Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: That about sums it up. Utterly brilliant. I smiled through the entire book. Hurray for Fat Ollie!
Rating: 
Summary: Ah yes, the rule of five - but not quite 5 stars
Review: There's nothing likeable about Fat Ollie Weeks. Hilarious, yes, but not likeable. His eye and ear for the world around him produce well-crafted observations from those of your everyday equal opportunity bigot to his very special contempt for female crime writers and Amazon reviewers. From police work to eating to casual conversation, Fat Ollie doesn't have a clue what a misfit he is.Ollie has written a 36-page novel, complete with repetitious dialogue and grammatical redundancies. The book's hero, actually heroine, is Olivia Wesley Watts a svelte, attractive redheaded detective who becomes trapped in a basement while on the trail of a gang trafficking in conflict diamonds. Ollie pursues Emilio (Emmy) Herrera, an addicted transvestite prostitute who stole his prized manuscript. At the same time Emmy is looking for Olivia, convinced she is real and the key to the biggest payday of his miserable life. As multiple investigations unfold and McBain's fiction intersects with Ollie's, McBain decides to show us Fat Ollie's sensitive side. Even though he prefers blondes and can't understand his attraction to a Puerto Rican, Ollie asks the sexy young Officer Patricia Gomez to go dancing. Officer Gomez thinks Ollie eats to compensate for other pain in his life. Incredibly, she seems to enjoy his company. Fear not, Ollie has not lost his lecherous weakness for blondes, which will come back to bite him in a predictable but funny scene in a bar that Emmy is known to frequent. All in all, "Fat Ollie's Book" is a very funny story - good, not great. It gets an extra star from me because of Ron McLarty, narrator of the audiobook. When McLarty is Fat Ollie, he sounds just as crass as you imagine the character to be. When he's Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks reading his debut novel, McLarty projects the author's misplaced confidence in his nonsensical work in a perfect grade school monotone.
Rating: 
Summary: Fat Ollie Steals 87th Precinct Spotlight
Review: This book contains the worst crime fiction Ed McBain has ever produced, and that's meant as a complement. After all, it takes a gifted writer to write prose as bad as McBain produces on behalf of one of his less noble fictional creations, Detective First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks. Weeks figures if he solves the crimes, what's the trick in making one up on paper and getting it on the best seller's lists? Not only does he have a well-worn list of "how-tos" for creating crime fiction ("BE SURE TO AVOID AMBIGUITY"), he's been doing his homework surveying the marketplace by reading Amazon.com reviews. Clearly this guy is in trouble... Weeks has been floating around McBain's 87th Precinct novels for a while, and now he gets center stage. Though he's with the 88th Precinct, and much disliked by the 87th Precinct detectives (and many readers) because of his nasty manner and blunt racist approach to life, he's still a decent detective. Weeks kind of works as a protagonist only if you are playing it for laughs, and McBain is here. "Fat Ollie's Book" is one of the more comic 87th Precinct offerings. People still die, and others mourn, but this time there's more emphasis on laughs, incongruity, and malaprops, particularly when it comes to Weeks' novel. He decides it should star someone like himself (maybe not quite as fat) but female, since he discovers women buy more mysteries than men. It's not exactly like Weeks transforms himself into Phil Donohue. His opus, "Report To The Commissioner," includes references to the narrator's ample bust and what a hot dish she is in general. She's writing from a locked room, you see, waiting for someone to kill her, and the first thing she wants you to know is there's a run in her stockings... Then someone steals his manuscript, and Weeks goes on the warpath to get it back. As a crime drama, "Fat Ollie's Book" is problematic. There's a couple of cases being worked on in tandem with Ollie's crisis, neither which holds much interest. The other detectives, like Steve Carella and Bert Kling, go through their paces but don't manage anything particularly interesting this time around. A problem with this book is that Weeks is probably the most colorful character anyway, and pushing him up to the foreground, especially as entertainingly as this, makes the others pale by comparison. But as a crime comedy, "Fat Ollie's Book" is a nice reminder of a key reason so many of us visit the 87th Precinct: McBain's one funny writer, and he can spin a yarn. Pity poor Ollie can't. But at least he can dance, play "Night And Day" on the piano, and come up for a derogatory epithet for anyone else on the planet.
