The Times Square Connection (The Marksman #22)

The Times Square Connection, by Frank Scarpetta

May, 1976  Belmont-Tower 

In a way this is sort of the end of The Marksman, even though there were two more volumes left. But The Times Square Connection was the last volume of the 1970s and also the last volume to carry the house name “Frank Scarpetta.” It was also the last volume to be written by series creator/editor Peter McCurtin. 

Published in 1976, The Times Square Connection is stated as taking place in July 1974…at least early in the book. Later in the book we come across the off-hand mention that a character is driving a “1976 model” car, which leads me to conclude that the manuscript got lost in the shuffle, perhaps due to the flurry of Marksman novels that were published in such a short span of time, and then rediscovered by McCurtin and given a final polish by him or someone else. 

To me, the entire book reads like McCurtin, with its hardboiled vibe and its frequent mentions of movies and old movie stars. There’s also a great part where Philip “The Marskman” Magellan goes to Forty-Second Street and notes how most of the “third-run theaters ha[ve] gone to straight porn,” a very cool bit of period flair for us 42nd Street Forever junkies. 

Speaking of “straight porn,” The Times Square Connection is yet another Belmot-Tower publication where the back cover copy doesn’t much relate to the actual book. The back cover promises a lurid tale of the mob moving in to the porno business in Times Square, and the reader can expect a bunch of sleazy shenanigans. Instead, McCurtin uses the “porno” angle as the framework; the mob could just as easily be moving in on the stamp-collecting or baseball card-collecting markets, and the story would not be impacted. 

Only the opening hints at what the back cover promises, when an old porno shop owner in Times Square is accosted outside of a bar and whacked by a couple mobsters. Then Magellan shows up, giving us a brief glimpse of how sleazy and depraved Forty-second Street has become as he walks through it, along Eighth Avenue, but after that McCurtin spends more time with Magellan sitting in the cramped office of an old carny acquaintance and getting info on who was behind the killing of the porno shop owner – who turns out to have been another of Magellan’s old carny acquaintances. 

This “carny” stuff is another indication of McCurtin being behind the typewriter; as we will recall, his original version of Magellan was a trickshot artist who worked the carny circuit, and McCurtin used this background in the prototype Assassin series and also his volumes of The Marskman, even if the other “Frank Scarpettas” seldom mentioned it. McCurtin also reminds us that Magellan got into the mob-busting game because of the murder of his wife and son, something documented in The Assassin #1, but interestingly we are told here that Magellan is “no longer in a hurry” to kill his prey, and now he is more methodical in his war of vengeance. We’re also told that his war has been going on for three years, perhaps more indication that McCurtin handled the final manuscript, as this book was published three years after that first Assassin. 

There seems to have been a story McCurtin was working on, but humorously The Times Square Connection soon loses the plot, gets involved in a lot of digressive banter between one-off mobster characters, and then in the final stretch focuses on a newly-introduced plot where a dirty New York cop who works for the mob comes up with the plan to kill a “retarded kid” and frame Magellan for the murder! (More on which anon.) The porno angle is completely lost – and McCurtin fails to exploit other material, as well. Early in the book we are told of Salerno, a ‘Nam Green Beret who has brought a group of fellow vets to the city to act as a mob army…a storyline lifted directly from The Executioner…but McCurtin forgets all about this setup and Salerno doesn’t even appear in the text until the final few pages. 

Even more humorously, there’s an entire chapter devoted to Magellan taking a newly-purchased submachine gun from his artillery case, a prototype made by British outfit Sterling around the end of WWII but never officially rolled out, and Magellan has gotten one at great expense. We’re given a lot of details about the gun and told that Magellan has never used it…and folks, by the end of the novel he still hasn’t used it! The gun literally only appears in this one chapter, with Magellan taking it out of the case, looking at it, and then putting it back in the case; in the hasty climax, Magellan uses an Uzi, and the Sterling isn’t even mentioned! 

Perhaps this is why The Times Square Connection is so choppy, and seems to occur in both July 1974 and sometime in 1976; maybe McCurtin started the book, set it aside, and then hastily went back to it when he needed to get out yet another Marksman installment. Or, as Lynn Munroe speculates, maybe another author did this later polish; if so, the style is very similar to McCurtin’s. I did not detect any wild stylistic changes as I read the book, and it all seemed to be courtesy a single writer. 

McCurtin is also one of the few “Scarpettas” who focuses on Magellan’s emotional makeup. We’re told he is “a big, wide-shouldered man with [a] hard, tired face,” and periodically in the book we are reminded that Magellan is “big.” This kind of goes against how I’ve always pictured the guy – thin, wearing a suit with hat, per many of the cover illustrations…well, sort of like the cover illustration of this volume (apparently courtesy an artist named “Hankins,” if I’m reading the signature hidden on the ledge correctly), with the important note that no scene like this occurs in the actual novel. And also, maybe the guy hanging from the ledge is intended to be Magellan. But also again, maybe the artwork wasn’t even commissioned for The Marksman in the first place and just got put on here by an indifferent editor with a publishing schedule to meet. 

