“The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.”

I’ll take my inspiration anywhere I can get it. This one came about from two different sources. The first was my own crazy head: I was sitting around, recovering from a cold, and trying to list all the really top-tier, A-list, first-class, world-famous directors who had tackled the work of classic mystery authors. You know, like Sidney Lumet and his lush 1974 homage to Agatha Christie,  Murder on the Orient Express, or Alfred Hitchcock, who did no favors for Francis Iles (a.k.a. Anthony Berkeley) with his lackluster adaptation of the 1932 thriller Before the Fact. (It wasn’t from lack of trying, but the studios refused to let Cary Grant, the star of 1941’s Suspicion play a murderer.)

My other inspiration came from my favorite film podcast Screen Drafts, or rather from a special feature on their Patreon page, where hosts Clay Keller and Ryan Marker dig deep into one of the masterpieces of world cinema made available as part of the Criterion Collection. This time, there were discussing Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1962), which is based on King’s Ransom (1959),  the tenth police procedural in Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct series. I was thrilled when Ryan gave McBain his due for the inspiration he provided Kurosawa, And since I haven’t read the book or seen the film, I decided to do both.

I used to have quite a fondness for McBain’s novels, but that was many years ago. If you really want to learn about the 87^th Precinct, you need seek no further than my good friend Sergio Angelini, who while writing his blog Tipping My Fedora, reviewed every one of McBain’s fifty-five books about Detective Steve Carella and his all-too fallible team over at the busiest police station in the fictional borough of Isola, part of a metropolis that is a near-direct parallel to New York. I offer you a few links here to this wonderful resource:

1. A chronological list of every 87^th Precinct book, each title linking to Sergio’s review
2. Sergio’s own ranking of the novels (at least, his best and worst)
3. A link to Sergio’s review of King’s Ransom

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For those of you unfamiliar with his work, “Ed McBain” was the most famous pseudonym of Evan Hunter, itself a phony appellation for one Salvatore Albert Lombino. As Hunter, he wrote many novels, including The Blackboard Jungle (1951) – based on his experiences teaching in an inner-city school for a whopping 17 days!!!!! – which in 1955 became a noteworthy film. He also wrote screenplays, including two for Alfred Hitchcock. His version of The Birds made it to the screen, but he was fired from Marnie for expressing his distaste for the rape scene to Mr. Hitchcock.

Hunter wrote under multiple pseudonyms, but his most famous came to life in 1956 with the publication of the novel Cop Hater, the first of the 87^th Precinct series, which lasted till 2005. I’ve read that Hunter took his inspiration from the success of Dragnet, which had debuted on radio in 1949 and throughout the 50’s was a television mainstay, perhaps the greatest police procedural series ever produced. McBain himself seems to acknowledge this with a nod to Dragnet in King’s Ransom, but the 87^th Precinct reminded me more of the Homicide squad in another radio show, Broadway Is My Beat, which also debuted in 1949 and lasted until 1956. It’s the same heightened emotional level that would appear in 1980’s and 90’s television with shows like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue.

King’s Ransom begins in the well-heeled estate of Douglas King, a top executive with the Granger Shoe Company. Granger has been around a long time, producing a well-made classic line of women’s shoes for generations. King, born into poverty, entered Granger as a 16-year-old stockboy and has relentlessly worked his way to the top. He is an interesting character, ruthless enough to fire a personal friend for wasting money at his job, yet contemptuous of his fellow execs’ plan to stage a hostile takeover and make a fortune by manufacturing a shoddier product for pennies and targeting the lower classes who long to be able to afford a Granger shoe.

