Ed Lacy
Ed Lacy, born Leonard S. Zinberg in 1911, was an American writer known for his contributions to detective fiction, particularly during the 1950s. He is perhaps best recognized for his 1957 novel *Room to Swing*, which earned him the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery of the year. Lacy's work is notable for featuring black protagonists, a rarity for the time, and he portrayed these characters with depth and complexity, often set against the backdrops of urban crime and boxing. His writing style is characterized by skillful plotting, including the use of flashbacks and twist endings, while maintaining a focus on psychological insights rather than gratuitous violence.
Despite a promising start with his first detective novel, *The Woman Aroused* in 1951, Lacy's later works did not achieve the same level of acclaim, leading to a decline in his reputation. He wrote numerous stories for esteemed publications and was also awarded a Twentieth Century Fox Literary Fellowship. Lacy's commitment to developing rich characters and engaging narratives has left a lasting impact, although he has largely faded from mainstream recognition. He passed away in 1968, but his manuscript collection is preserved at Boston University, where it can be explored by those interested in his literary contributions.
Ed Lacy
- Born: 1911
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: January 7, 1968
- Place of death: New York, New York
Type of Plot: Private investigator
Principal Series: Dave Wintino, 1957-1965; Toussaint Moore, 1957-1964; Lee Hayes, 1965-1967
Contribution
Ed Lacy is one of the many underrated detective-fiction writers who both flourished and faded all too rapidly. In 1958, he received the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best mystery of the year, Room to Swing (1957). Later works did not bring him the same degree of success, and his reputation faded to near oblivion after his death. Yet his crime novels still merit critical attention. Unlike his peers, Lacy often chose blacks as protagonists. His characters have greater psychological depth than is ordinarily found in detective fiction, an achievement that is all the more remarkable when one considers that those same characters are generally immersed in the stereotypically macho worlds of boxing and urban crime. Lacy’s plotting is similarly skillful, featuring recurring flashbacks, considerable action but little gratuitous violence, and double-twist endings. In 1957, the Los Angeles Mirror-News called Room to Swing “the occasional perfect mystery novel.” The hyperbole of this judgment should not be allowed to obscure the fact of Ed Lacy’s genuine achievement as a writer of detective fiction.
Biography
Ed Lacy is the pen name of Leonard S. Zinberg, who was born in New York City in 1911. He continued to live in New York throughout most of his life, gaining an intimate familiarity with the city that proved to be very useful to his fiction writing. He and his wife, Esther, had one child, a daughter named Carla.
Lacy began his writing career in 1940 with the nondetective novel Walk Hard—Talk Loud, which is set in the world of boxing, a milieu that would become a lifelong interest. During World War II, he served as a correspondent for Yank. After the war, he met some writers, and although they were poor, according to his account, he decided that theirs was the career that he would pursue. From that time, Lacy earned his livelihood as a freelance writer. After a slow start, he saw some success with his first detective novel, The Woman Aroused (1951), intended to be a satire. He wrote dozens of stories that were published in such periodicals as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Collier’s. Finally, after four nondetective and five detective novels, The Best That Ever Did It (1955), a caper novel, achieved considerable popularity. Three years later, Lacy received the Edgar for Room to Swing. Lacy also was awarded a Twentieth Century Fox Literary Fellowship.
Lacy died on January 7, 1968, in New York City. His manuscript collection is currently held in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University.
Analysis
Ed Lacy began his career of mystery writing in 1951 with the satiric The Woman Aroused, succeeded by Sin in Their Blood (1952) and Strip for Violence (1953). The titles suggest that the books have no literary merit whatsoever, and Lacy himself expressed wonder at the titles his editors and publishers created and approved. Yet these books mark a strong beginning to Lacy’s contribution to the mystery and detective genre.
That contribution may be judged credible, consistent, and often creative. During the mid-1950’s, before the Civil Rights movement had begun, Lacy was featuring black investigators, both private and police, who possessed the requisite invincibility of the detective hero. Each is literate, intelligent, ethical, physically powerful, and sensitive, often to a greater degree than his white counterparts. Lacy believed that stories were given new depth if the characters were Mexican, Puerto Rican, or black.
Toussaint Moore, the hero of the Edgar-winning Room to Swing, is originally selected to solve the case on which the plot hinges because he is black. Lacy gives his character compelling internal struggles: struggles between security and possible wealth, between the pain of racial discrimination in the South and the pleasure of success in solving his case. Minor characters who are black, such as Ollie Jackson in Be Careful How You Live (1958), are similarly presented as being intelligent and capable people. It is to his credit that Lacy writes of black characters without a trace of stereotyping—and without the self-righteousness sometimes found in works of the 1960’s.
