles from the Crime Masterworks Series for listener competitions. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
What could be easier? He had a confessed killer, clear fingerprints, and a witness. Everything was sewed up tight. Or was it Detective Steve Carella could not forget Gerald Fletcher standing beside the body of his beautiful wife, Sarah, announcing how glad he was that someone had stabbed her. And when Fletcher kept wining and dining him, flattering and heckling him, tossing him clue after clue, Carella could sniff that there was more to Sarah's death than just bungled burglary. When Sarah's little black book turned up a mile-long record of her nocturnal adventures, Carella knew it was time to call in the boys of the 87th, to find out why everyone was calling her Sadie when she died.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; Reprint edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446609692
• ISBN-13: 978-0446609692
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,453,050 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The 87th Precinct 87 Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars McBain Satisfies, As Always!, October 1, 1999

By	Maria E. Dublin (Novi, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sadie When She Died (87th Precinct Mystery) (Paperback)

This is early McBain, from 1972, and all the boys from the 87th precinct are here in top form! (Why can't I meet a guy like Steve Carella?!) Like all of his police procedurals, it's a very entertaining and breezy read. Suspense, humor, and crackling dialogue are all served up in equal doses. The book's jacket says, "What could be easier? He had a confessed killer, clear fingerprints, and a witness. Everything was sewed-up tight. Or was it?" Bad vibes and his keen cop's instinct sends Detective Carella on a mission to prove promiscuous Sadie wasn't killed by the number one suspect, but by somebody very close to her. YOU CAN'T GO WRONG WITH MCBAIN! I've loved him for years -- and his books written under his real name -- Evan Hunter -- are also wonderful.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The 8-7 Scores a Perfect 1o, March 5, 2004

By	"jac348" (Athens, OH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sadie When She Died (87th Precinct Mystery) (Paperback)

I've read most of the 87th Precinct series, and while the worst ones are always at least above-average, the best ones are a rare excursion into perfection (esepcially for the crime/mystery genre, which, although I love it, is vulnerable to substandard, schlocky stuff). "Sadie" is the best of the best, McBain's most taut, surprising, and intricate little gem. Read it, if only to understand its cryptic title.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Why I Read McBain, September 29, 2007

By	Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Sadie When She Died (Crime Masterworks) (Paperback)

Do you ever start to read a book and find yourself after a while completely alienated from the storyteller and the narrative? It happened here, and it was strange to me because this is an 87th Precinct novel, written by the masterful Ed McBain. I figured the guy was playing with me, setting me up for one of his classic big twists to come.

Only the twist never comes, and you are left with a disengaging, oddly unsympathetic chapter in the 87th Precinct saga.

The boys find what appears to be a straightforward burglary gone wrong: Dead female resident brutally slashed across the abdomen, silverware littering the floor, a guy three chapters in who confesses to the entire crime. But Detective Steve Carella is unconvinced it is as neat as that. While his partner Bert Kling deals with his latest love affair gone bad, Carella sets out to entrap the victim's husband, who says he's glad his wife is dead.

For the first time reading an 87th Precinct mystery, I really resented the detectives, wishing they would leave well enough alone or stir up some interest from Internal Affairs if not the ACLU. In pursuit of his hunch against the husband, who to all appearances seems a decent guy, Carella connives for an array of wiretaps violating not only the fellow's right to privacy, but that of his girlfriend. He also knocks on the doors of some of the dead wife's many ex-lovers, to get information about her other life as "Sadie" to reveal why her husband felt as bitter as he did.

Kling meanwhile uses his badge to get a rebound date with a witness to the crime after breaking up with his latest problem girlfriend, only to pull his gun out when things turn deadly between himself and some of the witness's pals.

It was 1972 when this was published, and perhaps McBain was trying to make some point about the limits of police authority in civil society. But he never makes this clear. Worse, he tells a story that is completely uninvolving as a suspense yarn, desultory and pointless, that lurches to a nonsensical conclusion, jacked up only by an out-of-nowhere attack which my edition pumps up in the teaser copy like it is the point of the story. It might as well be, for the absence of anything else here.

Even McBain's usually crisp writing is curiously distrait: "Reading another man's love letters is like eating Chinese food alone." Um, yeah...

Only toward the end, when McBain as an aside describes the Christmas Eve traffic in the precinct house, a rogue's gallery of pickpockets, thieves, and drunken killers, was I reminded again of why I come back to these McBain stories. It's for their sense of life, of vitality even at its lowest ebb and darkest hour.

Alas, "Sadie When She Died", while low and dark, is almost never vital, except in the wrong places. It's a sad, unpleasant work, further confirmation for me that the early 1970s represent a weak point in the McBain series.