The Crime of Our Lives Read online

  I read the stories, and something remarkable happened. It’s not that I thought they were the best stories ever written. I thought they were damned good, and that there wasn’t a clinker in the lot, but that’s not the point. What struck me, really struck me, was twofold—they were perfectly good stories, and they were stories I could have written.

  I don’t know how effectively I can explain this. I somehow identified, not so much with the characters in the stories as with the man who had written them. I could imagine myself coming up with ideas like his and turning them into stories like those stories. I actually did get an idea for a story—a man set upon by a gang of young punks, and turning more savage than his tormentors. I tried to write it, but didn’t get anywhere with it.

  I went off to college and wrote various things, mostly poems. I sent them off to magazines and was not surprised when they came back. Summer of ’56 I went to New York on a co-op job—my college, Antioch, had a system where you got practical experience by working half the year in various jobs they found for you. I worked in a publishing house mailroom, lived in Greenwich Village, and loved (at least in memory) every minute of it.

  One weekend I wrote a story about a young man who lived by his wits, stealing from an employer, committing mail fraud. When I went back to school in the fall I took it along with me, and during the winter I came across it and decided it was pretty good. I remembered that Evan Hunter had published some stories in Manhunt, whatever that was, so I looked up the address and sent it there. The story itself appears in Opening Shots, along with the details of what I went through before it finally sold. Suffice it to say that it wound up in Manhunt.

  And the following year I wound up working for Scott Meredith. I answered a blind ad, took a test, and dropped out of school for a year to keep the job. Evan Hunter, I learned, had had the same job, and had gone from employee to client, and was now living up in Westchester County. The industry was full of Scott’s ex-employees—the place was a great training ground for future writers and editors—but Hunter was the star, the golden boy who’d gone from one of our beat-up desks straight to the bestseller list.

  Interviewers like to ask a writer to name his influences. I’ve never cared for the question because it has never struck me as terribly applicable to what I do. Jazz musicians discuss their influences, and rightly so; one of the things you do, when you begin as a musician, is try to play like those people whose work you most admire.

  But is that what a writer does? I don’t think so. While I may have had any number of writers whom I greatly admired, I can’t recall trying to write like them, to sound like them. What you try to do as a writer, it seems to me, is to avoid sounding like anybody else. You do everything you can to find your own voice.

  In a sense, to be sure, I was influenced by everything I read. And it’s fair to say I was influenced more by bad work than good; working for Scott, laboring in the agency’s slush pile, I read tons of crap every day. That’s how you learn, seeing what’s wrong, noticing what doesn’t work, learning what not to do.

  How could I learn anything from Evan Hunter? The guy never wrote a bad sentence.

  It has been observed—I forget where or by whom—that only kids have heroes. I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but I do think you have to stop being a fan in order to become wholly a professional. You can continue to admire and delight in the work of another writer, but if you’re slavish in your devotion, if you’re stuck in the role of full-blown fan, your own growth will be limited.

  I remain an enthusiastic reader of Evan Hunter’s work. I’ve always enjoyed him under all his names—I discovered the first Ed McBain books before I knew who wrote them—and he’s one of the writers I buy right away in hardcover, as soon as the books come out. I am more than a little in awe of some of his accomplishments—keeping the 87th Precinct series fresh after fifty books over almost as many years, for instance, and actually getting better over the years. And writing so many different kinds of books, peopled with so many different kinds of characters. And having the energy to go on writing so rapidly, so prolifically, and so well.

  In recent years I’ve gotten to know the man, and we’ve become friends. It did not surprise me to find out that Evan is good company. I already knew that from the books.

  You can’t be friends with your hero, and I’m far too old to have heroes, anyway. But if I did have any, well, he’d be on the list.

  Under several names.

