McBain uses the Matthew Hope novels to extend his fictional range, both thematically and stylistically. He has done this with many of his other non-87th Precinct McBain novels as well, but not in such an extended fashion.

The narrative task McBain sets for himself in There Was a Little Girl is to construct a story told through the consciousness of a man in a coma. The plot unfolds piecemeal as Matthew mentally wanders back and forth from the past to the present in a kind of literary collage of images, vignettes, and backstories. It is a very interesting literary experiment, and the technique works especially well in this novel, which deals so heavily with the past. The concentration on Matthew's consciousness and mental shifting it goes through allows McBain to run the stories of Matthew's past parallel with the history of the characters he is investigating. Interspersed...