The series began in 1956 and continued until 2005 with the novels progressing from short pocket novels of roughly 200 pages (often released two or three times a year) to the longer style of novel common today (released once every year or two). The series was atypical in a number of ways from most other mystery/police drama series in that cases were often solved through routine police work, mistakes made by the criminals, or the criminals were not apprehended at all. Also atypical was that the detectives were usually less personally invested in the case – they went home at night, let other detectives handle part of the foot work, and treated the cases as a matter of routine. Detectives who served as the primary protagonist in a previous novel in the series would often be a secondary character in the next and there was no set pattern as to which detectives were partners or not. Given the time-length of the series it also had its own version of Comic-Book Time where the officers stayed roughly the same age throughout the series but still referenced previous cases and major events.
There have been several screen adaptations, including the feature films Cop Hater (1958), The Mugger (1958), The Pusher (1960), Fuzz (1972), and Blood Relatives (1978); a short-lived weekly series, 87th Precinct (1961–62); and three Made for TV Movies, Lightning (1995), Ice (1996), and Heatwave (1997). Most famously, King's Ransom was adapted into the Japanese film High and Low (1963) by Akira Kurosawa. So Long As You Both Shall Live and Jigsaw were also adapted for Columbo (as "No Time to Die" and "Undercover" respectively, with Arthur Brown joining Columbo in the latter).
Installments:
- Cop Hater (1956)
- The Mugger (1956)
- The Pusher (1956)
- The Con Man (1957)
- Killer's Choice (1957)
- Killer's Payoff (1958)
- Killer's Wedge (1958)
- Lady Killer (1958)
- 'til Death (1959)
- King's Ransom (1959)
- Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (1960)
- The Heckler (1960)
- See Them Die (1960)
- Lady, Lady, I Did It! (1960)
- The Empty Hours (1960)
- Like Love (1962)
- Ten Plus One (1963)
- Ax (1963)
- He Who Hesitates (1965)
- Doll (1965)
- Eighty Million Eyes (1966)
- Fuzz (1968)
- Shotgun (1968)
- Jigsaw (1970)
- Hail, Hail, the Gangs All Here (1971)
- Sadie, When She Died (1972)
- Lets Hear It for the Deaf Man (1961)
- Hail to the Chief (1973)
- Bread (1974)
- Blood Relatives (1975)
- So Long as You Both Shall Live (1976)
- Long Time No See (1977)
- Calypso (1979)
- Ghosts (1980)
- Heat (1981)
- Ice (1983)
- Lightning (1984)
- Eight Black Horses (1985)
- Poison (1987)
- Tricks (1987)
- Lullaby (1989)
- Vespers (1989)
- Widows (1991)
- Kiss (1992)
- Mischief (1993)
- And All Through the House (1984)
- Romance (1995)
- Nocturne (1997)
- The Big Bad City (1999)
- The Last Dance (1999)
- Money, Money, Money (2001)
- Fat Ollie's Book (2002)
- The Frumious Bandersnatch (2003)
- Hark! (2004)
- Fiddlers (2005)
This series provides examples of:
- Absence of Evidence: Items wiped clean attract suspicion in Axe and Heat.
- Accidental Kidnapping: King's Ransom has the son of a servant mistaken for the son of a rich man and abducted.
- Adaptation Distillation: Both Columbo adaptations strip out almost all the social, racial and sexual commentary, as well as combining several detectives into one role that Lt. Columbo himself fills (although as mentioned above Arthur Brown does appear in the second one). They are essentially the same basic plot with a lot of changes to the finer details.
- The Adjectival Man: The recurring villain the Deaf Man, a cold-bloodedly vicious criminal with a Complexity Addiction who is usually beaten but never caught. He's sometimes been seen wearing a hearing aid, has described himself as "hard of hearing", and tends to use aliases alluding to deafness in different languages, such as "L. Sordo" (el sordo) and "D.R. Taubman" (der taubman). He's certainly not completely deaf, but whether he actually is hard of hearing or even if that's simply an affectation is unknown.
