If a sign of a great author is making a book readable even when there is little in way of story, then here is Exhibit A in Ed McBain’s greatness. This book is fast-paced and gripping, capturing authentic moments of life on its margins. But the plotwork falls short of form.
If you are already familiar with and enjoy the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals, you can find things to extend your engagement with the series. But if you are a newbie wanting to give McBain a fair shot, this is not the book to start on.
80 Million Eyes is more a killer-and-filler entry.
This is also McBain’s earliest foray into an 87th Precinct subgenre, the show-business murder, in which an investigation uncovers some part of the entertainment industry. Other later examples include Calypso, Romance, and The Frumious Bandersnatch. McBain alter ego Evan Hunter had his own exposure to showbiz, which he sends up here in the form of cretinous producers and abusive stars.
A comic who hosts a TV variety show is struck dead in the middle of an act in front of 40 million faithful viewers. One of them is 87th Precinct detective Steve Carella, who gets partnered with fellow series regular Meyer Meyer to crack the case.
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| The view of the New York City studio where "The Tonight Show" was shot, circa 1970, as seen from behind host Johnny Carson's left ear. Stan Gifford's last moments on earth are spent taking in a similar view. As a person, Gifford seems modeled on Carson in some ways. Image from https://eyesofageneration.com/39173/ |
An autopsy reveals Stan Gifford was poisoned by a particularly fast acting toxin. Was it slipped to him just before he went on? By whom? And how and why?
“Do you think he took it knowingly?”
“Suicide?”
“Could be.”
“In front of forty million people?”
“Why not? There’s nothing an actor likes better than a spectacular exit.”
Meyer and Carella banter like this, sharing notes while pursuing dead ends and misleading clues. They eat up a lot of pages moving in circles. A trio of production staffers, all carrying their own beefs with the late funnyman, offer absurdly divergent versions of Gifford’s last moments which the pair ponder at length. Meyer meanwhile struggles to get through a cold, the one activity that puts them on the right track.
There is a second mystery to solve, involving a stalker who beat up a police officer and vanished. The woman he had been bothering tells police she has no idea who he was, and doesn’t expect to see him again. Detective Lieutenant Pete Byrnes puts Bert Kling on the case, even though by fantastic coincidence the woman is someone Kling had a bad relationship with while investigating a prior 87th Precinct mystery.
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| The B-story in 80 Million Eyes was originally published in the December 1965 issue of Man's Magazine under the title "The Dear Hunter." Apparently a straightforward repurposing of the short story, the novel even begins exactly the same way. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/subtropicbob/38424645010 |
Byrnes doesn’t care. He just knows the stalker will eventually attack Cindy Forrest and will likely go after any male he sees with her.
“He sounds like a hood, and hoods take what they want. He doesn’t know from candy or flowers. He sees a pretty girl he wants, so he goes after her – even if it means beating her up to get her. That’s my guess.”
Byrnes seems stuck on a longshot, that some random punk is a fanatical stalker who will stop at nothing until he attacks the same woman again. Alas, like many cops in this novel, Byrnes is correct in his hunches. McBain reveals the heavy to be an unnuanced knuckle-dragging lunkhead who will not be deterred in pursuit of his lust object, violently hating any male who he sees with her. Yet despite this bull-in-a-china-shop approach, he proves too clever and elusive for police.
As an exploration of the television industry circa 1966, which Evan Hunter knew well, 80 Million Eyes had potential. Isola is more clearly doubling for Manhattan here than in most installments, as we see it revealed as a national media capital.
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| The Stan Gifford section of 80 Million Eyes debuted three years earlier, in 1963, in the pages of Argosy magazine, another masculine-themed publication. McBain actually showcased several works of fiction in its pages over the years. Image from https://www.wolfgangs.com/vintage-magazines/the-argosy/vintage-magazine/OMS791763.html |
“The Stan Gifford Show” is broadcast from an abandoned furniture loft on rundown Culver Avenue, a neighborhood ridden by crime:
It was a little incongruous to see dozens of ivy-league, narrow-tied advertising and television men trotting through a slum almost every day of the week in an attempt to put together Gifford’s weekly comedy hour. The neighborhood citizens watched the procession of creators with a jaundiced eye; the show had been on the air for three solid years, and they had grown used to seeing these aliens in their midst.
We eavesdrop on a conversation with a producer who is complaining a writer dared speak out against changes done to his script. As he cavalierly details outrageous alterations of characters and setting, you sense Hunter airing some personal beef. It’s kind of fun, if drawn out.
