Ed McBain

• Born: October 15, 1926
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 6, 2005
• Place of death: Weston, Connecticut

Types of Plot: Police procedural; thriller

Principal Series: 87th Precinct, 1956-2005; Matthew Hope, 1978-1998

Contribution

Ed McBain’s fifty-plus 87th Precinct novels rank him among the most prolific authors of police procedurals. Acclaimed the best in this genre by, among others, the Mystery Writers of America, McBain won a Grand Masters Award in 1986. His knowledge of police methods was thorough and convincing; the 87th Precinct novels focus on them with a ruthless economy that adds to their excitement, information, and entertainment. In spite of this singular concentration, McBain nevertheless managed to present his readers with several plausible, three-dimensional—though never complex, profound, or overpowering—characters who operate in an otherwise largely implied, lightly sketched and labeled urban landscape. McBain’s special skill lay in his keen depiction of these characters as trackers and the unwavering quality of his narrative gaze. A major contribution of the 87th Precinct series to the genre has been to establish the ensemble detectives scenario in the popular consciousness. Long before the television series Hill Street Blues (1981-1987)—which many readers believe was based on McBain’s series—the detectives of the 87th Precinct set the standard for intelligent police procedural featuring a group cast. In addition, McBain’s Matthew Hope series, begun in 1978 and concluded in 1998, as well as suspense and mystery novels written outside the two series, furnish the genre with many compelling, complex, and involving works.

Biography

Ed McBain, who legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in the 1950’s, was born Salvatore A. Lombino, the son of Charles Lombino and Marie Lombino, in New York City on October 15, 1926, and reared during the first dozen years of his life in an Italian slum. He attended Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, where his family had moved in 1938. Following graduation, he went to New York City’s Art Students’ League on scholarship and from there to Cooper Union Art School. Hunter’s own self-estimate, however, was that his artistic talents ranged well below those of his fellow students. He had enjoyed writing for his high school literary magazine, and when he joined the Navy in 1944, he started writing once again. After more than a year of service on a destroyer in the Pacific, he left the Navy and entered Hunter College. In 1950, he was graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in English. In 1949, he married Anita Melnick, a classmate at Hunter College; they had three sons. The marriage eventually ended in divorce, and Hunter married Mary Vann Finley in 1973.

Until 1954, Hunter held various jobs: He was a substitute teacher in New York vocational schools, worked for a literary agency, answered the night phone at the American Automobile Club, and sold lobsters for a wholesale firm. Although by 1954 he had published nearly one hundred short stories and had written several novels as Evan Hunter and under various pen names, The Blackboard Jungle (1954) was the first to bring him success.

The first novel Hunter published under the name Ed McBain was the initial 87th Precinct novel Cop Hater (1956) . The author maintained a stylistic distinction between his more literary Hunter persona and his grittier McBain alter ego. The McBain name became so well established, however, that works originally published under Hunter’s other pseudonyms were eventually reissued under the McBain byline.

Hunter wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s late masterpiece, The Birds, and a number of television movies of the 87th Precinct novels have been made. His frank Let’s Talk (2005) describes the author’s fight with throat cancer and the difficult adjustment to living without a voice. Hunter died on July 6, 2005, from cancer of the larynx. Fiddler, the final installment in the 87th Precinct series, was published posthumously in 2005.

Analysis

Ed McBain was a serious, versatile, prolific, and successful writer. His 87th Precinct police procedurals were usually written in about a month, yet they were and are appreciated by large audiences, who are more familiar with Ed McBain than with Evan Hunter. Indeed, McBain’s works effectively replaced those of Erle Stanley Gardner and Georges Simenon, among others, as a standard on the bookstores’ mystery and detective fiction shelves.

McBain’s appeal is explicable in several ways. Clearly, he intended to entertain with swiftly moving, dramatic stories. In addition, he clearly entertained himself in the sense that he was free to explore any subject matter so long as it related to his characters’ criminal investigations. This freedom allowed him considerable range. Indeed, his work offers glimpses of a Dickensian array of characters: junkies, medical examiners, prostitutes, actors, patrolmen, psychologists, lawyers, businessmen, burglars, arsonists, psychopaths, gang members, homemakers, social workers, clergy, district attorneys, female police officers, and politicians. The list, if not inexhaustible, is extensive.

Considerable appeal also stems from McBain’s clinical concentration on the crime. A corpse is discovered—hanged, beaten, shot, dismembered, poisoned, drowned, or overdosed—and everything subsequently concentrates on how it came to be where and what it was. Kept distinct are whatever effects the corpse and the crime may have on shaping those who are involved with it or are enmeshed in the crime. The detailing of violence is employed not to titillate or to provoke but to underscore the fact that violence, senseless and otherwise, is part of a police officer’s daily reality. Nauseating situations are normal.

