Customer Reviews

Candyland : A Novel In Two Parts

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I thought nothing could be better than a new Ed McBain book, but I was wrong...a new book by Ed McBain AND Evan Hunter! They share the same body and the same mind but the two writers have differing styles. Both are fantastic! I applaud them both and so will you when you finish Candyland. Like Law & Order, the book is a cleanly divided story and like Law & Order, things are not always what they appear. Buy it, read it and thank heavens for Ed and Evan.

Candlyland, is a story told in two parts by Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. In Part I, Benjamin Thorpe, a married father and grandfather and successful Los Angeles architect is in New York City overnight on business. What his family and associates don't know, is that he is a sex addict. Now alone and at loose ends in Manhattan, he seeks female companionship, first in the hotel bar, then on the phone and finally at a "massage parlor". His trip to the bordello ends badly and we last see him, beaten and bloody, hailing a taxi. As Part II opens, we find police detectives working on the homicide of a call girl, found beaten, strangled and brutally raped. As they begin gathering information, they find she had some trouble last night with a John and that John turns out to be Benjamin Thorpe....As many know and as the jacket flap reveals, Evan Hunter and Ed McBain are the same author. In Candyland, he begins Part I as Evan Hunter, drawing you into the story and building the suspense. Then he smoothly turns the plot over to Ed McBain in Part II, as the case is investigated and the tension increases. Together, these two voices create a compelling, riveting novel, full of strong characters, powerful scenes and a shocking, unexpected twist at the end. His writing is crisp, spare and gritty, with an unrivaled ear for dialogue. Candyland is Evan Hunter and Ed McBain at their very best. This is a well written, tense page turner, easily read in one sitting and a book mystery/suspense thriller fans shouldn't miss.

As a new reader of mysteries and thrillers, I looked forward to reading this book with much anticipation. Friends had highly recommended books by Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. This combination novel (same author-different styles)was truly different. Believing that Part one was going to be the crime and Part two the solution, I was sadly mistaken. Part one has absolutely no crime or mystery. The entire section is devoted to the escapades of a sex-starved architect. We are certainly not at a loss for his lust and the author's development of his cravings. Part two at least gives us a look into the investigative work of the police trying to solve a homicide. They weave the Part one character into the story but superficially at best. The crime is easily solved without much thinking. If this book is indicitive of the styles of these two? authors, I think I'll head in a different direction.

I found this book to be well written, particularly the first part where the sex addict, a normal and very succesfull architect, is depicted so accurately, so hauntingly as he goes about feeding his addiction. Sexualized America is an unalloyed positive to the sophisticated filmakers who give us the shallow Joy of Sex type t.v. show Sex and the City. Las Vegas has an ad campaign that sells its city as a place for sex and irresponsibiltiy. Sexual relations are less important than wearing attractive (and expensive) shoes. Candyland takes sexual relations between people seriously. When sex is decoupled from normal love and affection, really bad things can and do happen. In this novel, sex breaks up marriages, turns a person immersed in this world into a sexual deviant, depicts prostitution realistically (not graphically) and shows that the sex addict lives on the edge of an abyss--that he may fall into at any time. The female vice cop, the prostitutes, the sex addict, the drug-abusing whore with the heart of gold (comes across as real in this novel),the man driven crazy because of sexual rejection gives a refreshing look at a phenomenen that too man Americans accept or ignore. I think everyone should ponder carefully the implications in this novel and especially the non-preachy, much-needed words of advice given at the end of this novel. The world of sex is grimy. This book is a good antidote to the idiocies of Pretty Woman that basically tell us that being a whore is just a fine and dandy job. The incidents, the characters, their thoughts and feelings take the sensitive reader out himself into the varied lives and worlds of people who deserve our censure, but at the same time deserve our love and compassion.

I read Evan Hunter's "Mothers and Daughters" when I was a child, became a fan, and have since read every book he's written as Hunter or Ed McBain. I've loved the 87th Precinct books as the characters remained consistant and the storylines good, though Hunter/McBain is unfortunately less enjoyable with each book.

I still find myself somewhat excited to read each new release and Candyland was no exception. However, this book was awful! I'm as open-minded as anyone, but it seemed he used the over abundance of sex and profanity as the core of the book and the storyline as an afterthought. The ending was predictable and the characters completely boring. I had no sympathy for Benjamin Thorpe, and found myself wanting him to be killed off to add some substance to the book.

This may have been my last book by Evan Hunter/Ed McBain after forty years of faithful readership.

Too much description of shocking sexual actions. Not enough effort to make the characters interesting, memorable, or likable. This was a disappointing work from the author. The plot was predictable and the ending, though better than the rest of the book, was a meager offering from a writer who should have known better. In short, it was a gimmick that failed.