Rating:
Summary: Great Story With Satire Of Detective Stories
Review: This book is excellent. What makes Ed McBain special is that he can make a hero out of Fat Ollie Weeks, an overweight policeman who is a bigot. In this book Fat Ollie's own manuscript is stolen. There are excellent comments on writing and on how the author (Fat Ollie or McBain) found his "voice." The book pokes fun of other McBain novels, of Fat Ollie and of bad writing. Ultimately, Ed McBain does not take himself, or Fat Ollie, very seriously, which makes for a great story. Some of the reviewers have misunderstood the cleverness of this book, and that's too bad.
Rating:
Summary: GO OLLIE ! A Fun Read But No Real Mystery Here
Review: This book is for all Ed McBain and police procedural fans, but if you have not read MONEY MONEY MONEY you should read that first because this is a direct sequel. Detective (Fat Ollie) Weeks is the first detective on the scene to investigate the murder of councilman Lester Henderson, who was considering a run for mayor. The murder actually occurs in the 88th precinct where Ollie is stationed, but this becomes the next book in the 87th precinct series because Henderson lived in the 87th and (despite the reluctance of their lieutenant) Ollie decides to enlist the help of detectives Steve Carella and Bert Kling, with whom he worked in the MONEY MONEY MONEY case. The murder is solved in a straightforward way (with the unintentional help of the murderer), but that is background to the main story and almost incidental. This is not FAT OLLIE'S BOOK just because he was lead detective on the case, but also because he had just finished his manuscript for the dectective story which he had decided to write during his and Carella's previous case. As he was investigating the Henderson murder, his briefcase with his only copy of REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER (written using the pen name Olivia Wesley Watts) was stolen from his car. Thus, Ollie is simultaneosly trying to retrieve his manuscript and apprehend the murderer. We revisit not only Carella, Kling and Ollie, but several other characters from previous books, including the Reverend Gabriel Foster, and detective Eileen Burke, a previous love interest of Kling who gets assigned to the 87th in a move that threatens to complicate his relationship with Deputy Chief Surgeon Sharyn Cook. And we meet Officer Patricia Gomez, to whom Oliie becomes attracted in the process of Gomez helping Ollie solve the case. We gradualy get to read Ollie's manuscript interpersed with the Henderson case through a clever device which McBain adopts which introduces another complication and very funny thread to the book. Ollie remains his bigoted self, and this element plays an integral role in the story. It is carried to such extremes that it is at times hilarious, but not, of course, for the targets of his bigotry. And it does remind us of how such attitudes lurk just below the surface in many organizations. Before reading very far into the book I decided that it was to be read in a lighthearted way, sort of a parody of mystery writers, detective stories, bigots, racial agitators, drug addicts, and homosexuals. From this viewpoint, it was a fun, very fast read, while further developing the characters with which I was already familiar as an avid McBain reader. While I loved the cleverness of the idea of parallel cases for Ollie as the basis of this book, a few unanswered questions (which would reveal too much of the plot) and the (perhaps intentional) superficiality of the story kept me from giving it a five star rating.
Rating:
Summary: Average McBain is still pretty good
Review: This is a typical McBain 87th precinct mystery -- two or three story threads, some day in the life information on the detectives and the sharp dialogues present in all of the nearly 60 books in this series. Instead of concentrating on Steve Carella, McBain's usual hero, this one centers on Oliver Weeks (Fat Ollie), a recurring bit-parter in other books who is an obese Archie Bunker with a detective's shield. All told, this is far from McBain's best (see the books with the Deaf Man -- a recurring criminal mastermind). The central crime (assassination of a city councilman) is not particularly complex, twisted or ingenious. The second thread is an interesting sidebar, but not much else. Ultimately, this is a good break from reality and one for the fans, but NOT for people uninitiated to McBain.