  * * *

  And this, written shortly after his death in 2005 at the age of 78. I’ve no idea where it may have appeared, and Google’s no help. My guess is someone asked me for a contribution for a batch of similar tributes, perhaps to be published online, and this is what I sent:

  I’m not sure how long I knew Evan Hunter. A little over fifteen years would be my best guess. But he’s been a presence in my life for far longer than that.

  The Blackboard Jungle was published in 1953, and it was probably a few months later when I read it. I was in high school myself, but my eminently middle-class school was nothing like the one Evan was writing about. Still, the book had an impact—it was, and no doubt still is, a gripping tale well told—but it was deeply underscored by a profile of Evan that I read a few months later in a writers’ magazine. I had by that time realized that I wanted to be a writer myself, and my father, quick to encourage what struck him as a laudable ambition, came across the Writers’ Yearbook annual at a newsstand and brought it home. And I read about Evan Hunter, and how he’d gotten out of the Navy and had this job and that job, and then started writing magazine fiction, and had now achieved bestsellerdom and a movie sale.

  It must have been a year or so later when I picked up a paperback copy of The Jungle Kids—published and titled to cash in on The Blackboard Jungle’s success, of course. It was a collection of stories Evan had written under various names for Manhunt Magazine and its legion of imitators. They were all about high school kids, and I suppose I could have identified with the characters, and maybe I did. But what I really did was identify with the author.

  I’d read my way through a ton of American realism, had found much to admire in Hemingway and Steinbeck and Wolfe and Farrell, but this was something different: reading these fairly elementary stories, I could imagine myself writing stories very much like them.

  Cut to the summer of 1957. I’d completed two years of college and had come to New York City to get a job. I answered a blind ad for an editorial position at a literary agency, took the test they gave applicants, and aced it. They hired me. The agency was Scott Meredith, and that was where Evan had worked while writing his earliest pulp stories. Now, of course, he was writing full time, and living the life of a country squire up in Westchester County, but Scott still represented him, and he was the agency’s fair-haired boy, and an inspiration to all the wannabe writers who worked there.

  Right around the time I got the job, I sold my first short story. To Manhunt, as a matter of fact.

  I dropped out of school to keep the job—it was better training for my profession than anything I could get in a classroom—and I spent my free time writing stories and articles. I never met Evan during the nine months or so that I stayed there. I didn’t meet anybody; clients used a private entrance and went to see Scott without passing through the bullpen where we employees were laboring. But he did buy me a drink.

  That Christmas of 1957, Evan sent splits of champagne to all of us in the back room. I thought it was the most remarkable act of generosity. Everybody got a bottle, and I drank mine on New Year’s Eve. Mumm’s, it was. Don’t ask me why I remember that, but I do.

  It occurred to me that I ought to thank him, but by the time I got the chance, some thirty years later, I have to admit it slipped my mind. By then I’d long since outgrown my hero-worship, although I’d never ceased to be an enthusiastic reader of everything the man wrote. I don’t recall just when we met, but it would have been at a party, or possibly at one of the Mohonk Mystery Weekends that Don and
Abby Westlake were running. Over time we became good friends, and it felt a little strange, because this was someone I had so long admired, and now we were friends. I found this enormously gratifying.

  Evan was a remarkable writer, as everyone else writing these tributes will assure you. He never once wrote a bad sentence or a dull paragraph, and he never lost his enthusiasm for the lonely chore of putting words on paper. His 87th Precinct novels are a towering achievement, over fifty of them, spanning half a century, and not merely sustaining their early excellence but improving upon it, as he was able to write longer and more complicated novels in the series.

  * * *

  Did I mean to end it that abruptly? Or was there more once? Never mind. I got to write about Evan at much greater length in a pair of 2011 Mystery Scene columns, and began by repeating the story of the champagne. I guess it made quite an impression:

  Long before I first met Evan Hunter, he bought me a drink.

  I remember it well. It was champagne, Mumm’s Brut, and it was one of half a dozen bottles that he sent to the office at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. It was Christmas, 1957, and I’d been working there since a bemused fellow at Qualified Employment sent me over there in August to take a blind test.