- All Bikers are Hells Angels: Played straight and subverted in a subplot of Let's Hear it for the Deaf Man. Two of the bikers in it are drug-using rapists who torture the rape victim's artist boyfriend, fatally crucify one of their own friends for trying to stop them and put up a fight when the police come to arrest them. On the flip side, said crucified friend is described as a Nice Guy who just liked traveling around on his bike and was interested in carrying around art to sell across the region.
- Arch-Enemy: The Deaf Man is this for the precinct and for Steve Carella in particular.
- Asshole Victim:
- The victims in Fiddlers become less sympathetic when you discover just what rotten people they were, and what they did to Charlie to make him so deranged.
- Michelle, the main victim in Romance, is a whiny, spoiled diva who gets her boyfriend / agent to stab her for attention and is later stabbed for real.
- Gregory Craig in Ghosts is one as well; he blamed his wife for his penultimate novel being slated by critics, dumped her for a younger woman who claims to be a psychic, and was killed by the man whose story he basically stole for the basis of his final, hugely successful book. The author's lover later declares through her powers that he killed his wife - she drowned, but she was an excellent swimmer. It's never proven... but her powers are real.
- The blackmailer in Killer's Payoff.
- Some of the victims of Ten Plus One were once involved in a rape, although many innocents are killed with them.
- The Bad Guys Are Cops: Mike Ingersoll in Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man.
- Badass in Distress: Carella is kidnapped, chained to a radiator and injected with heroin in Doll.
- Berserk Button: Emma is Brother Anthony's in Ice. And vice versa, as the novel's killer ultimately finds out when he murders Anthony...
- Don't even think about insulting or mistreating Teddy Carella. Steve will tear you a new one.
- As a father of a teenage daughter, Meyer absolutely hates paedophiles and has to be cautioned by Carella in Lullaby when dealing with the father of the murdered baby, who was having an affair with the other murder victim - the 15 year old sitter.
- And in Lady, Lady, I Did It!, when Carella, Brown and Kling go to arrest the killer, Kling loses all control and beats him half to death, because one of his victims was Kling's girlfriend Claire Townsend.
Carella was already typing up the false report in his head, the one about how Manners (the killer) had resisted arrest.- In Killer's Choice, the normally patient Meyer loses it when the owner of the liquor stone Annie Stone was shot dead in is visibly more concerned about the four thousand dollars' worth of booze that was destroyed in the process.
- Best Served Cold: The main plot in Ten Plus One and Fiddlers. In the former, the killer is targeting people who were in a play with his wife at university, and who participated in an orgy-turned-gang rape during the aftershow which left her infertile. In the latter, the killer is targeting people who screwed him over in some way, from his own mother - who abandoned him and his brother - to a teacher who refused to give him an A and made fun of him.
- Black Gal on White Guy Drama: Kling's relationship with Sharyn Cooke has some of this and partially falls apart because of said drama.
- Blackmail Backfire:
- In the Back Story of Ax, an accountant found out one client was a tax cheat and tried to blackmail him. The client told his Italian-American boss, who attempted to Scare 'Em Straight by claiming to be mob-connected and saying he'd kill the accountant if he tried anything again. The accountant was scared, but still blackmailed another client. To avoid his boss's wrath, he enlisted an accomplice (the Victim of the Week) to meet the blackmail victim and claim to have found the incriminating papers during a burglary. This whole subplot is a Red Herring, as the blackmail victim died of natural causes years ago and the accountant isn't the killer either.
- In Long Time No See, the blind and impoverished first victim is killed for trying to blackmail a war buddy over an Unfriendly Fire incident after crossing the Despair Event Horizon.
- Brick Joke: Meyer's long, wonderfully orchestrated story about a cat thief in The Mugger.
- Broken Bird: Eileen Burke, so very much. She becomes a cop after her father and uncle, both policemen, are murdered, and dreams of avenging her uncle's death. She is raped and slashed in one book and suffers PTSD as a result, and it gets worse after the events of Tricks, when she shoots a man who was killing and mutilating prostitutes, after he tried to kill her.