With great economy, the early scenes give us a rich picture of the complex relationships between King, his staff and his family. We will eventually get to know more about what drives the man, but at the start, his ruthlessness makes his partners wary and his wife uneasy, particularly when he gives his eight-year-old son Billy a lecture about winning. And then, as King himself appears to be on the verge of winning all the success he has aimed for, his phone rings, and a man’s voice says:

“We’ve kidnapped your son. The kid’s safe. He’ll stay that way as long as you do what we say. We want five hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills . . . “

I’m not spoiling much here by revealing McBain’s grand twist: the kidnappers have snatched the wrong kid. Billy’s best friend Jeff, the son of King’s humble chauffeur, has been taken by mistake. This leads to the big moral dilemma for the tycoon: does he go ahead and pay the $500,000 ransom – the money King needs to clinch his hostile takeover of Granger Shoe – or does he keep the money and obviate any sense of moral responsibility for another man’s son?

King’s decision, and its effect on his work and family life, forms the heart of the novel. We also bear witness to the chaotic relationship between the kidnappers, but this struck me as pretty standard stuff to the point of seeming cliched: the wholly evil crook vs. the less certain one, the wife who has a soft heart for the kidnapped boy – it’s all there. Some of the business shenanigans also felt like overly predictable plot points. What I found most interesting was the comparison between the two married couples, the Kings and the kidnapper Eddie and his wife Kathy, and how their relationships reflected mid-20^th century gender roles. Both King and Eddie must juggle the responsibilities of being a good provider with moral responsibility; Diane and Kathy take on the roles the “good parent,” but they must face whatever part they have played themselves in the moral struggles of their husbands. The ultimate “mystery” is what will become of these two families. The solution in both cases is more of a surprise than the outcome of the kidnapping, although maybe less satisfying than one might hope.

The best thing by far here about this 87^th Precinct novel is – the 87^th Precinct. McBain created a huge cast of detectives, cops and techs to populate his books, and he would rotate them from one title to another. As leading man, Steve Carella was in most of them, and he is an admirable figure, remarkably patient with horrible people but capable of a strong emotional response when the moment calls for it. We get a few moments here with Cotton Hawes, a rugged redhead who apparently is one of the newer entries at this point and has calmed down a lot since his last case. Best of all, we get to spend some time with Meyer Meyer, often the comic relief of the precinct, but also a real mensch, whose father resented his late-in-life birth and gave his son this ridiculous name as an act of revenge.

“In a neighborhood where the fact of Jewishness was enough to provoke spontaneous hatred, Meyer Meyer had had his troubles. ‘Meyer, Meyer, Jew on fire,’ the kids would chant, and whereas they never translated the chant into an actual conflagration, they committed everything short of arson against the J**boy with the crazy moniker.”

Less enjoyable are the rampant stuck-in-their-time attitudes toward women on display here. but to be fair, the characters we’re dealing with here are businessmen and cops, all of whom rank the ladies by their chest size and curves, and the women who have grown accustomed to that. Still, McBain’s omniscient narrator appears to be no different: here he is describing Diane King:

“She had acquired over the years a figure which oozed S-E-X in capital letters in neon, and had overlaid – if you’ll pardon the expression – her undeniable beauty with a polish as smooth and as hard as baked enamel. Even dressed for casual life in Smoke Rise, as she was now, wearing a simple sweater and skirt, suede flats, and carrying a suede pouch-like bag, sex dripped from her curvaceous frame in bucketfuls, tubfuls, vatfuls.”.

By the end, McBain makes it clear that Diane is more than the, er, sum of her parts, and like Kathy and another female character, Diane’s best friend Liz Bellew, she is an amalgamation of qualities and impulses that are both admirable and questionable. The ending of the novel is pretty much the same, as the cops bring the crisis to a messy conclusion which leaves Carella complaining to Meyer that he feels “’the case is still open. For a lot of people, Meyer, it’s still open.” At which point, McBain ends the novel with the appropriate line:

“Outside the squadroom, the city crouched.”