  The test consisted of reading a story (“Rattlesnake Cave”) and writing a letter to its author (“Ray D. Lester”). One could tell the author the story was fine, or suggest revisions, or explain why it stank. Ray D. Lester was in fact the science fiction writer Lester Del Rey, and he’d written the story to Scott’s order, striving to encompass every plotting flaw he could think of. I pointed them out in my letter, and got the job, which consisted in doing essentially the same thing forty hours a week, with other stories that were every bit as bad as “Rattlesnake Cave,” but not by design.

  They hired me in spite of both my youth—I had just turned nineteen—and the fact that I’d be going back to Antioch College on the first of October. They didn’t know that part, and I figured I’d cross that bridge when I came to it, but after two months I burned it instead and told the college I wouldn’t be coming back after all. It was the best job in the world for me, and I could write a whole column about the place, and will, but this one is about Evan Hunter.

  Our office was on the eighteenth floor at 580 Fifth Avenue. A couple of years later Scott moved to more spacious quarters on the seventh floor, but on eighteen there were just six of us hirelings in the outer office, and everybody got a bottle. Champagne bottles come in a great variety of sizes, and each size has a name all its own. There are Magnums and Jeroboams and Mehuselahs and Nebuchadnezzars, and don’t they sound grand? There is also the split, which contains just enough champagne to fill two glasses, and that’s what each of us got, and I couldn’t have been happier.

  I saved it for New Year’s Eve. A date and I could each have had a glass, but I didn’t have a date, so I drank the whole bottle.

  I read The Blackboard Jungle in high school, probably within a year of its 1954 publication. I was reading a rich diet of Steinbeck and Wolfe and Farrell and O’Hara, and I can’t say Evan’s novel blew me away. I thought it was okay, certainly, but it didn’t make kneel in homage.

  My next contact with the man, albeit from a distance, was when my dad brought home a copy of Writer’s Yearbook. Scott Meredith had contributed a self-serving article, explaining just how much money Evan had made from Jungle, how he’d sold film rights in advance of publication, and all the other great deals he had made on his author’s behalf. I think the total sum ran to $100,000.

  That impressed me, but I can’t say it made me salivate. I knew by then that I was going to be a writer, that I’d somehow produce books and stories, and that I’d somehow make a living doing this.

  Then, some months later, I bought a paperback at a drugstore. It was The Jungle Kids, a collection of stories Evan had originally published in magazines, mostly Manhunt. They all had youthful protagonists, and they’d been collected to cash in on the success of the novel.

  I thought they were terrific. And I had a solid experience of identification—not with the juvie characters, but with the author himself. Because the two things that struck me about what I was reading were (a) that these were genuinely good, and (b) that I could see myself writing them.

  And I immediately got an idea for a similar story, and sat down and tried to write it. It was terrible, and died a few pages in, and I threw it out and forgot about it.

  But when I sold my first story, it was to Manhunt. When I got a job good enough to quit school for, it was where Evan started; he’d gone to work for Scott when the office was even smaller, and had been good enough at it that the Meredith brothers had talked about making him a partner. Instead he’d done well enough writing to devote himself to it full-time, and when I started there he was the agency’s star client—which is why noblesse oblige led him to send some champers to the wage slaves.

  Do you think I minded that I didn’t have a date? Or that two sips of Mumm’s don’t make New Year’s Eve any more than two swallows make a summer? What, are you kidding? Evan Hunter bought me champagne!

  Let’s talk about names.

  He was born Salvatore Albert Lombino, and his first sale was a science fiction story bylined S. A. Lombino. His employer, whose name at birth was a far cry from Scott Meredith, convinced him that an Italian name was an impediment to success, and Evan Hunter was born out of his high school (Evander Childs) and college (Hunter). There were other pen names during those pulp years—Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten—but Evan Hunter was first among them, and he hadn’t been using it long before he went to court and made it official.