- Bully Turned Buddy: As a kid Meyer had a bully named Patrick Cassidy (one of the many kids who called him "Meyer Meyer, Jew on Fire") who once literally tried to force Meyer to kiss his butt as a form of dominance after Meyer gave him an Embarrassing Nickname of his own. Meyer hoped to beat up Cassidy some day, only to find that the man was a cop when he looked him up again, with Cassidy actually being the one to encourage Meyer to join the police force as well.
- Busman's Holiday: "Storm", from The Empty Hours, has Cotton Hawes investigating a murder while on vacation at a ski resort.
- Butt-Monkey: The Deaf Man, surprisingly. On one hand he constantly gets a lot of people killed and avoids being arrested. On the other hand, he always ends up empty handed, continuously fails to prove himself smarter than the detectives of the 87th Precinct, and is repeatedly badly injured and/or forced to flee town with his tail between his legs.
The guy is such a smug sadist whose plans often entail stunning collateral damage, that it's pretty satisfying to watch. - Cartwright Curse: Bert Kling. The poor guy just can't catch a break. All of his girlfriends either end up dying, having too many issues to cope with a relationship, going off with another man, or just getting fed up with him and leaving.
- Caught on Tape: Crucial evidence in Doll and Bread.
- Celebrity Paradox: A couple of books contain references to other works written by McBain under his real name of Evan Hunter:
- Axe:
"Who wrote Strangers When We Meet?."- The opening line of The Blackboard Jungle is quoted in Killer's Payoff.
- The Chessmaster: The Deaf Man.
- Christmas Episode: The Pusher, Sadie When She Died, Ghosts, Eight Black Horses, Money Money Money, All Through the House. (The latter of which is actually an illustrated short story.)
- Cold Snap: Fuzz takes place when the city is in the middle of a freeze of sorts.
- Comic-Book Time: The same cast of characters were used for the entire 49-year run of the series. This necessitated revisions over time, such as characters who originally had seen military service in World War II getting rewritten so that their service occurred during Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, etc.
- Con Man: Several in the fourth book of the series.
- Confess to a Lesser Crime: A variant occurs in Long Time No See when someone confesses a lesser crime, not to the authorities, but to a confidant who he's afraid will go to the authorities if he tells the real story. In the Back Story, the murder victim was an Accomplice by Inaction to the Unfriendly Fire murder of his superior in The Vietnam War. Years later, he needs to bare his soul and talk to his therapist about what happened, but claims that it was a gang-rape he stood by and witnessed instead of a murder (rape has a statute of limitations and murder doesn't).
- Continuity Nod: Later books in the series frequently reference events or characters from earlier ones.
- Cop Killer: In Cop Hater, the first novel, a murderer kills three policemen; as it turns out at the end, the third was the true target, and he only killed the first two to mislead the police into thinking that he's a Serial Killer who targets cops.
- Creator Cameo: A drunk sailor in The Mugger says his ship is "U S S Huntuh".
- Criminal Mind Games: Most noticeable with the Deaf Man who increasingly targeted his plans or modified them to specifically antagonize the 87th Precinct detectives, even to the point of causing his own plans to fail.
- Crossover: McBain's final Matthew Hope novel, The Last Best Hope, has that character teaming with Steve Carella on a case.
- Cutlery Escape Aid: In So Long as You Both Shall Live, a kidnapped woman uses the vinegar and oil left with her salad to remove the rust and lubricate the door hinges of the room where she is being held. She then uses the fork to scrape away the rust and pop the pins out of the hinges to escape the room.
- Cynicism Catalyst: Roger Havilland was a "gentle" cop until he tried to intervene when a street punk was being beaten up and both the victim and assailants turned on him, putting him in the hospital. He came out a sour man prone to hitting people.
- Dating Catwoman: In Tricks, Parker has a spark with another Halloween party guest before realizing she's with a group of thieves and killers his colleagues are after (in fact, she's the one who's done all of the killing) and arresting her with some regret.
