No Villain Need Be is a terrific entry in the Ivor Maddox/Susan Carstairs police procedural series written by one of the true greats in crime and mystery fiction. She helped shape the true procedural, which is much more complex than today’s version; today’s “procedural” is often about a singular case, blending psychological profiling and detective work to catch a single killer; being sure to scatter in a lot of gruesome, graphically described details of the violence. Her three procedural series featuring Luis Mendoza (as Dell Shannon), Vic Varallo (as Lesley Egan), and Ivor Maddox/Susan Carstairs (as Elizabeth Linington) all featured a real look at a precinct (Los Angeles, Glendale, and Hollywood) and were more wide-ranging, and tasteful, showing decent cops inundated by cases, crimes big and small, from horrific and disturbing to humorous. Her narratives were fast-moving and hectic, showing decent cops diligently working to solve everything thrown at them and protect the decent citizens from those who were not. She balanced this against the private lives of her cops, humanizing them so that we came to know them so well over the years that cracking open a Linington book was like visiting old friends.

As always, there are points in the narrative where Maddox or Rodriguez or D’Arcy, sometimes another regular, would lament the decay of society and wonder if their efforts were even worth it, since liberal judges and liberalism was working against them, making their job more difficult. This exchange between D’Arcy and Rodriguez at the crime scene of a nice young woman who has been raped in her own home highlights that:


“Three long blocks down the hill, César. All the porno theaters along the boulevard. I saw a graph the other day down in Vice at headquarters. Very interesting. Relative proximity of forcible rapes to the porno houses. And the judges in the ivory tower say there’s no connection between pornography and sex crimes. Just since it’s been allowed out in the open, the sex crimes are up like a rocket.”

“Let’s start a crusade,” said Rodriguez, “and hear all the sophisticated liberated citizens tell us what damned puritans we are.”


And then there is this, from Feinman, in his thoughts, feeling sorry for a family whose home has just been robbed and they’ve been assaulted in the process:


“But Brannon had a point, of course. In the unlikely case that they caught up with the lout, a judge would put him on probation and turn him loose. The judges accepting the plea bargaining, reducing charges, reversing evidence on technicalities and turning the outlaws out to roam were in effect sentencing the Brannons and all the decent people like them to indefinite sentences locked up in their own homes, afraid of the dark.”


Written in 1979, one can’t help but reflect forty-four years later on recent riots, fires and destruction, violent lawlessness condoned by only one side, calculatingly and nefariously dismissed as peaceful protests by only one side, that has literally made a shambles of major cities where decent people have to live too. Everything about Linington’s police procedurals only highlight how long society, with a helping hand from one side, with someone else misleading them and pulling the strings, has chipped away at decency and common sense, till we’ve reached the point we’re at today. This makes Linington read as fresh and pertinent today as she was way back when — not “out of date” for the moral views of her detectives as some on only one side would have you believe.

Here are some of the more prominent cases Maddox and the Wilcox station in Hollywood must deal with in this excellent entry:

1) A pedophile is on the loose, kidnapping young boys, abusing them and then leaving them dead on the streets the next day. They frantically check out the “usual” suspects, but can’t prevent more tragedy. Maddeningly, it appears the boys are going with the stranger willingly. The solution as to why makes sense, but is also heartbreaking.

2) In a clever variation on burglary, houses are being completely emptied while the residents are away by a moving van, labeled as such, so that neighbors don’t make much of it, just wonder why their neighbors are moving so suddenly.

3) A young woman is brutally raped in her own home, her boyfriend, trying to protect her, stabbed multiple times.

4) A sweet little old lady, barely surviving but too proud to seek assistance, considering it charity, is robbed clean when another string of burglaries unrelated to the moving van, comes calling.

5) Ellis is shot as they assist the Secret Service on a counterfeiting raid.

6) Someone has figured out that the self-pay machines at certain places has a deep flaw — it doesn’t recognize color. This leads to Xerox copies of money turning up in machines.

The case of the sweet older lady barely surviving even before the burglary is a particularly poignant one. Sue becomes quite fond of her and entangled with her plight, as does her mother, whom Maddox and she are trying to persuade to move in with them as they search for a suitable home. When Sue finds just the perfect fixer-upper it’s a bit too much. Only a heartbreaking tragedy borne of despair, when the sweet old lady is mugged, and robbed again, provides a bittersweet solution.

A terrific entry in the series, its fast-flowing narrative and the juggling of cases masking the tremendous writing skill of Linington in making it such a pleasure to read. Perhaps nothing sums up this one better than the inner thoughts of Maddox and Feinman as they look down the boulevard:

They looked along the boulevard, where once there had been clean pleasant shops, bright restaurants, department stores, well-maintained store fronts, clean sidewalks. The boulevard looked sleazy and dirty, miscellaneous refuse collected in the gutters just since street-cleaning day last week. Where a good many of the larger stores had been, and the little family movie houses dating from the thirties, now the daylight neon screamed, ADULT FILMS, X-RATED TOPLESS, 24-HOUR TOPLESS BOTTOMLESS! And down the side streets, though not as many as before the crackdown on them last year, were still the dreary massage parlors. Some of the people on the street were ordinary-looking people, decently enough dressed; but there were also quite a lot of teen-agers in freakish clothes wandering about aimlessly. There had been a drastic rise in teenage prostitution the last six months, largely concentrated in Hollywood; it was beginning to look as if that was an organized thing.

“Sodom and Gomorrah,” said Maddox
“And it may end the same way,” said Feinman. ( )

A good read. ( )

Dell Shannon ( )