Let’s face it: Ironside, starring massive Raymond Burr as a para in a power chair, was a gimmick. A successful gimmick, for sure, since it ran from 1967 to 1975 and is still running in Zimbabwe, no doubt, but the show had absolutely nothing to do with the real condition of paralysis. Burr was a big man and the butt of a thousand Johnny Carson fat jokes. The wheelchair meant he didn’t have to pretend to chase down criminals. He just tooled around in the back of his spiffy Ford Econoline Van and directed his assistants to catch the crook of the week.

Then came Lincoln Rhyme.

In 1997, crime novelist Jeffery Deaver wrote a bestselling book called The Bone Collector, featuring a sip-and-puff C4 quad/detective/scientist/force of nature, Lincoln Rhyme. Thoroughly disabled and no longer employable as a “real” cop, Rhyme was a fictional “consulting forensic scientist” a full three years prior to the debut of the popular television series CSI. Unlike the television forensics team working out of their ultra-modern set, Rhyme held court analyzing minute crime data from an adapted apartment in Manhattan. He is not just the classically “gruff but good hearted” gumshoe, like almost every fictional detective ever written. He is a pain in the rear, sloppily dressed, often in polka dot pajamas, unshaven, drinking single-malt Scotch at every turn, and suffering no fools or departmental pinheads. As one associate asked him, “Don’t you get tired of being in a good mood all the time?”

Jeffery Deaver is one of the best crime novelists on the planet, specializing in the kind of procedure crime-solving that involves the smallest of minutiae — dirt samples, complicated chemical analysis, the age and origin of a random wood chip the size of a fingernail, that kind of stuff. The plots are wildly complicated and the bad guys are geniuses at their particular and peculiar brand of psychopathology. In his quad investigator, he found the perfect criminologist mind to handle this victory of science over evil. Eleven Lincoln Rhyme novels later, all massive bestsellers, he has created an iconic figure to stand next to, or sit next to, the Hieronymus Bosches and Kurt Wallanders and John Remuses of the contemporary, highly literate world of crime fiction.

The inspiration, I think, for Lincoln Rhyme, was not Raymond Burr. It was more likely Stephen Hawking.

Rhyme is indeed a master scientist at the chemistry and geology of crime and even with his limitations, can wield a Bausch & Lomb comparison microscope or a density gradient device as skillfully as the actors on CSI (Rhyme rarely depends on DNA — too easy). But he is not just a brainiac cum irascible grouch in a Storm Arrow wheelchair (later to be replaced by a red and gray Merits). He is an astute, unflinching observer of his condition and its effect on both himself and others. He is a tactless truth teller like the abrasive protagonist in the book and recent highly acclaimed HBO movie, Olive Kittredge. At times the novels feel like crime-interrupted manuals on living with a C4 SCI, of which Deaver says early on, “C4 is the demilitarized zone of spinal cord injuries … trauma to the infamous fourth kept him alive though virtually a total quad.”

His back was crushed by a beam at a construction site when he was the head of forensics for the NYPD. In his debut in The Bone Collector, after yet another debilitating bout with autonomic dysreflexia — raging headaches, blood pressure through the roof, even seizures — he decides it’s time to pull the plug. He wants desperately to die. He even announces in the New York Times that “my next big project is killing myself.” But he can’t find a doctor willing to help him soon enough, gets distracted by a new case, and ends up blowing off the Lethe Society, the most gung-ho of the euthanasia groups.

Not that it makes him anymore at peace with the world. He hates “cripphobes,” as he tags them, who treat him like a circus freak or china doll. And he hates being a captive of a useless body. “One of the most frustrating aspects of being a quad,” he says in book number three, The Empty Chair, is the inability to bleed off anger,” i.e., throw a lamp or punch a wall. And in book number 10, The Kill Room, one of my personal favorites, he rants about the advantages of being a para over being a quad, not the kind of insight you hear much even in disability circles.

“Nobody pays much attention to people in wheelchairs if they can pick up a knife and fork or shake your hand. When someone has to feed you and wipe your chin, your very presence spreads the discomfort like spattered mud … and those who don’t look away give you those f**king sympathetic glances. Poor you, poor you …”

Rhyme: All Mind and Heart

The books are peppered with astute, cynical one-liners:

“Gimps spend a lot of time on their asses.”

“A quad’s life is wires … the rich ones, at least. The lucky ones.”

“One thing crips get over is modesty … serious crips, real crips, macho crips don’t care.”

But, hard truths aside, Lincoln Rhyme lives a full life. He tries to get out of his Bat Cave at every chance, packing up “all the shit a quad has to haul around” and following a crime to the Bahamas or backwater North Carolina. As the series evolves, he has surgery on his right arm, allowing it some limited movement, though not enough to pull a gun trigger or dial a cell phone. And he has a girl, Amanda Sachs, a crime-stopping cohort, a beautiful woman who hates to be treated like “a pricey collectible,” a lover of fast cars, and severely limited herself at times by crippling arthritis. Amanda loves him dearly, sleeps with him regularly, and worries that he will keep trying dangerous surgeries until he suffers even greater loss.

“Didn’t he know the truth?” she asks herself. “That he, like everyone else, is mind and heart first, before he was body?”

And that is the crux of the whole series: Lincoln is all mind and heart, even if his mind is obsessed with dirt droppings and his heart is bent on saving the world and saving himself at the same time.

One of my favorite Lincoln Rhyme beats is how Hollywood hacks come to him with TV series ideas that exploit his unique profile and his many intriguing cases, obviously in search of that elusive “Ironside” jackpot. The saddest pitch is a show called … drumroll please…”Rhyme and Reason.” His reaction: “Are they out of their f***king minds?”

Lincoln Rhyme, through 11 books and myriad thorny mysteries, knows that he has one strength left, one strength that in the end trumps all the rest — mental strength. His problems of adjustment, especially trying to transcend the way others see him as weak, pathetic, and accursed, will never go away. But, as one associate nailed him, “He is such a strange man … so terribly afflicted and yet so supremely confident.”

Strange man? A brilliant fellow who enjoys, among other of life’s pleasures, ridding the world of despicable creeps, guzzling single-malt Scotch, and spending time in the company of a tall, red-haired beauty who drives like a bat out of hell? Doesn’t sound so strange to me.