From the New York Times:
Evan Hunter, Writer Who Created Police Procedural, Dies at
78
By MARILYN STASIO Published: July 7, 2005 Evan Hunter, the
author who as Ed McBain virtually invented the American
police procedural with his gritty 87th Precinct series
featuring an entire detective squad as its hero, died
yesterday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 78.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Evan Hunter, best known
for the 87th Precinct series he wrote as Ed McBain, in 1997
outside the 17th Precinct in Midtown Manhattan.
The cause was cancer of the larynx, said his agent, Jane
Gelfman. In a 50-year career, Mr. Hunter, sometimes as Ed
McBain and sometimes using other names, wrote a vast number
of best-selling novels, short stories, plays and film
scripts. With the publication of "Cop Hater" in 1956, the
first of the 87th Precinct novels, he took police fiction
into a new, more realistic realm, a radical break from a form
long dependent on the educated, aristocratic detective who
works alone and takes his time puzzling out a case.
Set in a New York-like metropolis named Isola, "Cop Hater"
laid down the formula that would define the urban police
novel to this day, including the big, bad city as a character
in the drama; multiple story lines; swift, cinematic
exposition; brutal action scenes and searing images of ghetto
violence; methodical teamwork; authentic forensic procedures;
and tough, cynical yet sympathetic police officers speaking
dialogue so real that it could have been soaked up in a
Queens diner between squad shifts.
Lending humanity to the grim stories that flood the 87th
Precinct is a revolving ensemble cast that includes Detective
Steve Carella, the heart and conscience of the squad room;
his gentle, deaf wife, Teddy; the rocklike Detective Meyer
Meyer, whose father refused to give him a first name because
he didn't want to name him for "some goy"; Bert Kling, the
rookie cop who plays Candide to his hard-bitten elders; and
Fat Ollie Weeks, the equal-opportunity bigot.
For all the studied muscularity of his style as Ed McBain,
Mr. Hunter considered himself an emotional writer rather than
a hard-boiled one. "I think of myself as a softy," he once
said. "I think the 87th Precinct novels are very sentimental,
and the cops are idealistic guys." He was also a stern
moralist, and in many of his novels, this aspect surfaced as
a keening lament for the battered soul of his city.
"This was a city in decline," he wrote in "Kiss" (1992). "The
cabby knew it because he drove all over this city and saw
every part of it. Saw the strewn garbage and the torn
mattresses and the plastic debris littering the grassy slopes
of every highway, saw the bomb-crater potholes on distant
streets, saw the black eyeless windows in the abandoned
tenements, saw public phone booths without phones, saw public
parks without benches, their slats torn up and carried away
to burn, heard the homeless ranting or pleading or crying for
mercy, heard the ambulance sirens and the police sirens day
and night but never when you needed one, heard it all, and
saw it all, and knew it all, and just rode on by."
The hard, blunt prose could not disguise a sophisticated
stylist who hated to be pigeonholed as a genre writer. "Not
procedurals," a character in
"Romance" (1995) protests when someone slaps that label on
books he writes.
"Never procedurals. And not mysteries, either. They were
simply novels about cops. The men and women in blue and in
mufti, their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers,
children, their head colds, stomachaches, menstrual cycles.
Novels."
Although other practitioners adopted the conventions that
continue to distinguish the realistic police procedural from
the hard-boiled American private-eye novel and the genteel
British detective mystery, many critics considered Mr.
Hunter's command of the form to be matchless, an assessment
with which he no doubt would have concurred.
"I feel that there is no other writer of police procedurals
in the world from whom I can learn anything," he told John C.
Carr, editor of "The Craft of Crime," "and in fact they all
learn a lot from me." There wasn't any point in his reading
the competition, he said. "That's like Michelangelo watching
an apprentice paint in the white of an eye."
His peers shared that assessment. The Mystery Writers of
America awarded Ed McBain its Grand Master Award for lifetime
achievement in 1986, and in 1998 he was the first American to
receive a Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers
Association of Great Britain. Though his popularity with
readers never flagged, by the early 1990's his 87th Precinct
novels were particularly in vogue. And while earlier books in
the series, like "Eighty Million Eyes" (1966), "Sadie When
She Died" (1972) and "Fuzz" (1968), continue to be admired as
vintage McBain, later, more complex works like
"Widows" (1991), "Mischief" (1993) and "Money, Money, Money"
(2001) racked up more robust sales in the United States and
abroad. Ms. Gelfman, his agent, estimated that in 50 years of
writing, he had sold more than 100 million copies of his
work.