The 87th Precinct Series

The 87th Precinct’s professional survival—and sanity—thus depends on the extent to which its individuals understand, have mastered, and have a feel for certain unvarying procedures “as disciplined as the pattern of a bull fight.” McBain holds his readers because his knowledge of those procedures (learned from the New York and Florida police) has a professional imprimatur. It is the application of procedures, authoritatively unfolded by McBain, that is central to every novel.

Descriptive background in the 87th Precinct stories is minimal. New York City is called simply Isola; it is divided into five sections, as dissimilar as foreign countries. There are the River Harb and the River Dix (Styx), which surround the city; Calm’s Point (ironically, a dangerous section); West Riverhead; Lower Isola; the Gold Coast; and Cloak City (a garment center, in later books Coke City).

Principal characters in the 87th Precinct stories are also sketchily described. Detective Steve Carella is merely a tall, athletic man in his late thirties or early forties with somewhat slanted, Asian eyes. However, Carella, as much as anyone, is the central figure. So it is with the other precinct detectives. McBain’s rough characterization reflects his view of the police and the nature of their work. Like an army, Isola’s police force is a vast, hierarchical organization, and detectives are only organization men. He has compared them to account executives, a notoriously cutthroat profession, yet detectives have a singular difference: They view the myriad forms of death daily. In McBain’s corpus, police officers witness the slow, individual decay of the slums’ inhabitants. Each day, they witness the death in the addicts’ search for heroin; the death by confinement for burglars, thieves, pimps, hustlers, muggers, and killers; the death of the whore’s honor and integrity under repeated sexual stabbings; the death of street gangs, which live in fear and use violence to banish it; and the death of love in ordinary and deadly domestic violence. McBain’s detectives focus on the case, probe for information with their tested methods, in the hope that “another one” can be filed. Nevertheless, McBain registers their recognition that their procedures are often intrinsically inadequate, that with nothing to go on, the police often have little chance of solving many murders, and that chance and coincidence, as much as the skillful adherence to procedure, frequently illuminate and resolve the crime.

Given this setting, in which organization and procedure are paramount, the detectives, not without passion, are pushed toward functioning as emotionally uninvolved trackers and observers. Consequently, while McBain certainly does not treat the precinct’s detectives as interchangeable parts, he realistically depicts them as a unit. When Carella is not on center stage, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer, Arthur Brown, and Bert Kling, among others, carry on. In such a context, McBain uses situations—rather than lengthy descriptions, extended conversations, stream-of-consciousness ruminations, or one character’s analysis of another—to define them as individuals.

In this sense, his 87th Precinct detectives are relatively dull and unimaginative fellows—relative, that is, to the people whom they encounter and pursue. McBain merely illustrates something that every newspaper reporter and his readers accept: Crimes and criminals, as a rule, are perceived as intrinsically more interesting than the badge-numbered organization men and women who try to stop them. McBain, who ably recounts what the police do and how they do it, copes with this perception in two ways. He gives a third dimension to the detectives: Carella’s devotion to his family and his belated recognition in high school that he was not only an Italian but an Italian Jew as well; Cotton Hawes’s continual embarrassment, on and off the job, because of his name (and as far as readers are concerned, because of the fact that he is puritanical); Meyer Meyer’s unblinking defense of his ridiculously apparent toupee, his avuncular insistence on lecturing a junkie, and his delight in discovering a murder victim whom he knew—so that for once there is a name for the detectives to use; and Bert Kling’s horror, when, turning over a murder victim, he discovers that it is his fiancé and his delight in marrying a gorgeous model, only to be cuckolded within months—all of these touches humanize most of the precinct’s seventeen detectives.

Further plays of imagination and injections of color come from those whom detectives interview, interrogate, and pursue, although none of these characters rises to the stature of the Deaf Man. A quintessential villain, the Deaf Man is also the quintessential embodiment of criminality. He taunts and challenges Carella and the precinct with clues to past or impending crimes; he flaunts his disguises, changes his appearance and name; he apparently dies a number of deaths but phoenixlike rises again; he recruits and when necessary abandons his dupes; he is a virtuoso murderer, thief, arsonist, con man, and layer of false trails; and he is to the precinct a perpetual reminder that crime always pays for some, that criminality is perpetual and elusive.