Not up to McBain/Hunter standard. I have read almost all of the Ed McBain books and I have only read a few of the Evan Hunter books. Part 1 is more about obsession than anything else. I can not believe that Ben/Michael after he got beat up and lost all his money he was still interested in obtaining the services of a hooker. Part 2 Emma and Johnny lack chemistry and would never make it at the old 87th.

Evan Hunter/Ed McBain pulled off quite a stunt with this book. Keeping a single point of view going for for an entire book is difficult, making your `voice' as an author consistent is also difficult. Hunter/McBain manages to switch from one point of view to the other in this really remarkable book, and to switch 'voices' as well.

The first half of `Candyland' was so engrossing that I read it in a single night. The second half wasn't quite so enthralling, but still a good police procedural and up to McBain's high standard.

The only reason for 4 stars instead of 5 is the ending of the book. I just didn't buy it and it was not set up well enough to really go over. But that is a quibble, this is a really fun book and an example of a highly skilled writer taking big chances.

"Candyland" is not so much a novel as a concept piece, the idea of two authors, both the same man, writing separate novellas that intersect at a specific event. Evan Hunter wrote "The Blackboard Jungle," the screenplay for Hitchcock's "The Birds," and a slew of serious novels. Ed McBain, Hunter's best-known pseudonym, is the author of the 87th Precinct crime novels. "Candyland" is a McBain crime novel, too, about the murder of a hooker. But it is also a Hunter portrait, of a man suspected of killing her.

Ed McBain novels are especially interesting when they stray from the 87th Precinct. "Downtown," a dark comedy of a man lost in the big bad city a la "After Hours" but with a body count and better jokes, was up there with Elmore Leonard's finest. "The Sentries" was a bizarre Cold War paranoia tale with a remarkably downbeat and unpleasant tone for airport fiction. "Candyland" is a brilliant and clever detour from the fictional environs of the 87th Precinct's Isola to the reality of New York City, and one of his best crime stories yet.

The tone is the same as in the 87th Precinct novels, dark and funny and acutely sensitive to how police officers operate. In the second half of the novel, the criminal investigation part written by "McBain," two detectives have a problem questioning a witness. The guy turns to the woman after they are done:

" `We ought to arrange some signals we can use. If we are going to be working together any amount of time. Like if I touch my nose, for example, it'll mean you're Good Cop, I'm Bad Cop. Or if I call you Em instead of Emma...'

" `I told you I don't like being called Em.'

" `That's just what I'm saying. If I call you Em in front of somebody we're questioning, that'll mean Don't go there. Same as if you call me James. Don't go there, leave it be, shift the topic to something else.'"

The female detective here, Emma Boyle, is an interesting creation. She's not the typical gorgeous McBain dame with a positive mental outlook on life and love, but somewhat squirrelly and resentful. She's had a hard time with her brother officers, and she's having a hard time with her ex-husband, a rich philanderer keeping her child from her on a shabby pretext. She blames him for "raping" her during the last two years of their marriage, because his affair meant their marriage sex took place under false pretenses.

Sex is what it's about for these vice cops, and that's what the initial half of the novel, or the first novella, written by Hunter, is all about, too; a profile of a day in the life of a man with a problem he is unwilling to control. This is Benjamin Thorpe, successful architect who becomes a murder suspect in the second half of the book. Again, the writing here is subtle, detailing in matter-of-fact prose just how far gone this forty-something architect named Benjamin Thorpe has gone in pursuit of orgasms. Some reviewers here say Hunter's descriptions of Thorpe's activities cross the line into porn. It is certainly intense writing, but more cautionary than erotic, more ugly than graphic, designed to make Thorpe's desires read as the sickness-inspired impulses rather than vicariously thrilling to the reader.

Some people claim they knew how this was going to turn out, but I was fooled. Does the dual nature of "Candyland" work? Better than expected. The two-novella conjunction plays off very well, the two-author format even more so. The different approaches of the writer (just-the-facts McBain versus the deeper and more psychological territory of Hunter) dovetail nicely. In the end, you have a story with but one central character, that being Eros Unbound, and what it does to distend the mind and distort the character. It's dark and heavy, but never dull, and the story stays with you after it's over.

Well having read the first part, I expected to find some
excitement in the second part , such as Thorpe's struggle
to prove he was not the murderer, Thorpe's getting arrested
or questioned , etc. It turned out to be the fact that the
guy never knew there was a crime, or that he was a suspect.
Thus I sort of failed to understand why the two parts connected
to each other. The second part could have made a story without the first part. Although I like crime novels in which cops are guilty,this one is very ordinary - compared to 87th presinct. Three stars - only for the sake of McBain's writing skills.