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80 Million Eyes - by Ed McBain

Detectives Meyer and Carella investigate the death of a popular television comedian, while Detective Bert Kling attempts to smoke out a violent stalker terrorizing a woman from his past.

It's just another week for the hard working cops at the 87th Precinct...

80 Million Eyes may not be one of the better 87th Precinct novels out there, it has some minor pacing problems and, with the exception of a few scenes, more on that in a moment, the narrative has a soft-boiled texture to it.  But there are enough special moments sprinkled throughout the novel's 165 pages to make it an enjoyable read for fans of the long running series.  Newcomers to the 87th Precinct, however, might do better by picking up a different book in the series.  Some of my favorites, and books I feel comfortable recommeding to newcomers,  are Tricks, Ghosts, and Poison, but that's just me and my idiosyncratic taste in fiction.

This entry, like many others in the series, switches back and forth between two very different cases.  The copyright page even goes so far as to list two separate titles, The Dear Hunter and Eighty Million Eyes.  Perhaps they had originally been published individually as short novels elsewhere.  Of the two, I thought that Hunter was the better.  It had a rough and tumble feel to it that was missing from the more gimmicky Eyes portions.  The best parts of Eyes were the occasional moments of playful banter between Meyer and Carella as they released their gradually mounting stress, while Hunter had several scenes of intense violence and nail biting suspense to keep the reader enthralled and wondering what would happen next.  Those sections of the novel make it worth cracking open, but, as I said in the previous paragraph, only after you have another 87th Precinct mystery, or three, under you belt.

The Big Bad City - by Ed McBain

It's August and the city of Isola is cooking in the summertime heat.  A semi-sweet burglar is kind enough to leave chocolate chip cookies at his crime scenes and the body of a strangled woman is found in Grover Park.  While a great many people are on vacation this August, it's still business as usual for the working detectives of the 87th Precinct.

The Big Bad City is one of the late, great Ed McBain's last 87th Precinct mysteries, and it is a damn good one.  As with the forty-eight or so novels that have come before it, The Big Bad City overflows with gritty realism as the detectives go about the mundane work of tracking down clues (and interrogating suspects) as well as those quiet personal moments and observations that make the detectives such realistic and, for the most part, sympathetic characters.  Thanks to McBain's gift for snappy dialog, how they investigate a crime is just as fascinating as the crime itself.  Carella and Brown's investigation of the murder, as well as the rather unorthodox history, of Sister Mary Vincent (formerly Katie Cochran) is the centerpiece of the novel and fuels several feisty scenes between the detectives and those they are questioning.  The novel's secondary mystery, wherein Meyer and Kling attempt to track down and apprehend a chocolate chip cookie gifting oddball of a burglar, is good enough for a book of its very own.  A sequence where one of the media dubbed Cookie Boy's burglaries goes murderously awry is the brilliant highpoint of the novel.  (A bungled arrest comes in a close second.)  Finally there is the subplot involving the vengeance seeking Sonny Cole, the man that killed Steve Carella's father and who is now determined to kill Carella as well.  The only thing about The Big Bad City that didn't sit all that well with me was the matter of Carella's impending fortieth birthday.  With over forty years worth of novels behind him, I could not help but think that Carella should have been just a little bit older.  On the verge of turning 50, perhaps.

Even with police procedural shows like Law & Order, NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street cluttering up cable stations (and DVD rental shelves) and countless other writers walking similar beats, nobody has come close to surpassing the wonderful 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain.  The Big Bad City is a perfect example of why that is, read it and enjoy.