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Ed McBain

kevinburtonsmith

Né Salvatore Lombino
Legally changed to Evan Hunter in 1952
Pseudonyms include Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten, Curt Cannon, Ezra Hannon, John Abbott, Dean Hudson, Ted Taine, S. A. Lombino, D. A. Addams
(1926-2005)

ED McBAIN was best known among crime fiction fans–and rightfully so–as the creator of the ground-breaking 87th Precinct police procedural series.

Nope, McBain didn’t invent the police procedural — he just set the gold standard, and that’s what he’ll always be remembered for.

He also managed to contribute to the Shamus Game, with such notable gumshoes as Matt Cordell, Ben Smoke, Matthew Hope and Curt Cannon. He even wrote one of the all-time great spoofs of the genre, “Kiss Me Dudley,” featuring Dudley Sledge, a private peeper who knows how to handle both women AND fish.

But his writings went far beyond just the crime genre. Under a slew of pseudonyms, he wrote horror, science fiction, melodrama, westerns and children’s books. He wrote short stories, novels, television shows, films and even a couple of plays, and saw much of his work adapted to both TV and film. In fact, his first large-scale success was the film version of his 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle.

Still, he’ll always be remembered for creating the cops of the 87th Precinct, in the fictional city of Isola, which bears an uncanny resemblance to New York City.

Why Isola, instead of New York City? In The Craft of Crime, edited by John C. Carr, Houghton Mifflin, 1983, McBsin confessed:

“When I started writing the first book, I found I was on the phone with the cops every ten minutes to check something…I thought, ‘This is getting to be a headache; I’m going to be spending more time talking to the cops than writing the books.” And I said, ‘I’m going to make this an imaginary city.”

And hence Isola (it means “island” in Italian) was born. He goes on to say how much he enjoys making up “baloney” about Isola. It’s obvious from the interview that McBain is serious about his work, but he never takes himself too seriously.

* * * * *

Born Salvatore Albert Lombino in 1926 in New York City, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well known as Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956. He also used the pen names Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten, Curt Cannon, Ezra Hannon, John Abbott, Dean Hudson, Ted Taine, S. A. Lombino, and D. A. Addams. And there are probably a few I’m missing.

Salvatore was born and raised in New York City, and lived in East Harlem until age 12, when his family moved to the Bronx. He attended Olinville Junior High School, then Evander Childs High School, before winning an Art Students League scholarship. Later, he was admitted as an art student at Cooper Union. Lombino served in the Navy in World War II and wrote several short stories while serving aboard a destroyer in the Pacific. However, none of these stories were published until after he had established himself as an author in the 1950s.

After the war, Lombino returned to New York and attended Hunter College, where he majored in English and psychology, with minors in dramatics and education, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He published a weekly column in the Hunter College newspaper as “S.A. Lombino”. In 1981, he was inducted into the Hunter College Hall of Fame, where he was honored for outstanding professional achievement.

While looking to start a career as a writer, Lombino took a variety of jobs, including a few weeks as a teacher at Bronx Vocational High School in September 1950. In 1951, he scored a gig as an executive editor for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and worked with authors such as Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, Richard S. Prather, and P. G. Wodehouse. He made his first professional short story sale the same year — a science-fiction tale titled “Welcome Martians”, credited to “S.A. Lombino.”

By May 1952, he had legally changed his name to Evan Hunter by May 1952, after an editor told him that a novel would probably sell more copies if credited to “Evan Hunter.” Thereafter, he used the Evan Hunter name both personally and professionally, and would eventually reserve it for for his non-crime novels exclusively, after being assured by his agents that publishing too much fiction or any crime fiction under the Hunter byline might weaken his “literary reputation.” Which mattered, because no matter which name he was using, he was one prolific SOB.

Anyway, the strategy seems to have worked. His brief stint as a teacher paid off when his first truly successful novel, Blackboard Jungle, dealing with juvenile crime and the New York City public school system and written under the pen name Evan Hunter, was published in 1954. The film adaptation followed in 1955, and was also a hit.

But in the mean time, during this the first half of the fifties, Hunter was pumping out a ton of genre fiction, under a barrage of pen names. But he wasn’t limited to crime and sci-fi—his short fiction appeared in publications as varied as Manhunt, Famous Western, Redbook and Amazing, and later on in his career, the trend continued, his work appearing regularly in everything from Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen’s mystery magazines to the Ladies Home Journal and Playboy. There was even a short-lived digest, Ed McBains Mystery Book.

He used his best-known pseudonym,“Ed McBain,” for the first time for Cop Hater in 1956, a police procedural which became the first novel in the 87th Precinct series (although at the time, he considered it a standalone), and would end up using that pen name for the rest of his career; not just for the 87th Precinct series but for all his crime fiction.

And he kept on writing. Not just novels and short stories but scripts for film and television, most famously for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), based on Daphne du Maurier‘s 1952 short story. Other screenplays included Strangers When We Meet (1960), Fuzz (1972) and Walk Proud (1979), all based on novels he’d written.

Meanwhile, other screenwriters were busy adapting his work. There were a couple feature films released in 1958, Cop Hater and The Mugger, and NBC ran a TV series, 87th Precinct, that ran for the 1961-62 season, all based on the his police procedurals. And over the years, various other writers attempted to capture the magic of the 87th. Among the more interesting adaptations were the 1963 Japanese flick Tengoku to jigoku (English title: “High and Low“),  directed by Akira Kurasawa and starring Toshiro Mifune, 1972’s Sans mobile apparent, a French/Italian co-production that transport Isola to Nice, and 1978’s Blood Relatives (aka “Les liens du sang”), a Canadian/French production filmed with Donald Sutherland as Carella and Montreal as Isola.

And he kept on writing. In 1978, he started a new series about Florida-based lawyer/sleuth Matthew Hope, and in 2000, a two-part novel called Candyland appeared that was credited to both Hunter and McBain, that opened with Hunter’s “psychologically-based narrative voice” and was wrapped up in “McBain’s customary police procedural style.”

Uh-huh.

He was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to be be honoured with the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.

And he kept on writing.

His final novel, the 87th Precinct book Fiddlers, was published in January 2005.

He passed away later that same year, from laryngeal cancer, aged 78, in Weston, Connecticut. He’d been a  heavy smoker for decades, and had had three heart attacks over a number of years.

10-42.

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

Unless otherwise noted, I’m assuming these stories appeared as by Ed McBain.

NOVELS

All books by Ed McBain, unless otherwise noted.
Not all of these are crime novels, and some of them may be alternative titles.

     

COLLECTIONS

NON-FICTION

SELECTED ARTICLES

FILMS

   

TELEVISION

 

  • “No Time to Die” (1992; based on a story by Ed McBain)
  • “Undercover” (1994; teleplay by Ed McBain)

COMICS

ALSO AVAILABLE

PLAYS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted (and awaiting tons of corrections, I’m sure) by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Rudy, Scott Lawrence, Jerry Mastet and Ted Bergman for at least trying to keep me honest. And an extra big thanks to Erin MacDonald whose Ed McBain/Evan Hunter: A Literary Companion is just absolutely some kind of wonderful.

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