Customer Reviews

Eighty Million Eyes

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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.

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.

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 .