Ed McBain

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Ed McBain is the pseudonym of mainstream novelist Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle). If Hammett took murder out of the drawing room and gave it back to the people who do it best, McBain has done the same for detection. McBain practically invented the police procedural, making heroes of the working joes of the 87th Precinct in the process.

McBain was born Salvatore Lombino in New York City. After his Navy service during WWII he went to college at Hunter (source of his future name) and wound up as a teacher, an experience that gave him the raw material for Jungle, the inside story of juvenile delinquency from the point of view of a dedicated teacher. It's a prime example of the juvie fiction of the 50s, but has dated as poorly as many of those books. The book became a popular film starring Glenn Ford - and, oh yeah, introduced the song "Rock Around The Clock" and the music called rock and roll. Hunter himself wrote a number of screenplays, most notably for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Hunter picked up the McBain name and started his best known work a few years later. As writer and policeman Jim Doherty has said, all of the elements that went McBain's books had been used by other writers before, but when McBain put them together they became something new - a police procedural.

After a long and productive career, Evan Hunter died from throat cancer, writing right up until the end. He was 78 years old.