Ed McBain: By their very nature, literary genres belong to no one writer, but are composite creations, shaped by different authors.
Yet more than most, Ed McBain, who has died from cancer aged 78, could lay claim to having created his own genre, or at least sub-genre, for the police procedural was defined by what McBain achieved with his long series of some 50 novels in the 87th Precinct series.
Set in the fictional city of Isola, but intended as a portrait of McBain's own New York City, the novels took the reader inside the 87th Precinct station house to show how ordinary policemen struggled to stay on top of the mayhem around them.
Despite the limitations of the format, McBain found enough significant variations to occupy him for a large part of his prolific career. The first in the series, Cop Hater, was published in 1956, and it was McBain's first novel.
Or was it? Like a character from one of his novels, McBain had many disguises. He was born Salvatore A Lombino in New York City, but when he started writing, he was advised that a more Anglo-Saxon name would serve him better. So he adopted a pseudonym, or many pseudonyms. They concealed not only his Italian origins, but also his prolificacy.
He published his first books, four of them, in 1952: two for children, Find The Feathered Serpent (as Evan Hunter), and Rocket To Luna (as Richard Marsten). That same year Hunter took the credit for two adult novels, The Evil Sleep! and The Big Fix.
It's a measure of McBain/Hunter's flexible approach to nomenclature that the latter was republished in 1956, but under the name Richard Marsten; while most of the eight novels first credited to Marsten were later republished as by Ed McBain.
Yet the story of names does not end there. In 1954, Abelard Schuman published Cut Me In by one Hunt Collins: another identity assumed. In 1956, McBain made his debut. In 1958, the novelist Curt Cannon introduced himself with I'm Cannon - For Hire: pseudonym number five. Then, some 20 years later in 1975, even though by then McBain/ Hunter had little need for disguise, he published the novel Doors as Ezra Hannon.
Some interviews with McBain have referred to books written as SA Lombino, but they may be chimerical; and perhaps, hidden in the undergrowth of 1950s pulp magazines, there lurk yet more Lombino alter egos.
Nevertheless six is an impressive tally of noms de plume. At first, Hunter was the "serious" novelist, while the others wrote the money-spinners, the pseudonyms required because in the US, he said, "mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature". Hunter never quite managed to achieve the kind of acclaim (or sales) he desired, while McBain won over many critics who might otherwise find crime fiction tainted, and it is certainly the 87th Precinct novels that will ensure the writer a place in literary history.
Salvatore Lombino was born into a poor but respectable family in Italian Harlem. He studied art at Cooper Union, New York 1943-44, and saw service (but not combat action) in the US Navy, (1944-46). It was while in the navy that he took up writing, and after the war he graduated in literature from Hunter College. He did a little teaching but quit in frustration; and he spent some time working for a literary agency. Meanwhile, he began selling stories to the pulps, and he never lost the discipline required to turn prose around at half a cent a word.
By way of children's fiction, he graduated to crime fiction, and then in 1954, writing as Evan Hunter, he published The Blackboard Jungle, based in part on his experiences teaching in South Bronx. Hollywood bought the rights to the novel, and Richard Brooks's movie duly appeared in 1955, with Glenn Ford as the teacher struggling to cope with adolescent rebellion.
In 1958, Hunter published Strangers When We Meet; this time he wrote his own script for the ensuing movie. In the meantime he had provided a few scripts for television's Alfred Hitchcock Presents. . . series, and in 1963 wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds.
Between 1956, when the first was published, and the release of The Birds, no fewer than 15 87th Precinct novels appeared. As time went on, the tone became ever so slightly sour, increasingly pessimistic. It was McBain's ability to keep abreast of the zeitgeist that made his novels such an attractive model for TV series such as NYPD Blue and, particularly, Hill Street Blues.
Unsurprisingly, McBain considered himself a cinematic writer, even when not writing for the screen: "You just touch on things. You don't go round the room describing the furniture," he said.
He tried his hand at writing plays, and Evan Hunter novels continued to appear, but as McBain took up more of his time, the Hunter novels became less easy. Later he found himself another character, another city, in the series of novels that featured the Florida lawyer, Matthew Hope.
His first two marriages, to Anita Melnick and Mary Vann Hughes, ended in divorce. His wife, Dragica; a son with Melnick, two sons with Hughes, and a stepdaughter all survive him.
Ed McBain (Salvatore A Lombino), writer, born October 15th, 1926; died July 6th, 2005