WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN – Catch Me, Kill Me. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1978. Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel from the MWA in 1978.

   A former creative director for a large New York ad agency. William Hallahan published his first novel, The Dead of Winter, in 1972. This chilling (in more ways than one) tale of vengeance and sudden death earned considerable praise and prompted Publishers Weekly to extol Hallahan as being “expert in the creation of evil atmosphere.” His subsequent novels have lived up to — and surpassed-the promise of that debut. Catch Me: Kill Me is among his best, of such quality and merit that it was awarded a 1977 Best Novel Edgar.

   Typical of Hallahan’s more recent work (broad of theme and scope), it is both a novel of political intrigue and a probing character study of its three protagonists. In a men’s room at Grand Central Station, a Russian Jew named Boris Kotlikoff, a minor poet who defected to the United States two years previous, is inexplicably kidnapped by Russian diplomats attached to the U .N. Inexplicably because Kotlikoff left Russia with no state secrets and is in no way a threat to his homeland. Even the most astute cold-war experts are at a loss to guess why the Soviets would perpetrate such a volatile act on U.S. soil.

   Three men arc involved in the search for Kotlikoff, who is apparently being held hostage somewhere in New York City. All three know each other, but only one-a CIA hatchet man named Gus Geller-has official government sanction, and that of the top-secret variety. One of the other two is working with Geller: a discredited ex-CIA agent, Charlie Brewer, whose methods can be as brutal as they are unorthodox. The third man is Ben Leary, legal counsel for the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, who refuses to be put off his own line of inquiry.

   Suspense builds to edge-of-the-chair proportions as Geller, Brewer, and Leary battle a variety of obstacles — and each other — to find Kotlikoff and uncover the amazing truth behind his abduction. Hallahan’ s distinctive, clipped prose style is particularly effective here; and he once again proves himself a master of the unexpected plot twist and the surprise climax. Even readers who don’t generally care for Us-versus-Them novels will find Catch Me: Kill Me absorbing.

———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.