- Death Faked for You: Carella's, in Doll. He's found and rescued just before his kidnappers are about to make it very real.
- Detective Patsy: Happens to inexperienced patrolman Bert Kling in The Mugger. Bert gets a promotion to Detective after that.
- Dirty Cop: Roger Havilland. While never portrayed as an antagonist (just The Friend Nobody Likes) he beats up suspects on occasion and after his death it's confirmed that he was taking bribes to protect a gambling ring.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- George Lasser in Axe is killed for "poaching" customers in a business that amounted to maybe ten dollars a week:
"He did it for the lousy two-bit wood business."- One short story has a Rabbi murdered by An ultra conservative colleague upset that he - reluctantly and only due to the workers busy schedule - was willing to hire a workman to renovate the Synagogue on the Sabbath.
- In Lady, Lady I Did It!, The killer is a garage employee who gunned down a customer - and three innocent bystanders - out of simple anger that the man didn't like the color he'd repainted the car and made him do it over again. Not helping the matter was that the main victim was Jewish and the killer was an antisemite.
- Distracted by the Sexy:
- The officers on duty in Ten Plus One when a hot blonde actress – and potential victim of the book's villain, a sniper – arrives at the station. She does not get killed, by the way.
- In Tricks, the principal of a high school where Sebastian the Great and his sexy assistant Marie are performing sees most of the male students can't keep their eyes off her, and while he's supposed to be watching the students "he himself was having a little difficulty (taking his eyes off her), to the extent that when Marie takes her leave the principal thinks "Shit." Then again, how was he to know she's part of a murder plot involving Sebastian and his male protege?
- Dying Clue: In Lady, Lady, I Did It!, one of the victims manages to gasp the word "carpenter" before dying. Investigation by the 87th Precinct fails to turn up a suspect who is named Carpenter or who works with wood. It turns out the victim was actually saying "car painter" (i.e. the man who had recently painted his car) but his thick accent turned it into "carpenter".
- The Swedish procedural, The Laughing Policeman, about a mass shooting on a Stockholm bus, with a member of the Violence Squad among the victims, turns on exactly the same sort of obscure dying utterance which the cops misunderstand because he has an American accent.
- Establishing Character Moment: The Deaf Man at his introduction in The Heckler wins a poker match by calculating hand probabilities.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Cotton Hawes often has well-timed bursts of realisation.
- Everybody Did It: Killer's Payoff comes to a climax with Hawes setting a Bluffing the Murderer trap for three suspects to see which one shows up. All three do.
- Everybody Lives: In King's Ransom and So Long as You Both Shall Live, both the victims and the perpetrators of the featured crimes survive.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Some books take place over the course of a single day.
- Fair Cop: Bert Kling, Eileen Burke, Annie Rawles.
- Sharyn Cooke is both this and a Hospital Hottie, being Deputy Chief Surgeon for the department.
- Fair-Play Whodunnit: Like Love, although the main clue can be confusing for the modern reader.
- Faking the Dead: Andrew Leyden in Shotgun.
- Fat Bastard: 88th Precinct detective Fat Ollie Weeks, and police informant Fats Donner. The former is a bigot, the latter a pedophile.
- Fatal Method Acting: In-universe in Eighty Million Eyes, where a famous comedian is murdered on live television in front of forty million witnesses.
- For Want Of A Nail: In The Heckler, the Deaf Man and his accomplices make off in an ice cream van. But it has no ice cream and, while awaiting the ferry, a police patrolman asks for an ice cream...
- Gangbangers: Hail to the Chief has the detectives investigating the fallout between a turf war (partially motivated by race) between three separate gangs.
- Girls Behind Bars: Part of Marilyn's backstory in Poison, being imprisoned in Mexico and subjected to various abuses.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion:
- Jeannie Page is killed for this reason in The Mugger.
- Invoked and subverted in Lightning. A Serial Rapist targets devoutly pro-life Catholic women and keeps re-attacking them in a deliberate effort to get them pregnant and force them to change their minds about abortion.
- Lady, Lady, I Did It! has a subplot about a teenaged girl who was impregnated by a rapist and then died from the effects of an illegal abortion.