Broadcast television centered around black-and-white pictures and studio sets dominated American lives in the 1960s; recalling this lends a certain nostalgic charm for those of us who still remember it. From the way it is described, “The Stan Gifford Show” functions as a kind of talk-show/variety-show hybrid, like what Ed Sullivan or Dean Martin did before “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” changed everything.
Gifford, we are told, is a fantastically gifted funnyman. But we don’t see much of his celebrated humor except a labored pantomime routine that ends with his sudden death. Nor does the program or its production factor much into the novel as it goes on. McBain presents a handful of characters without offering compelling reasons to suspect any of them.
McBain lavishes more attention on the methodology of criminal investigation. It is here the book achieves some lovely moments of verisimilitude, with a dash of poetry here and there that showcases why McBain captured so many fans over the course of 50 years. Walking into a police lab, Kling happily registers “the aroma of a thousand chemicals, hitting the nostrils like a waft of exotic perfume caught in the single sail of an Arabian bark.”
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| Old-style police lab work is underway. In 80 Million Eyes, series regular and lab technician Sam Grossman helps Bert Kling with the stalker case by analyzing a shoe print. Image from https://portal.ct.gov/despp/division-of-scientific-services/_content/history---old |
There is also a Whitman-like reverie of Carella and Meyer walking through the city on a warm autumn day, taking in all the urban beauty:
The landmarks both men had grown up with, familiar sights that gave the city perspective and reality, seemed to surround them intimately now, seemed closer and more intricately detailed. You could reach out to touch them, you could see the sculptured stone eye of a gargoyle twelve stories above the street. The people, too, the citizens who gave a city its tempo and its pace, walked with their topcoats open, no longer faceless, contagiously enjoying the rare autumn day, filling their lungs with air that seemed so suddenly sweet.
Such an unexpected prose pageant distracted me from the fact nothing of real interest had been going on in this case for some time. Usually McBain throws in some early clues that connect to later events, or creates some intrigue that pulls a reader in. Here the Gifford case is especially flat, while the psycho angle recalls better 87th stories where an unbalanced villain offered more in the way of an angle or personality.
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| A 1966 first edition of 80 Million Eyes emphasizes the eeriness of the title. It certainly is a different kind of mystery. "Give me a good old-fashioned hatchet murder any day," Steve Carella sighs at one point. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Eighty-Million-Eyes-Ed-McBain/dp/B000O6ML66 |
There are a high percentage of talking-head scenes and storylines favoring conversation over incident. More problematic for me is how both cases are solved, where the investigators get sudden bursts of inspiration to set them on the right path.
Police intuition is a thing, I know, but McBain strains the concept here to wrap up his stories quickly and neatly, if not well:
There is an intuitive feel to detection, and the closest thing to sudden truth – outside of fiction – is the dawning awareness of a cop when he is about to make a fresh discovery. The moment Kling drove onto the dock he knew he would hit pay dirt. The knowledge was sudden and fierce.
In this instance, the brain wave comes from recalling a small clump of mud dislodged from a shoe containing assorted debris. Oy vey!
Even a harrowing assault scene, written with harsh, absorbing clarity in a moment-by-moment way, does little to carry the story forward. It’s so nasty and cruel you expect the book will kick into a higher gear resolving it. Yet there is something frustrating about the way McBain keeps pushing the same gears for this magical maniac just to juice up this underwhelming B-plot.
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| The back cover of the first edition of 80 Million Eyes calls McBain "the pseudonym for a famous, best-selling author." Hunter played with this subterfuge for several years, partly in jest, partly because he didn't want to be tied down to a specific genre. The following year, 1967, would be the first without a new 87th Precinct novel since the series debuted. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Eighty-Million-Eyes-Ed-McBain/dp/B000O6ML66 |
McBain still manages to work the suspense, gets a few chuckles, and summons vivid environments populated by living, breathing characters. “You’re dealing with people, not ciphers,” one of the suspects tells investigators, and at that moment I felt like she was talking to me.
It is in the construction where the novel feels off. The two story concepts – regarding the televised murder and the stalker – were originally published separately for magazine publication earlier in the 1960s, then repackaged together to make up this novel. Many 87th Precinct novels successfully utilize multiple storylines; this one doesn’t work.
Here you get an abruptness, a willingness to settle for obvious solutions in place of challenging the reader. Even more offbeat is the resolution, which McBain rushes through with atypical disinterest.
Late in the book McBain offers a linking device around the concept of mad love, but if anything this only underlines its slapdash nature, since in one case the romantic angle arrives out of nowhere. 80 Million Eyes has moments where it delivers what series fans enjoy; it’s what one must read through getting those moments where the novel drags.
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