Candyland: A Novel In Two Parts – Evan Hunter & Ed McBain, 2001 ★★★★½

Tag Team of One Makes Winning Combination

If schizophrenia is not merely talking to yourself but answering, what is it when a famous novelist partners up with his own nom de plume? 

Evan Hunter wrote some popular novels around broad social themes like juvenile delinquency, homophobia, and racism. Ed McBain wrote the famous 87^th Precinct crime novels and countless other mysteries. Candyland brings the pair together, for the first and only time.

It is a nifty idea for a novel which delivers on the page, Hunter’s faculty for writing in sensational, pinpoint detail about a particular human ill developing naturally into McBain covering its criminal aftermath. As a bonus, you get a suspenseful underlying meta-mystery of how and/or if these two plot threads will come together in the end.

That by itself justifies the dual-author approach and helps make for an absorbing if unsettling reading experience.

Hunter and McBain were the same person, a New Yorker born Salvatore Lombino who changed his name to Hunter and later became best-known as McBain. Candyland brings them together for the first and only time to tell of a day in the life of a sex addict (Hunter’s book) which leads into a homicide investigation (McBain’s book) when a prostitute turns up dead.

Benjamin Thorpe is an architect who can’t get over the fact that at 43 he is already a grandfather. Stuck in a sexless marriage, he still has wild oats to sow. A business trip to New York City offers opportunity. He tries talking up a lone woman at a bar, then phone sex with a steady acquaintance, and finally a massage parlor that advertises “complete satisfaction.”

A massage parlor. Benjamin Thorpe has been to many of them, and his thrills begin at the front door: "It's as if he's in a movie theater watching a particularly thrilling scene that's making him feel ashamed somehow, but he can't do anything to change the scene..."
Photo by Rafael Ben-Ari from https://reason.com/2020/02/02/massage-parlor-panic/

Never mind next morning’s flight home, he has an urge to feed:

Though in all truth, it never was an urge as such. In fact, he thought about sex all the time. Well, most of the time. No, all of the time. Well, most men thought about sex, didn’t they? Most of the time.

Thorpe struggles with two demons. One is locked inside of him, desperate for the endorphin rush only orgasms can bring. The other is the culture around him, which presents myriad objects of desire and a plethora of ways to satisfy his lusts. Thorpe’s point-of-view narrative tells us he senses a problem but doesn’t want to stop.

Subtitled “The Rain May Never Fall Till After Sundown,” this part of the book is Hunter’s territory, a lone man struggling against forces he can’t understand, let alone resist. For Thorpe, sex alone is not enough. Certain amounts of risk and pain are required.

This culminates in a scene where Thorpe is serviced by two women in graphic detail, for services he has paid for well over the usual amount (and will pay for even more in other ways.) The women give his genitals quite a working-over, but because he’s an older guy whose been out drinking all night, their efforts at bringing him to climax fall short.

Then, his hour up, they leave him to get dressed. His body wracked with pain, Thorpe still staggers to their supervisor demanding more time.

The Manhattan Thorpe visits in 1999 is cleaned up considerably from how it looked here, back in 1980. Still, what he sees in windows and lights at night tantalizes and stimulates him as he walks the city, trying to find someone, anyone.
Image from https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-22/new-york-city-will-no-longer-prosecute-sex-work-that-s-historic

I know from Amazon.com reviews that this episode turned off a lot of readers, it goes on a while and spares few details. But in its ugliness and Aristocrats-style black humor it makes a point that sex can stop being fun when pursued too long. “Seven hundred bucks and they say I was drinking?” Thorpe exclaims, causing a scene and getting himself kicked out with a few bonus punches thrown in for the trouble he caused.

After a follow-up section that may or may not establish an alibi for Thorpe, we move into the McBain section of the novel, titled: “By Eight, The Morning Fog Must Disappear.” (This, like the other subtitle, is taken from the title song of the old musical “Camelot.”) Here, we learn that one of the sex workers who tried and failed to satisfy Thorpe was raped and murdered a few hours later.

The narrative is the same present-tense, single point of view, but this time of a detective with New York City’s Special Victims Unit, Emma Boyle. Detective Boyle takes rape personally, especially after discovering her soon-to-be-ex-husband was carrying on an affair for at least the last two years. As far as she is concerned, she is a rape victim, too.

Boyle also carries a lot of baggage from a career of being surrounded by insensitive males. She pushes back as best she can, in a way McBain presents as sympathetic if not likeable:

“Gee, I’m terribly sorry if I sound snippy, Mr. Shears, is that the word you just used, snippy? I sure hope there wasn’t anything sexist intended in the choice of that word, snippy.”