The Matthew Hope Series

In 1978, McBain brought out the first of his Matthew Hope novels. Goldilocks inaugurated a series in which the lead investigator begins as a newly transplanted (from New York to Florida) civil attorney who soon turns to criminal law—hardly a surprising career move given the bodies that pile up around his practice. Each fairytale-themed title refers to a particularly gruesome crime; its motive is always bestial and its principals are frequently irresistible beauties. Hope is not as skeptical as he ought to be and is inclined to believe a woman’s story, whether she is a grouchy old garden maven with three children buried in the yard or an asylum inmate with a billion dollars coming her way. Hope’s optimism leads him into dangerous situations, and he often cannot penetrate the veils of deceit in which his clients are naturally swathed. Readers tended to enjoy the occasional, more freeform Hope diversion between the tightly woven procedurals of McBain’s better-known series.

Later Works

Near the end of his life, McBain apparently intended to create a new series. His last completed work, Alice in Jeopardy (2005), was to be followed by Becca in Jeopardy, though that manuscript remained unfinished. Alice, in a departure for McBain, is let down in her hour of need by infighting authorities and must strike out on her own in search of her abducted children. Set in southwest Florida, where McBain had not ventured since ending his Matthew Hope series, the author once again provided his readers a balmy break from the precinct after Fiddlers, the last book featuring Carella and his colleagues.

The 87th Precinct books matured and deepened over the years. Entries such as Lullaby (1989); Mischief (1993), which features the return of the Deaf man; Nocturne (1997); The Last Best Hope (1998) , which brings together the principals of the Matthew Hope series with the 87th Precinct detectives; and The Last Dance (2000) have the strength and freshness of true virtuosity. Violence, emotion, sex, insights and musings on the fraught and continual decay of urban life, bad jokes, and black humor blend together with McBain’s trademark procedural and forensic veracity, understated characterizations, well-realized, tautly paced plots into cogent stories with essentially American, urban hearts. His detectives—brave as they can be—mostly are neither heroes nor antiheroes. They persistently, humorously, at times foolishly and sometimes successfully proceed against the worst human products of those values and environs inimical to the American self-image.

Principal Series Characters:

• Steven Louis Carella , the 87th Precinct’s senior police detective, is between thirty-five and forty years old. Tall, athletic, and of Italian descent, he is devoted to his wife, a beautiful deaf-mute, and to their twin children. Honest, intelligent, tenacious, and experienced, Carella is humanized by his humor, temporary defeats, and concern for denizens of his hard world.
• Teddy Carella is Steven’s wife and a source of tenderness, intrepidity, and insightful intelligence. She provides her husband with his emotional compass.
• The Deaf Man , who periodically appears in the series, is a cunning, big-city superhood who delights in challenging the police. Often Carella’s nemesis, he is a ruthless, streetwise variation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty.
• Cotton Hawes is an 87th Precinct detective who often works with Carella. Named for Cotton Mather, Hawes loves the police officer’s existence, looking up at society’s underbelly. He has a sense of outrage and is one of the few characters allowed brief bursts of social commentary, particularly on the degradations of life in the streets of slums.
• Meyer Meyer , a veteran, middle-aged 87th Precinct detective, is a source of humor and commonsensical morality.
• Arthur “Big Bad Leroy” Brown is a huge, experienced, thoughtful black detective. When teamed with Teddy Carella, understated musing on race relations attends their conversation and interactions.
• Bert Kling is a white, midwestern hayseed. Self-conscious about his relative inexperience as a police officer in earlier volumes, he matures somewhat as the series does.
• Eileen Burke is a female detective and past paramour of Kling, whose presence and secondary story line recurs in later volumes.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Anderson praises McBain, saying he was prolific and produced quality works that evoked New York City.

Dove, George N. The Boys from Grover Avenue: Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct Novels. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Though an old resource, this book is focused on McBain’s best-selling series.

Landrum, Larry. American Mystery and Detective Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. A thorough critical analysis of the American wing of the genre. Details McBain’s seminal role in the development of the police procedural.

McBain, Ed. The Official Site: Ed McBain. http://www.edmcbain.com. The official Web site of Ed McBain. Offers many interesting links to interviews and other sources. A complete bibliography (no small feat) accompanies a short biography.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Evan Hunter, Writer Who as Ed McBain Created Police Procedural, Dies at Seventy-eight.” The New York Times, July 7, 2005, p. B10. Obituary summarizes Hunter’s career, focusing on his popular 87th Precinct series and noting his Matthew Hope series and early success. Describes some of his private life as well.

Vicarel, Jo Ann. A Reader’s Guide to the Police Procedural. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. A helpful source for short entries. Covers 271 writers and more than one thousand titles, including Ed McBain and many of his novels.