The Mugger

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Away back in the dim, distant past, a magazine called Manhunt published a story about a former private eye named Matt Cordell, whose gun license had been revoked after he’d pistol-whipped his wife’s lover. Cordell was a drunk living on the Bowery and reluctantly solving cases for old friends who kept popping up to plague his blotto existence. I always thought of him as a defrocked shamus. The pseudonymous editor of Manhunt was someone named “John McCloud” (I know his real name but will not reveal it under threat of extreme torture) who fancied the Matt Cordell stories and bought some half-dozen of them. One of the stories was called “Now Die In It,” a wordplay twist on the expression, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” McCloud — in the trade the banter was, “He wandered lonely as McCloud” — ran the story in 1953. The byline on it was Evan Hunter.

You will be wondering by now what all of this has to do with The Mugger. Well, by the time I sat down to write the second book in the 87th Precinct series, I knew that I wanted to accomplish several things.

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