- Halloween Episode: Tricks. There's even a group of circus midgets who yell "Trick or treat!" before shooting people.
- Happily Married: Steve and Teddy Carella, and Meyer and Sarah Meyer both have stable relationships throughout the series with both mutual trust and the ability to have fun together.
- Haunted House: Ghosts. And as Carella finds out first hand, it's for real.
- Heat Wave: Cop Hater, Bread, and Heat all take place in hotter than usual periods of time.
- Hello, Attorney!: Prosecutor Nellie Brand is often introduced being called over to the precinct after having just been dressing up nice for a dinner date or something.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Frequent mistake of suspects being questioned is saying more than they claim to know about.
- I Remember Because...: In Ghosts, a bartender remembers a suspect was drinking at the bar during the murder because, right around that time, another customer did a drunken striptease and the suspect gave the bartender a $5 tip and made a joke about the floor show.
- Identifying the Body:
- In Tricks, a stage magician's decapitated body is found and his wife identifies him by some scars on the body. They actually had faked his death and the body is that of his assistant.
- A victim's mother did so in Shotgun, with a similar outcome.
- Immediate Sequel: Eight Black Horses picks up straight after where Lightning left off.
- Info Dump: Usually at the end, in the form of a transcript of the culprit's confession explaining various details that have been puzzling the detectives.
- Insists on Paying: Steve Carella (and, by extension, every honest cop).
- Interrupted Suicide: One was unsuccessfully interrupted in Like Love.
- It's Personal:
- 'Til Death, in which the wedding day of Carella's sister is marred by someone targeting her husband-to-be.
- So Long as You Both Shall Live, in which Bert Kling's wife Augusta is kidnapped after the actual wedding by a Stalker with a Crush who wants to have sex with her and then kill her. And then himself.
- Jerkass: Roger Havilland and Andy Parker are rude, insensitive men who drag down the people around them.
- Just Got Out of Jail: Subplot of Heat, where a recently released prison inmate is out for revenge on the man who arrested him - Bert Kling.
- Karma Houdini:
- The murderer who is the protagonist of He Who Hesitates.
- Karma Houdini Warranty Said murderer ends up confessing in Shotgun and does get charged and presumably convicted. Karma caught up to him.
- And the Deaf Man, who remains at large at the end of Hark!, the final book in which he appears.
- Several of the Deaf Man's accomplices also get away clean, including a man who helps him blow up several cop cars as a diversion and two of the people who helped him start a violent race riot at a concert meant to promote inclusiveness.
- Emma from Ice is a remorseless career criminal multiple-murderer who just doesn't happen to be the murderer of the book and gets off scot free at the end.
- Detectives Brock and Mastersen in Ten Plus One, who beat and railroad an innocent man into prison out of pure meanness and get away with it due to the 87th Precincit detectives never finding out.
- The murderer who is the protagonist of He Who Hesitates.
- Killed Off for Real: Roger Havilland in Killer's Choice, Frankie Hernandez in See Them Die, Claire Townsend in Lady, Lady, I Did It!.
- Kissing Cousins: In Blood Relatives, a man is suspected of murdering his cousin, to whom he is engaged. The culprit turns out to be the man's sister.
- Locked into Strangeness: Detective Cotton Hawes has a white streak in his otherwise red hair as a result of his hair growing back over a knife scar.
- Locked Room Mystery: A fairly realistic version in Killer's Wedge.
- Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard
- Love Letter: A series of erotic ones left behind by a murder victim in Widows.
- Lower-Deck Episode: Hail, Hail the Gang's All Here gives brief spotlights to some of the precinct's least seen detectives.
- Meaningful Name: Usually averted, but played straight with Don King from King's Ransom.
- Never Suicide: Shotgun, although the detectives see through it straight away.
- Noble Bigot with a Badge: Fat Ollie Weeks throws around racist slurs or stereotypes multiple times per conversation, but the man is a very good detective, ultimately honest and never hesitates to investigate the murder of a minority. The "bigot" part is gradually (although not fully) eroded in the last few books as he starts dating a Hispanic detective.
