Juggling Live Electric Eels

By John Skow

Probably it works this way: after years of riding the Shetland pony across the | slack wire above the center ring, you begin to wonder if you could do it blindfolded. Sure, easy. But if the pony were blindfolded? If you were both blindfolded and you were juggling live electric eels? Something like this may have gone through Ed McBain's mind as this master began There Was a Little Girl (Warner; 323 pages; $21.95), his 80th or maybe 160th crime novel. Could he, for instance, just to make things interesting, write a thriller in which his hero gets shot on the first page and stays unconscious for the entire book? What kind of hero would that be? Interesting question. Let's see ...

What is surprising is not that McBain pulls this off but that he does it without breaking a sweat. As always in his novels, sharp, clear sentences trot briskly one after another, tailing up into effective paragraphs and chapters as if there were nothing to it. As always, the funny stuff is funny and the scary parts scary. The puzzle is even puzzling: What did Florida lawyer Matthew Hope stumble over while trying to negotiate the sale of a fairgrounds to a local circus that got him shot? A few of Hope's friends try to find out and are soon stumbling clueless through the circus world, wondering whether the death of a gorgeous midget was suicide or murder, why the animal trainer seems himself to be a predator, and whether the dashing young man who hangs by his hair is kept aloft by cocaine.

The author's secret appears to be the steadiness of his gaze. He looks straight at whatever he is describing, concentrating utterly (for a chapter or only a sentence or two) on, say, why bears are more dangerous than tigers in animal acts, or on the merry custom of "choosing day," when carny couples pair up. Or on the night toward the novel's end (and it may be toward Hope's end as well) when the hero's teenage daughter talks to him by his bedside for 12 hours and more, telling him about the time in Rome when her hands were sticky with gelato and he washed them in a fountain. "Dad," she says, "could you just squeeze my hand a little? Just so I'll know you're hearing me? I'm not rushing you or anything ..." McBain gets the daughter right, of course, and the bears and the tigers right too, as he has done for dozens of books and years.