Lacy does at times, however, commit the sorts of technical mistakes that are common in novels in which first-person narration is employed. For example, he fails to explain why the narrator is bothering to tell this story at all and how a narrator such as this would ever consider writing such a work. Most important, Lacy sometimes forces the narrator to record the events surrounding his own death, a neat trick indeed. Still, though Lacy is guilty of all these mistakes, they are more than compensated for by the psychological insights presented and the skillful and somewhat sophisticated manipulation of time through multiple flashbacks. These shifts in chronology flow naturally, and the revelations they contain are well placed. Such clever placement of information is an important component of the consistently well-structured plots of Lacy’s novels.
Lacy’s annual summer visits to the East End of Long Island became a source for Shakedown for Murder (1958). Both the idyllic village setting and the less-than-idyllic village “frustration and bigotry of long standing” figure strongly in the plot. Trips to Europe, particularly to Paris, offered Lacy the ideas for Go for the Body (1954), The Sex Castle (1963), and The Freeloaders (1961). Work was another source of story ideas for him. Lacy once took a job in a butcher shop to learn about freezing meat, a subject taken up in The Men from the Boys (1956).
In a 1959 article, “Whodunit?—You?” Lacy describes his customary process of assembling a plot. He began each novel with “the denouement clearly in mind.” It was important to him that clues be planted carefully throughout the text and the solution to the mystery not be unrelated to the plot. He wrote for three hours a day, seven days a week, and produced five typed pages per day. It took about a month for him to complete a first draft, to which he returned some weeks later for the extensive revision he or his editors required. He claimed that an average mystery novel during the 1950’s could earn five thousand dollars over its life from magazine serialization, hardcover and paperback publication, and foreign rights. (Most of his works were translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and German.)
Though he could be classified as a member of the American hard-boiled school of writers, Lacy’s plots avoid the gratuitous violence and sex often associated with this genre. Although considerable violence does take place, rarely is it exaggerated or without function within the plot. On this topic Lacy commented, “There is more than sufficient violence about us, so [I] don’t use violence for violence’s sake.” He also refrained, he added, from putting characters “in bed 20 times a day.”
Be Careful How You Live
An illuminating example of a Lacy novel is Be Careful How You Live, published in 1958 after a string of five successes that had earned high praise from critics. Be Careful How You Live describes the adventures of Bucky Penn, a young New York police detective who becomes the partner of Doc Alexander, a very clever, streetwise, older detective. Together they operate successfully on the elite Commissioner’s Squad. Risks and temptation arise, however, when they become members of a special unit assigned to solve an important kidnapping case.
Narrated in the first person by the main character, and using a large amount of flashback, the novel reveals how events in Bucky’s childhood explain, if not justify, his adult behavior. He became an undirected, dissatisfied young man who gave vent to his aggressions by becoming first a boxer, then a soldier, then a physically abusive New York police officer. The account of his rise and fall is realistic and credible. Ollie Jackson, a black officer and a minor character, is ethical, intelligent, and loyal—perhaps the most attractive character in the book. The female characters, on the other hand, are seen by Bucky as either slovenly, sluttish, or pleasantly compliant—the only categories he understands. Lacy keeps judgments and observations consistent and appropriate to Bucky’s nature. Not until the shower of bullets at the very end of the story does the reader flinch, faced with a denouement that simply does not ring true. Given the many strengths of this book, and, indeed, of the entire canon of Ed Lacy, it is disappointing that he and his works have nearly fallen into the category of the forgotten.
Principal Series Characters:
Dave Wintino , a young, strong, and wiry detective on the New York police force, makes a reputation for himself very quickly as a smart and incorruptible investigator and as a formidable pugilist.Toussaint Moore , a black private investigator, was reared in Harlem. He had been a postal worker, but idealism—and the desire to make better money—motivated him to give up his government post in favor of work as a private investigator. Somewhat introspective, Moore is a sensitive, intelligent individual.Lee Hayes , a black police detective in New York City, becomes involved in investigations of violent crimes while managing to steer clear of both the corruption that is pervasive in the city’s bureaucracy and the temptation to succumb to racial hatred.
Bibliography
Browne, Ray B. Heroes and Humanities: Detective Fiction and Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986. A study of humanist ideology in American, Canadian, and Australian detective fiction, geared toward a popular audience interested in scholarly approaches to culture. Provides perspective on Lacy’s work.
“Ed Lacy (Len Zinberg).” In American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers, edited by George Parker Anderson and Julie B. Anderson. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Compares Lacy to other hard-boiled detective writers. Bibliographic references and index.
Lachman, Marvin. “Ed Lacy.” In Murder off the Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters, edited by John L. Breen and Martin Harry Greenberg. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1989. Lacy is compared to nine other masters of paperback genre fiction. Bibliographic references and index.
Landrigan, Linda. Introduction to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense, edited by Linda Landrigan. New York: Pegasus Books, 2006. Lacy is one of the authors covered in this anthology of some of the best crime fiction of the second half of the twentieth century.
Niemi, Robert. “Ed Lacy.” In Woody Allen to C. D. Wright. Supplement 15 to American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Scribner’s, 2006. Massive update to a truly voluminous series of author biographies; devotes extensive coverage to Lacy and his work.
Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Places Lacey’s characters in relation to other, more famous private detectives.