- No Communities Were Harmed: The novels are set in "Isola", a district of an unnamed, fictional city in an unnamed state which, as mentioned above, closely resembles New York at its scuzziest. Isola includes many features of Manhattan, and the other districts mentioned are clear expies for New York City's other four boroughs.
- More specifically, according to The Other Wiki, "Calm's Point" is Brooklyn, "Majesta" is Queens, "Riverhead" is the Bronx, and "Bethtown" Staten Island
. Then there's the Harb (Hudson) and Dix (East) Rivers, and the similarly unnamed "next state" (New Jersey). George M. Dove's unofficial 1985 companion to the series, The Boys from Grover Avenue, analyzes the geography of McBain's "Imaginary City" and describes it as NYC shifted to the side, so that north becomes east, east south, etc. - Oddly enough, New York itself is occasionally mentioned in the books. Apparently McBain's universe has two huge and virtually-interchangeable metropolises co-existing very close to one another on the East Coast of the United States.
- The film adaptations of Cop Hater (1958) and The Pusher (1960) are explicitly set in NYC. Meanwhile, the film of Fuzz (1972) is set in Boston for some reason, and the film of Blood Relatives (1978), being a French-Canadian co-production, is set in Montreal!
- More specifically, according to The Other Wiki, "Calm's Point" is Brooklyn, "Majesta" is Queens, "Riverhead" is the Bronx, and "Bethtown" Staten Island
- No Kill like Overkill: Pepe Miranda's death in See Them Die. First, he is shot repeatedly by the army of cops. Then Andy Parker empties his gun into him. And then, Parker grabs another gun and shoots Miranda in the head. Twice.
- Non-Protagonist Resolver: Sometimes people other than the main cast catch the villains while having little idea of what's going on.
- In The Heckler, an unnamed beat cop foils the villains' getaway by approaching a fake ice cream truck to make an order, then noticing a discrepancy in the crooks' story and making inquiries that cause them to try and shoot their way out, only for him to wound both men and capture one of them.
- In Ghosts, right after a scene that discusses how Carella and Hawes both see themselves as the hero and the other man as the Sidekick, the killer is arrested by a beat cop who mistakenly thinks the killer just robbed a pawnshop (really, he's fleeing the pawnshop because the owner realized he was trying to sell stolen property). Said beat cop gets promoted to protagonist as a result of the case, being promoted to detective and working with the leads in a few of the remaining books, but he's never seen or mentioned before arresting the killer.
- Non Sequitur: Meyer often blurts his (unrelated to the topic at hand) thoughts out loud, confusing the others.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: Some of the most mild and harmless-seeming people turn out to be killers, such as Timothy Moore, the victim's medical student boyfriend in Ice.
- "Number of Objects" Title: Eight Black Horses.
- Obfuscating Disability:
- While the Deaf Man wears a hearing aid, it's suggested on various occasions (including by the Deaf Man himself, in The Heckler) that it may just be a prop.
- Elmer Wollender in "Storm", from The Empty Hours.
- Oddball in the Series: He Who Hesitates is the only novel in the series told from the villain's POV.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Just about any time Carella thinks about Assistant District Attorney Henry Lowell he remembers that he's the guy who failed to convict the murderer of Carella's father, usually admitting to himself that the man tried hard and it isn't fair to hold it against him, but he still does.
- Once More, with Clarity: Taped evidence in Bread, misunderstood at first.
- One-Letter Title: "J" in The Empty Hours.
- One-Word Title: Many of the books, particularly in the '80s and '90s.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: The Deaf Man.
- Paranormal Episode: Ghosts is the only novel to feature supernatural, and with Det. Steve Carella seemingly being saved by a ghost.
- Plucky Comic Relief: Richard Genero is one of the least lucky and insightful of the detectives and moments where he shows up are rarely serious ones.
- Pointy-Haired Boss: Captain Frick. The best thing that could be said about his leadership is that he realizes his own incompetence and most of the time just doesn't do anything.
