A maudlin score of violins has maundered down the scale. 'Well then,' admits the officer in charge, 'the airplanes got him.' But our hero has another theory: 'Ohhh no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.' And thus the last, melancholy seconds of King Kong surrender to the credits. Ed McBain, effortless progenitor of so many mutilations, amputations, and general spiller of the common corpuscles, is up to the third in his new sequence of novels [with Beauty and the Beast]. They are 'based' upon fairytales (the last two were Goldilocks and Rumpelstiltskin), although most of the original plot is cheerily jettisoned…. But if the Beast unfairly cops it in King Kong, Beauty is given shorter shrift in the McBain—she's bound hand and foot with wire hangers, doused in gasoline on a deserted beach, and burned to a quick crisp.

Beauty...