Eighty Million Eyes (87th Precinct) [Mass Market Paperback]

Ed McBain (Author)

Book Description

Series: 87th Precinct | Publication Date: March 1, 1997

Stan Gifford was America's most beloved comedian. It showed in the ratings--40 million people watched the ever-smiling comedian crack his jokes. And those same 80 million eyes saw him die on camera. It looked like part of the act, but the joke was on Gifford. Now 87th Precinct detectives Meyer and Carella aren't amused--America might have loved Gifford's on-air personality, but everyone who worked for him had a reason to want him dead.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stephen King and Nelson DeMille on Ed McBain

I think Evan Hunter, known by that name or as Ed McBain, was one of the most influential writers of the postwar generation. He was the first writer to successfully merge realism with genre fiction, and by so doing I think he may actually have created the kind of popular fiction that drove the best-seller lists and lit up the American imagination in the years 1960 to 2000. Books as disparate as The New Centurions, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Godfather, Black Sunday, and The Shining all owe a debt to Evan Hunter, who taught a whole generation of baby boomers how to write stories that were not only entertaining but that truthfully reflected the times and the culture. He will be remembered for bringing the so-called "police procedural" into the modern age, but he did so much more than that. And he was one hell of a nice man. --Stephen King

Way back in the mid-1970s, when I was a new writer and police series were very big, my editor asked me to do a series called Joe Ryker, NYPD. I had no idea how to write a police detective novel, but the editor handed me a stack of books and said, “These are the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. Read them and you’ll know everything you need to know about police novels.” After I read the first book--which I think was Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man--I was hooked, and I read every Ed McBain I could get my hands on. Then I sat down and wrote my own detective novel, The Sniper, featuring Joe Ryker. My series never reached the heights of the 87th Precinct series, but by reading those classic masterpieces, I learned all I needed to know about urban crime and how detectives think and act. And I had a hell of a time learning from the master. Years later, when I actually got to meet Ed McBain/Evan Hunter, I told him this story, and he said, “I would have liked it better if my books inspired you to become a detective instead of becoming my competition.” Evan and I became friends, and I was privileged to know him and honored to be in his company. I remain indebted to him for his good advice over the years. But most of all, I thank him for hundreds of hours of great reading. --Nelson DeMille

To read about how Ed McBain influenced other mystery and thriller writers, visit our Perspectives on McBain page.

For a complete selection of 87th Precinct novels available for Kindle (paperbacks coming in February 2012), visit our Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Booklist.

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--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Ed McBain was one of the pen names of successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926 – 2005). Debuting in 1956, the popular 87th Precinct is one of the longest running crime series ever published, featuring over fifty novels, and is hailed as “one of the great literary accomplishments of the last half-century.” McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (March 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446603864
• ISBN-13: 978-0446603867
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,026,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ed McBain was one of the many pen names of the successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926 - 2005). Born Salvatore Lambino in New York, McBain served aboard a destroyer in the US Navy during World War II and then earned a degree from Hunter College in English and Psychology. After a short stint teaching in a high school, McBain went to work for a literary agency in New York, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and P.G. Wodehouse all the while working on his own writing on nights and weekends. He had his first breakthrough in 1954 with the novel The Blackboard Jungle, which was published under his newly legal name Evan Hunter and based on his time teaching in the Bronx.

Perhaps his most popular work, the 87th Precinct series (released mainly under the name Ed McBain) is one of the longest running crime series ever published, debuting in 1956 with Cop Hater and featuring over fifty novels. The series is set in a fictional locale called Isola and features a wide cast of detectives including the prevalent Detective Steve Carella.

McBain was also known as a screenwriter. Most famously he adapted a short story from Daphne Du Maurier into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). In addition to writing for the silver screen, he wrote for many television series, including Columbo and the NBC series 87th Precinct (1961-1962), based on his popular novels.

McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. He passed away in 2005 in his home in Connecticut after a battle with larynx cancer.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NUMBER 21 AND STILL VERY GOOD!, August 15, 2002

By 

Mac Blair "Mac Blair" (Huntingdon, TN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eighty Million Eyes (Mass Market Paperback)

Another good one by Ed McBain. This is really two stories in one book as there are two different investigations going on at the same time. One is about Stan Gifford, a TV comedian, who dies while on the screen. Was he murdered or did he kill himself? He was thought to be loved by all but it turns out many, many people connected with the show wanted him dead. Through good police work Steve Carella and Myer Myers close in on the killer. Who did the dirty deed? The other story is about Cindy Forrest and a man who shows up at her office, he won't leave and beats up the policeman who is called. She does not know who he is. Bert Kling is assigned to this case. He has had contact with Cindy in a previous book and she does not like him at all. He tries to get of the case but his LT. says no. Bert spends much time with Cindy but after he leaves her one night the man breaks into her apartment and beats her up. Bert then take off on his on investigtation to find the man. Again through very good lab work and Klings police work the man is finally found. A very good police book that explains how things work and how they are but together to come up with the right answers. In most cases you can't go wrong with McBain.

2.0 out of 5 stars 80 Million Is Not Enough, May 16, 2007

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eighty Million Eyes (87th Precinct) (Mass Market Paperback)

Ed McBain produced a fantastic variety of adrenaline-pumping, psychologically-probing fiction in his lifetime, colorfully varied in character, structure, and plotline. But not everything he wrote was a masterpiece. Take "80 Million Eyes."

That's the best part of the book, the title. Sitting on my shelf, I imagined another inspired McBain foray into the Big Bad City, 80 million eyes peaking out from tenement windows or penthouse gardens witnessing assorted skullduggery in Isola. Then I read the jacket copy and saw it was about the star of a television show suddenly expiring before a national audience. Even better.

With expectations set so high, no wonder I was disappointed. Yes, the main plot is about funnyman Stan Gifford. His weekly show is being shot live in an abandoned furniture loft on Culver Avenue in the 87th Precinct territory when he suddenly keels over in the middle of a skit. While Dets. Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer work this case, Bert Kling handles another where a woman is being stalked by a brutal, cagey psychopath.

Written in 1966, ten years and 21 novels into the 87th Precinct series, "80 Million Eyes" seems unusually tired and labored for McBain. First, the Gifford plotline never develops into anything interesting. Yes, there's an amusing moment in a producer's office where we hear the fellow on the phone butchering a script, probably one by McBain's other self, author Evan Hunter. But Gifford himself never is fleshed out enough to make us interested about the "why" of his killing. The cast of characters around him in the studio look promising from a distance but barely register in the narrative before being dropped altogether.

"Our facts are right, and the facts lead up to suicide," Meyer says at one point. "But I don't like the feel...The feel is murder."

But there is no "feel" this time for the reader, as McBain leads you around by the nose in a rote case, reducing an already rudimentary whodunit to who cares.

The second case, of the brute with the thing for the single woman, accounts for the spark of this book. It's not a complex plot strand, apart from the one complication of Kling having had a past unhappy history with the stalker's target. Though not the Deaf Man, the psycho isn't entirely stupid, either. He presents some unnerving suspense before the case is wrapped up, suddenly and all-too-neatly.

The problem with McBain in the 1960s was that he was writing more complex novels while still adhering to the page limits from his 1950s heyday, when the books had but single plots that could be unreeled satisfactorily over just 160 pages. Later on, given more pages to play with, McBain's multiple story arcs would pay off for him in a big way, but "80 Million Eyes" is about as cramped as he ever got. I know, it's like that Woody Allen joke, about the food being bad, and "such small portions." But I think if McBain had more space to fill, "80 Million Eyes" could have been a lot more than it is.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 80 million eyes, December 1, 1999

By 

netta (Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eighty Million Eyes (87th Precinct) (Mass Market Paperback)

I found the book interesting and breath taking, it's a thriller that never stops surprising . the english is not hard and not too plain and that combination creats a fluently written book which is fun to read .