Emma Boyle's job becomes a means for her estranged husband to separate her from her baby daughter, as her caseload keeps her out late. She also has a long memory of indignities suffered from her brother officers.
Image from https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/detective-badge.html

She gets partnered with Vice detective Jimmy Martin, who knows the world of massage parlors and call girls. Martin comes across as affable enough to suggest Boyle’s problems with him are largely her fault. But McBain is developing his part of the story in multiple directions, so that when Boyle begins investigating this story of an unknown middle-aged man thrown out of the massage parlor demanding his orgasm, her initial belief in his guilt is challenged by instincts and the memory of her detective mentor:

Mind the vic, Leo used to say.

Meaning pay attention to the vic, learn all there is to know about the vic – and you’ll get the perp. Mind the vic, find the vic, find the perp.

Which puts her focus not on joining her brother cops in the hunt for Thorpe but rather on Cindy Mayes, the murder victim, who just had her apartment lock replaced a day or so before her murder, or long before Thorpe entered her parlor.

Emma does not agree sex addiction is enough of a motive by itself for a deadly rape: “Rape isn’t about sex,” she says. “It’s about power.”

Hunter and McBain wrote different types of stories, but they wrote them in much the same way, meaning that the two interlinked novellas have the same basic tone and style. Just the approach is different, making this experiment less radical than its jacket sleeve might suggest.

In fact, the whole Hunter opening could be considered not unlike a long introductory narrative to your typical McBain story. At least one 87^th Precinct novel, He Who Hesitates, comes at you from the criminal’s point of view, and Candyland starts out much the same way.

The Thorpe section is slow moving but keenly observed, basically consisting of a long night in Manhattan as the architect tries and fails to score, growing ever more desperate as the night draws on. We learn about his tricks for scoping out a bar for likely sex partners, preferably prostitutes, and how he knows when he has found one:

Some of them will ask you straight out if you’re a cop. That’s the prelude to the essential question. Once she asks you if you’re a cop, she’s upstairs in your bed.

Thorpe has a surprisingly hard time finding a call girl: "He knows without question that half the women out here on the street tonight are prostitutes. The problem is determining who is and who isn’t."
Image from https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/1202769016924/ 

Hunter seems to know a lot about this world, so much so I wondered if it was something he might have personally experienced. He was said to have been a longtime writer of “sleazebook” fiction under the pseudonym Dean Hudson. Hunter always denied this, strenuously, but the more I read Candyland’s opening section, the more I sensed he might have had a real lived-in sense of what this demimonde was about.

Thorpe does not care who he offends or puts off. He is completely beyond embarrassment. He just wants sex, without commitments or condoms, to the point where his work suffers and his drinking increases. He only cares about feeding his beast:

He sometimes feels he is trapped in a perpetual nightmare of long-legged, big-breasted, red-lipped girls incessantly beckoning, offering dark and secret candy.

I think Hunter does a great job explaining this character, deepening our sympathy even as he invites our scorn, and giving his story suspense. McBain’s part of the book is much more readable, though, and does travel some rocky psychological territory of its own.

Emma views the sex workers she encounters as victims of male lust and power, and very much minds jokes and casual attitudes from other officers. To them, she realizes, a dead prostitute can be a routine part of the job rather than a human tragedy. (We get a glimpse of a prostitute as a caring human being, not in Emma’s section but Thorpe’s, which is effective if not completely convincing. Though any person who keeps both a cat and a cockatoo is aces in my book.)

Evan Hunter and Ed McBain as they appear on the back of the first-edition book jacket. But which is which? Photo by J. W. Fry.

I enjoyed the twists and turns the narrative took in the Emma section more than I did the railroad-like momentum of the Thorpe section. My one real quibble is that this part is too short, with an abrupt conclusion. I loved the surprise ending, but I wanted more investigation and follow-through with all those red herrings McBain mysteries normally provide. The Thorpe section effectively sets up the situation and makes its point; the Emma section builds just as well but then just stops.

But I won’t complain I wasn’t satisfied. Saying it ended too soon is a classic complaint about a good book, which Candyland certainly is. And the twin-author concept, which may seem at first a gimmick or a ploy to sell more Hunter novelsHu, works rather well. The author voices are the same, but their approaches are different (just-the-facts McBain versus the deeper and more psychological territory of Hunter). In the end, you get a connecting thread around one central character, Eros Unbound, and how he can distend a mind and ruin a character. It’s dark and heavy, but never dull, and stays with you long after it’s over.