Rating:
Summary: Report to the Commissioner
Review: This is my first Mcbain book I have read. I enjoyed the different twist in this book. Fat Ollie is the typical Columbo type cop. Ollie is portraded as a fat, bigot aspiring writer. The book is about the murder of a councilman. It seems more or less important to Ollie to find who stole his book. There are different story lines that are quite easy to follow. It was quite fun to read and guess what OLlie would do next as well as reading along Ollies' book. I read this book on my return flight from Iraq and I must say I am not much of a Crime Fiction guy but, but this was well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Fat Ollie Weeks, Meet Ed McBain
Review: This is not the book to start with in reading the 87th Precinct series (the pedant in me would say 'start at the beginning,' but I personally feel the series hit its stride in the 1980s, when McBain was taking more time between books to plot, develop characters, and build suspense). But it does call attention to what have been two of the series' strengths almost from the beginning: variety and humor. Previously McBain has dared to narrate one novel in the series entirely from an unapprehended perp's perspective, build another as a commentary on Richard Nixon and Watergate as reflected through a smart but grievously flawed gang leader, and frame yet another as a ghost story. Here he infuses almost the entire novel with that other series characteristic, humor. Now, there is a history of two kinds of humor in the 87th Precinct: mordant gallows humor, and self-referential, occasionally smug humor (fellow 87th Precinct aficionados will remember all those gibes at Hill Street Blues for ripping McBain off a bit too egregiously). For better or worse (mostly better), Fat Ollie's Book usually utilizes the self-referential approach. Fat Ollie Weeks himself is an odd duck, sharing all of Andy Parker's foul-mouthed foul-minded bigotry and sexism, but displaying, unlike Parker, signs that he can actually be a good, dedicated detective when he wants to be. But from his introduction, Ollie has also been an object of fun: the bigot as Popeye's Wimpy, overweight, always looking to cadge another hamburger, ah yes (and come to think of it, Wimpy also always sounded a big like W.C. Fields, whom Weeks tries to imitate to the growing consternation of generations with no taste for or experience of film comedy before, say, the Pink Panther). The joke here is that Fat Ollie has written a detective novel based less on his own experiences than on a form letter with the 7 rules for writing bestselling thriller fiction and on his reading of book reviews on, well, Amazon.com! The set-up, which interweaves Ollie's awful prose with McBain's consummately professional approach, allows the real author to score humorous points against other genre writers and to underscore what makes his novels work as well as they do. For me at least, what kept this self-consciousness from lapsing into narcissism was the humor in Fat Ollie's renaming of the topography in and around 'Isola,' McBain's version of Manhattan, with new names of his own. This completely unnecessary renaming not only befuddles the poor drug-addled transvestite who has stolen the manuscript and thinks that it is describing real events from which he can profit. It also represents a seeming acknowledgement from McBain that the fake names laid over what is otherwise a realistically portrayed New York City have long since become a dispensable detraction for the reader and an extraneous obstacle for the author, as in the circumlocutious trips 'upstate to the state capital' and the odd references here to the World Trade Center bombing in some unnamed city. There are signs of uncharacteristic haste and sloppiness in some parts of the book (is it just me, for instance, or does McBain offhandedly interject the last names of two 87th Precinct detectives into a conversation on p. 227 without having previously introduced them this time around). But much can be forgiven the author for indulging himself, and his readers, in an experiment in humor and a lesson in the craft of detective fiction. There. Now, to figure out how to keep Fat Ollie Weeks from reading this and taking it as encouragement to write another novel'..
Rating:
Summary: Best Yet
Review: This is the best 87th Precinct novel so far -- even though much of it is actually the 88th Precinct. The characters are superb and McBain's sense of humor is enthralling. He braids a murder investigation into the theft of a manuscript -- and we are just as interested in both. But beyond the actual plot, the characters are what make this novel so good. We are glad to see some of our old favorites -- Carella, Kling, Parker, the snitches Cowboy Palacios and Fats Donner -- but the "fleshing out" (so to speak) of Ollie Weeks is superb. And the incidental characters are a hoot! I can't wait for McBain's next!
Rating:
Summary: As good as usual and funnier than most.
Review: Those who pull an Ed McBain book off the shelf, or take one to the check out, are unlikely to be disappointed. This 2002 offering is as good as they usually are and funnier than most. Occupying most space, in terms of physical bulk and narrative focus, is Oliver Wendell Weeks, a cop otherwise known as Fat Ollie. Affecting a style of delivery modeled on that of W C Fields (who remembers him?), and able to boast that his music teacher successfully taught him the first three notes of "Night and Day", Fat Ollie has further displayed his talents by writing a police procedural novel. Unfortunately for him it is stolen, but fortunately for us its full text is interlaced with everything else that unfolds in this rich McBain extravaganza. Thrown in also are comments about Internet sites like this one, and those who read and write reviews thereon.
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