  When I worked at Scott Meredith, the receptionist, an Englishwoman named Joan, still called him Sal. “It’s Sal on line one,” she’d inform Scott. And at his memorial service half a century later, a sister of Evan’s indicated that he was still Sal to her.

  Everybody else called him Evan. It annoyed him that some people felt he was sailing under false colors, or ashamed of his Italian heritage. His enduring series character was Steve Carella, and Evan wrote about him with great success for fifty years. Evan’s early years were spent in Italian East Harlem, and he used that background in one of his finest novels, Streets of Gold, narrated by a blind Italian-American jazz pianist. He was open enough about who he was, but he felt that one’s name was a matter of choice. You could keep the one you were born with or pick one that better suited you, as you preferred.

  When Ed McBain’s Eighty-seventh Precinct novels outperformed Evan Hunter in the marketplace, Evan found himself addressed as Ed by fans and interviewers. He didn’t mind. But he knew who he was. He was Evan Hunter.

  Before he started writing, Evan thought he’d be an artist. He was good enough at it to win an Art Students League scholarship and to be admitted to Cooper Union. He started writing stories during his World War II naval service, and was to say that as an artist he had seen everything in a frame, and later came to see everything with a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

  The job with Scott Meredith made him a writer, but it’s hard to believe he ever considered doing anything else. Evan loved to write, and it was something he could do rapidly and well. He turned out an extraordinary volume of work, and never lost his enthusiasm for it.

  In his mid-seventies, after a couple of heart attacks, an aneurysm, and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his larynx, Evan did something that sums up the man. He decided that what the reading public most wanted was books about women in jeopardy, so he sat down and, as Ed McBain, wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on Becca in Jeopardy, with every intention of working his way through the alphabet.

  Don’t you love it? Here’s a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and he’s perfectly comfortable launching a twenty-six book series.

  The Dean Hudson novels give further evidence of Evan’s enthusiasm for the task of stringing words together.

  In the late ’50s the genre of soft-core
erotica was born, and a number of us found it to be a well-paying apprenticeship, and a very forgiving medium in which to find oneself as a writer. Along with Don Westlake and Robert Silverberg, I became a steady producer of pseudonymous books. (We called them sex novels; today’s term seems to be erotica, and I must say I like that better; I feel like Moliere’s character who is startled and rather pleased to discover that all his life he’s been speaking prose. Damn! I’ve been writing erotica!)

  The foremost publisher of this erotica was Bill Hamling, whose imprints included Nightstand Books and Midnight Reader, and Scott Meredith had an exclusive deal to feed Hamling a steady supply of manuscripts. (Scott got 10% of what his writers were paid, of course, and we’ve since learned he also got a packaging fee of $1000 a book. So when I wrote a book for $1000, I received $900 and my agent pocketed $1100. What a guy!)

  By this time Evan was a best-selling author with an estate in Pound Ridge, up in Westchester County. He was writing about Carella and the guys in the Eight-Seven, and he was writing mainstream fiction as Evan Hunter, but he had time on his hands. He told Scott he could certainly spare a few days each month to knock out a book for Hamling.

  And the extra dough would come in handy, because no one but Scott would know he was writing the books, and Scott would pay the money into a special account, which Evan could then use to pay the expenses of the girlfriend his then wife didn’t know about.

  Thus Dean Hudson, a pen name not too hard to decipher; Evan lived on or near the Hudson River, and was certainly entitled to see himself as the dean of Hamling’s faculty of eroticists. I don’t know how many books he wrote as Dean Hudson; somewhere along the way he tired of the sport, or perhaps broke up with the mistress, and Scott, never one to let go of a good thing, found some young hopeful to ghost Dean Hudson books, even as Don and I enlisted various up-and-comers (or down-and-outers) to write under the banners of Andrew Shaw and Alan Marshall.