Reilly, Helen - McKee of Centre Street (1934)

McKee of Centre Street (1933) is Reilly's breakthrough novel, emphasizing police procedure. The Centre Street of the title is the famed headquarters of the New York City Police. The tale opens with a description of the radio room there. It is written in Reilly's most visionary style. There are descriptions of light on walls, colors, sounds, the whole thing building to abstract geometrical patterns of light and sound. Such 3D abstractions remind one of the visionary novels of William Hope Hodgson.

Reilly resembles Freeman Wills Crofts in the purity of her approach. McKee of Centre Street (1933) sticks to pure police procedure throughout its length with the same single-mindedness Crofts displayed in such books as The Box Office Murders (1929). Also Crofts-like: the way we share all of McKee's thoughts and discoveries throughout the book, instead of waiting till the end of the novel to get the detective's ideas. Reilly also shares Crofts' internationalism: McKee of Centre Street has frequent flashbacks to Columbia in South America, in the same way that Crofts liked to explore continental Europe. The boat and ocean finale of McKee of Centre Street also recalls Crofts.

Radio itself was a fairly new technology in 1934, and the chapter is also an expression of a universe created by high technology. The room contains maps showing the location of every police car in New York City; in many ways, it is a symbolic or virtual re-creation of the City itself. It seems like an early expression of Virtual Reality. It is also the brain center of police operations, and the chapter can be read as metaphors for the operation of the nervous system.

Reilly emphasizes the efficiency of the police. This was a virtue highly prized in the 1930's, where it was associated with Modernism, science, and the Future. It also recalls Taylorism, the science of running factories efficiently according to mathematical and statistical methods. Reilly includes a document analyzing crime statistics for 1932 and 1931. Such a statistical approach also invokes Taylorist ideas. The police here are seen as a modern, factory like operation, using machines, mathematics and efficient organization to run their enterprise. It has been discussed whether Reilly's books are ancestors of the modern police procedural novel. They certainly try to describe police procedure accurately and in detail. So in this sense, they certainly qualify. However, many modern police procedurals stress the ordinary, human nature of the police, while Reilly tries to convey the extraordinary nature of the police.

The following chapters of the book depict a speakeasy where a murder has occurred. The speakeasy is also depicted in technological and organizational terms. The descriptions of its lighting effects, and the role they play in the murder, are almost as much a "sound and light show" as the opening police chapter. The electrician in charge of the lighting becomes a key player in the story. I cannot recall any other of the countless underworld nightclub tales of the 1930's that include an electrician character. So this is a unique point of view of Reilly.

There is an odd contrast in imagery between the male and female characters. The women have often lost consciousness: the murdered woman looks as if she has simply passed out on the dance floor, suspect Judith Pierce is found fainted in the phone booth, and the janitor's wife is asleep. By contrast, Reilly keeps emphasizing how alert the (male) police officers are. However, one of the male characters in the book will eventually lose consciousness, in a spectacularly written passage (Chapter 15). Throughout the book, Reilly's extraordinarily vivid writing style will add an almost surrealistic clarity to her descriptions of typical daily life and New York City locations. Everything has a more real than real vividness that recalls the bright light in such painters as Dali and Magritte.

McKee of Centre Street sticks to its police procedure paradigm throughout its entire length. The book is extremely pure in its approach. Nearly everything in the book consists of the police examining a crime scene, finding some physical clue, and then using it to reconstruct the actions of the suspects and the victim. The police also use the eye witness testimony of innocent bystanders, and the facilities of a huge police operation. They also do much trailing of the suspects, and even go so far to spy on them on occasion. The suspects all stone wall and lie to the police at every opportunity, so the suspects' testimony plays only a small role in this book, as compared to, say, a typical Van Dine school novel. Although the suspects' movements and actions are endlessly traced, they are on stage for only a small fraction of the time they would be in a conventional Golden Age novel, and do not really come alive as characters. Throughout there is vivid descriptive writing, especially of the buildings in which the suspects move, and of New York City lighting and atmosphere. There is a an attempt to create a portrait of New York City.

This purity of approach has both strengths and weaknesses. It can be monotonous, and lack variety. But it does allow Reilly to explore her innovative techniques at length.

There are two large manhunts in the second half of this novel. the first across New York City, the second in the Connecticut countryside. I tend to prefer the city one. It is written with all of Reilly's visionary style of description. The countryside one is a bit of a shaggy dog story. It takes place in all the back ways and little used roads of a country area catering to tourists. It focuses on the locals who support the tourist industry, and their homes, camps and little known back paths. In this it is similar to an even longer and more elaborate country chase in Mr. Smith's Hat.

One does not want to oversell Reilly's work. McKee of Centre Street lacks a clever plot solution. The end of the book takes only around five pages, and shows no ingenuity whatsoever. Sure enough, one of the characters did it. Reilly might as well have thrown a dart to pick this character, for it could have been any of the suspects. It is an anticlimactic end to a novel, all of whose merit has been its detection, not its puzzle plot. Reilly's emphasis on typical scenes of daily life also deprive her books of the fabulous eccentricity that graces so many Golden Age novels.

Mike Grost