McCurtin lived in the city and grungy mid-‘70s New York is very much brought to life, with Magellan ranging from Times Square to Brooklyn. There’s a lot of topical detailing and “directions around the city” stuff here, likely a page-filling gambit, but cool because it gives the book that period vibe. It’s just a shame that the plot promised on the back cover never materializes in the actual narrative. 

So anyway, the opening bit of the porno shop owner being killed sets up Magellan’s return to New York; there’s a bit of detail here that he has not been in the city for a while. An old carny friend tells Magellan who was supposedly behind the killing, and this leads to a hard-edged sequence in a slummy bar. McCurtin has a very clipped, hardboiled style, and Magellan takes no shit; there is no softness about him, either, as evidenced when he pays a street hooker to walk into the bar with him to act as cover. He shoves her out of the place before the shooting starts – humorously, McCurtin notes that a drunk sailor on leave chases her out of the bar, presumably to rent her services – and she’s never mentioned again. She is also the only female character in the book, other than the mother of the murdered child, who appears at the end to drunkenly argue with Magellan. 

Now here is a fascinating little rabbit hole: the “framing Magellan for the murder of a retarded child” scenario appeared in an installment of The Sharpshooter: A Dirty Way To Die, and not only that, but it was the exact same plot: a dirty New York cop worked with a Mafia don to kill a kid and frame Magellan. That volume was also written by Peter McCurtin…or at least, the first chapter was. The rest of the book was written by Russell Smith, and in that one the stylistic difference between the two authors was very evident. It seems then that Peter McCurtin, who edited both The Marksman and The Sharpshooter, wanted to get double bang for his “Magellan gets framed for a child’s murder” buck. McCurtin’s first attempt featured a male victim and was finished by Russell Smith, and there “Magellan” was turned into “Johnny Rock” and the manuscript was published as a Sharpshooter. McCurtin’s second attempt featured a female victim and must have been stuck in limbo for a while, then McCurtin himself went in and finished it up, and it was published as a Marksman. 

What’s humourous is that if I’m correct, in the first attempt the “child murder” setup was clunkily added to the beginning of a completely-unrelated plot (namely, Russell Smith’s wacky tale about the scientist in California), and in the second attempt it was added to the end of the book…meaning, The Times Square Connection starts off being about the mob moving into the New York porno racket, but ends up being about the mob running a child-killing frame on Magellan. One almost expects to see a trenchoated Robert Stack emerging from the mist to introduce this very special segment of Unsolved Mysteries. 

This is very much a man’s world, and McCurtin proceeds to waste a lot of pages on the bullshit digressions of a bunch of New York mobsters, arguing about the problem that is Magellan – yes, exactly like in Chapter 1 of A Dirty Way To Die, but the names are different. It’s just longer here, going on for a few chapters instead of just one, and there’s a lot of stuff featuring the dirty Irish cop who comes up with the entire frame. 

As with A Dirty Way To Die, the actual killing is left off-page, but here we are told it will be “vicious sex stuff,” and the victim will be the “retarded kid” of a dead mafioso…one whose last name, curiously, was Rossi. As in “Bruno Rossi,” the housename for the Sharpshooter? I want to believe McCurtin did this intentionally. 

Even when the mob dispenses with the child-killer, a sicko who exists on the bottom rungs of the mob world, this too is ignored and McCurtin spends more time focusing on Magellan harassing the guy who whacked the killer for the mob – a ridiculously overdone scene where Magellan blows away the other guys in the guy’s car, takes the guy captive and drives him to Brooklyn, to a cemetery where Magellan finds a fresh grave and threatens to throw the guy in it. It just goes on and on and on, and at this point the “Times Square” setup is completely gone…but then it barely existed in the first place. 

McCurtin spins his wheels to such an extent that the “climax” is the most harried three pages you’ll ever read. It all literally is relayed in summary in the epilogue; Magellan manages to get all of his enemies conveniently rounded up in one spot – a staple of this series – and then he casually blows ‘em all away with his Uzi in a page or two. Salerno, the big bad ‘Nam Green Beret who is set up at much page expense early in the book and then disappears, only shows up here, for a page or two, to be quickly blown away. To say the entire thing is unsatisfying would be an understatement. 

The book ends with Magellan about to fly to Miami to get revenge on the don who planned it all. That clearly never happened, but then The Marksman was filled with one-off volumes by one-off authors that never got followed up on; personally I’m still waiting to read about Magellan getting revenge on The Professor. 

After The Times Square Connection, The Marksman disappeared for four years, not returning until 1980’s The Card Game, which was credited to Aaron Fletcher (whether or not he actually wrote it). At that point McCurtin was gone – per Len Levinson, McCurtin got out of being an editor in the later ‘70s so he could focus more on writing – and also the “Frank Scarpetta” house name was dropped. This is why I say The Times Square Connection almost comes off like a finale for the series. It’s just a shame that the book doesn’t deliver what the back cover promises.