- Pun-Based Title: Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand
- Repetitive Name: Meyer Meyer.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Carella reads his own obituary in Doll.
- Scary Black Man: Arthur Brown, and he's more than happy to play on white people's prejudices (see Jigsaw for an excellent example). Unfortunately, some white suspects have a tendency to talk to the white cop who's interviewing them (usually Kling) and ignore Brown completely.
- Mostly subverted in the Columbo film "Undercover".
- Second Episode Introduction: Monaghan and Monroe debut in The Mugger, the second book of the series.
- Secret Diary: There's one belonging to the victim in Blood Relatives.
- Self-Deprecation: Both Meyer Meyer and The Deaf Man admit to hating Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, the screenplay for which was written by... Evan Hunter.
- Serial Killings, Specific Target: Cop Hater, Long Time, No See and Mischief.
- Serial Rapist: Lightning involves one who keeps re-attacking the same women.
- Speech-Impeded Love Interest: The protagonist's wife Theodora "Teddy" Carella is unable to speak due to her deafness.
- The Spook: The Deaf Man, a diabolical Moriarty-esque criminal genius. His real name and biography are never revealed, and even his deafness may be an affectation.
- Stalker with a Crush: Kling must protect Cindy Forrest from one in Eighty Million Eyes.
- The Stool Pigeon: Danny Gimp is a useful informant whose sole profession is lingering on the edges of crime picking up things to sell to the cops.
- Fats Donner is also one of these.
- Suspect Is Hatless:
- In Lady, Lady I Did It, a gunman opens fire in a crowded bookstore; killing several people. Despite there being multiple eyewitnesses, the police are unable to get an accurate description as most of them were focused on the gun. And, even then, the description of the gun varies greatly from person to person. It turns out, the gunman was using two quite different guns; one in each hand.
- Lampshaded in Blood Relatives when a victim fails to pick a suspect out of a lineup. The narrative then describes how at some time during their training, police officers have to describe someone who entered their classroom during a lecture (results of which are, to say the least, varying).
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Andy Parker for Roger Havilland. After Havilland's death, Parker fills the role of a large, brutal, racist jerkass cop. Even his backstory is similar to Havilland's.
- Sympathetic Murderer: Several, for example Charles Tudor from Give the Boys a Great Big Hand. Both Carella and Meyer feels sympathy for him for being such a Love Martyr.
- Themed Aliases: The Deaf Man always uses aliases that are some sort of play on words on 'deaf' in a variety of languages.
- This Is a Work of Fiction"The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."
- This Is My Name on Foreign: The Deaf Man's aliases are always some kind of play on 'deaf' in a foreign language: sometimes literally translating as 'The Deaf Man'.
- Those Two Guys: The buffoonish and arrogant homicide detectives Monoghan and Monroe.
- Tomboyish Name: Though Mrs. Carella's given name is Theodora, everyone calls her "Teddy".
- Treasure Map: In Jigsaw a gang of thieves made a map of where they were going to hide their loot, then tore up the pieces (two for each gang member) and entrusted them to various friends and relatives. The gang all died in a shootout with the police and the novel follows the detectives and various criminals trying to get the pieces of the treasure map to recreate it and find the loot.
- Trojan Ambulance: In So Long As You Both Shall Live, Augusta Kling is abducted on her wedding night by her Stalker with a Crush, who is a paramedic and drives her away in an ambulance.
- Unintentionally Notorious Crime: In Lady, Lady, I Did It, a shooter opens fire in a store and guns down four people. One of them happens to be Detective Bert Kling's fiancee, thereby guaranteeing that the crime has the attention of every cop in the city.
- Villain Episode: He Who Hesitates is told entirely from the killer's point of view.
- Wedding Episode: Crime still plagues the squad in 'til Death and So Long As You Both Shall Live.
- The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): In Tricks, a liquor store owner whom the squad warns about a group of murderous thieves brags about how he's gunned down many such robbers in the past. A few pages later, the current gang of robbers kill him before he can get a shot off.