Despite his popularity, Mr. Hunter could give the impression
of a literary talent who felt he had not been given his due,
mainly because of the limited success of film and television
adaptations of his books. Although several of his 87th
Precinct novels were turned into films, and a number of the
novels were adapted for television in Japan, it rankled that
an American television series, "87th Precinct," was a failure
in the 1960's.
Instead, the show that revolutionized prime-time crime drama
was "Hill Street Blues" in the 1980's. Mr. Hunter had nothing
to do with that series, but he ruefully held to the
conviction that it had drawn its concept, characters and
dramatic style from the McBain novels.
Despite his renown as Ed McBain, it was as Evan Hunter that
the author had his first taste of literary acclaim, before he
was 30. That was in 1954 for
"The Blackboard Jungle," a somewhat autobiographical novel
about a young teacher whose ideals are shattered when he is
assigned to an urban vocational high school with a
half-savage student body. The next year it was turned into a
successful movie with Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Mr.
Hunter followed "The Blackboard Jungle" with other
best-selling novels, including "Mothers and Daughters" (1961)
and "Last Summer" (1968).
He also adapted some of his novels for the movies, including
"Fuzz," a 1972 film starring Burt Reynolds, and "Strangers
When We Meet" (1960), starring Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak.
But the most acclaimed of his 75 or so screenplays was the
one for "The Birds," the classic 1963 film that he and Alfred
Hitchcock adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier.
Until illness sidelined him, Mr. Hunter had been
collaborating with the composer Charles Strouse and the
lyricist Susan Birkenhead on a musical stage version of the
1968 film comedy "The Night They Raided Minsky's," about
burlesque theater in New York.
For many years, the Evan Hunter and Ed McBain bylines were
strictly separated to avoid any confusion or shock that
readers of Evan Hunter's
"serious" books might feel when exposed to the "mayhem,
bloodshed and violence" that were Ed McBain's meat and drink.
The author later acknowledged a fusion of the literary styles
he once considered distinct.
"Evan Hunter and Ed McBain are truly becoming one," he said
in 1992, and in 2001 the two wrote the novel
"Candyland."
Neither name was his original one. He was born Salvatore
Lombino on Oct. 15, 1926, in New York City, the only child of
a postal employee, Charles Lombino, and his wife, the former
Marie Coppola. He started writing while serving in the Navy
during World War II. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter
College and held a teaching job that he would later draw on
for "The Blackboard Jungle."
Though his Italian immigrant ancestry would inspire him to
write a generational saga, "Streets of Gold" (1974), he
changed his name in 1952, believing that "prejudice against
writers with foreign names" led publishers to reject their
work. "If you're an Italian-American, you're not supposed to
be a literate person," he said in 1981.
Mr. Hunter's first two marriages, to Anita Melnick and Mary
Vann Hughes, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife,
Dragica; a son with Ms. Melnick, Ted, of San Miguel, Mexico;
two sons with Ms. Hughes, Mark, of Paris, and Richard, of
Monroe, Conn.; a stepdaughter, Amanda Finley of New York; and
two grandchildren.
Mr. Hunter's first divorce, in 1973, led to the appearance of
a new character, Matthew Hope, a Florida divorce lawyer. Hope
became an Ed McBain hero in a separate series of novels, all
bearing fairy-tale titles like
"Goldilocks," the first, in 1978. After a dozen books, he
quietly retired the series in 1998.
After a heart attack in the 1980's, Mr. Hunter modified his
routine of writing 10 hours a day just about every day of the
week. One result was fewer, darker, more thoughtful books and
a new philosophy: "When it's no longer fun, I'll stop."
But he kept going. His current publisher, Otto
Penzler/Harcourt, will bring out "Fiddlers," the 55th and
last in the 87th Precinct series, in September, and "Learning
to Kill," a collection of five decades of stories, next
spring.
-----
Jim Beaver
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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