Doors (1975)

Ed McBain's crime novel was first published in 1975 under another of Evan Hunter's pseudonyms, Ezra Hannon, whose name is still on the copyright line of later editions. Alex Hardy, a superburglar who dresses for the neighbourhoods he works, is hired by the fence Henry Green to take back an antique ring Henry himself sold to Jerome Rothman and his wife, from their apartment at Sixty-ninth and Madison, across from the Westbury Hotel. (Open Library)

Watches

Hamilton (unidentified model): Inside the Rothmans' apartment Alex finds the ring in its box from Henry Green, Jeweler, in the safe. Because a burglar who goes straight to the safe and touches nothing else looks tipped off, he dumps the dresser drawers onto the bed and takes a Hamilton wristwatch and a pair of gold earrings, leaving the costume jewelry, then scatters clothes and knocks over a lamp. The Hamilton is window dressing for the staged burglary; the text does not say which of the Rothmans it belonged to. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: So he went to the dresser now, and began pulling out the drawers, dumping the contents onto the bed, and then tossing the empty drawers on the floor. He found a Hamilton wristwatch, which he put into the dispatch case, and he also found a pair of gold earrings with diamond chips, mixed in with a lot of costume jewelry. (Ed McBain, Doors, scan cataloged as Warner Books, 1995, pp. 90 to 91, a sentence that runs across the page break; Internet Archive scan OCR)