4 out of 5

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With a legitimacy likely informed by his time in the Navy and as a teacher, the amusingly shock-titled “So Nude, So Dead” is a tight ticking-bomb styled novel, giving its lead – the born-for-pulp named Ray Stone – two monkeys on his back, in the form of a growing heroin withdrawal and a hunt for a killer, the latter because he’s being accused of the murder, and the former a happenstance as he keep reluctantly prioritizing the other.

McBain (originally publishing under his penname Evan Hunter, as the equally sillily titled “The Evil Sleep!”) starts as he means to go on, waking Stone up from a bender to discover that his hook-up from the prior evening now lies dead next to him, two bullet holes in her stomach. Seeking her prodigious heroin stash to straighten him out, he then finds it missing, and furthermore realizes that he’s the clear suspect for the murder. Reaching out to exes and family for help, Ray realizes those bridges are well burnt, and starts butting up against withdrawal symptoms, as well as the deepening mystery of the murder and the missing heroin; every attempt to get his fix nets him another clue, and with the police in close pursuit…

It’s a miraculously smart setup, and McBain plays Stone right: he humanizes his addiction, but also makes it clear that he’s not a good guy: he has broken people, and the fire he fights with is maybe partially over “justice” but is also certainly just so he can put this behind him and get high again. We dabble in language and tropes of the time and genre, however, the necessary forward momentum of the story prevents us from lingering too long on dames’ gams, and Ray’s involvement in the jazz scene level sets somewhat in terms of race; in short, McBain keeps us focused mostly on what matters for the story, and there’s little else.

As you might expect, though, that pace is hard to maintain even over a relatively short book – just shy of two hundred pages – and we conveniently leave behind the difficulties of withdrawal for longer stretches, as well as the looming police presence becoming more of a card to play only when things slow down. Additionally, it’s early times for Ed: the action can get a bit blurry, and there’s a sense that some of the procedural stuff is more cribbed from movies than research. But the lean and meanness of the text, and its overall momentum, carries us excitingly up through Ray’s enjoyable and believable step-by-step through the clues to a final series of twists and reveals.

The Hard Case Crime republishing of this (under the Ed McBain name) also gives us a Matt Cordell “novelette:” Die Hard. It’s somewhat unremarkable, but shows off the writer’s evolving, succinct prose – apparently written a year after So Nude, So Dead – and was apparently the first appearance of Cordell, who would later become the character Curt Cannon. There are definite themes shared between the book and the novelette, somewhat exposing how you can boil down or expand this stuff as needed to meet a page length, though Die Hard could have had some extra pages / chapters and still been a compelling read.