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Ed McBain’s novels were adapted for film and television numerous times, but never so prestigiously or effectively as 1963’s Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low), director Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of King’s Ransom. I watched the film for the first time after reading the novel (it’s available on the Internet Archive). Some aspects of the film are extremely faithful to the novel, but Kurosawa’s intentions run deeper here, and the result is a film that elevates its source material. The title by which we have come to know the film (“tengoku to jigoku” literally translates into “Heaven and Hell”) is a brilliant commentary on Kurosawa’s reimagining of McBain’s book: the phrase “high and low” refers to making an extensive search for something, while the greater meaning of the film involves the social and moral status of the central figures of the film: Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), the Yokohama shoe executive standing in for the novel’s Douglas King, and the tortured kidnapper, played by Yamazaki Tsutomu.

The film is unofficially divided into two sections: the first hour takes place in Gondo’s home and largely follows the plot of the novel. We open with negotiations between Gondo and the other executives and his refusal to help them with their hostile takeover. The kidnapping takes place, and Gondo is prepared to honor the kidnapper’s demands – pay thirty million yen and don’t contact the police – until he learns that his chauffeur’s son was kidnapped instead of his own. Then he contacts the cops immediately, and a super efficient team, led by Inspector Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) sneak into the house. Up to a point, Gondo’s way of thinking parallels that of his literary counterpart, but then he makes a different decision, and the film begins to diverge from the novel.

This turns out to be no problem at all. The exchange of money for the victim is now performed largely on a train and makes for an exciting climax to the first section. Gondo proves willing to take the moral high road, and while he is brought “low” in a financial and business sense, his decisions earn him the respect of the nation’s citizenry and its press. From there, Gondo retreats into the background, and the film becomes a tense procedural where the police vow to honor Gondo’s choice by finding the kidnapper and retrieving the ransom money. It is one of the best police procedurals I’ve ever seen, rendered even more suspenseful for me since Kurosawa and his screenwriters have conceived of a different kidnapper with a murkier motivation.

The audience bears witness to the wealth of minute information that must be gathered and sifted through in order to find any leads to the who, where, and why of this criminal. While we never learn anything about the personal lives of these detectives, the film expertly delineates each emotional reaction, each frustration and small satisfaction, they feel. It all culminates in one of those brilliant moments of cinema where one brief burst of color in a gloriously black and white film signifies a turning point in the case. (If Spielberg was influenced by this when he crafted Schindler’s List, I don’t know my cinema!)

The final section of the film is a brilliant cat and mouse chase through the lowest sections of Yokohama, as a vast team of cops follow the kidnapper through the streets and into dance halls jammed with working class folks, American soldiers, and the dregs of society. A highlight of this section is a harrowing horror show set in a twisting alleyway full of heroin addicts suffering from withdrawal. They are dehumanized, both by the villain, who uses them as specimens in a deadly experiment, and by the cops, whose reaction to the death of an addict is almost casual – and then celebratory as she provides concrete evidence of the villain’s guilt.

The film was supposed to end with a wrap-up scene between King Gondo and Inspector Tokura, but when Kurosawa saw the intense performance of Yamazaki as the criminal, he rewrote the ending to feature a final confrontation between kidnapper and victim. At last, we learn why the man targeted Gondo, and while McBain’s novel certainly dealt with issues male worth, which tends to be related to their wealth, sexual prowess and social control, in High and Low there’s something gut-wrenching about these characters’ sense of honor, about who has really been brought low in the end. We all know that Toshiro Mifune was perhaps the greatest film actor Japan has ever known, and I understand that Yamazaki’s performance jump-started a great career in movies and television. Based on their performances here, both men deserve their success. And Kurosawa deserves to take his place among that pantheon of great directors who found the inspiration in classic detective fiction to say something profound about our lives.

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I happen to have four more McBain novels sitting on my shelf, and I’m happy to say that, by sheer coincidence, they all appear on Sergio’s list of the thirteen best 87^th Precinct novels. I don’t feel yet that urgent desire that I feel for, say,  Erle Stanley Gardner’s work to be a completist, but after the pleasures of reading King’s Ransom (which missed Sergio’s “Best of” list by a hair!) and watching Kurosawa’s gem of a film, I will definitely be revisiting Isola’s boys in blue.