A short life of the author
Ed McBain was the most prolific and most influential practitioner of the police procedural in the history of crime fiction — a writer who, over the course of fifty-five novels published between 1956 and 2005, built a fictional police precinct so richly populated and so convincingly detailed that it became the template for virtually every subsequent police ensemble in literature, film, and television. Under his real name, Evan Hunter, he also wrote The Blackboard Jungle (1954), one of the defining novels of 1950s America. But it is the 87th Precinct series — with its squad of detectives, its rotating cast of criminals and victims, and its unsentimental depiction of the daily mechanics of police work — that constitutes his major achievement and his lasting influence.
Salvatore Lombino to Evan Hunter
The man who became Ed McBain was born Salvatore Albert Lombino in 1926 in East Harlem, New York, the son of Italian American parents. He legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in 1952, explaining that the publishing industry’s prejudice against Italian names would have limited his career. He attended the Bronx campus of Hunter College (coincidentally sharing the surname), served in the Navy during World War II, and afterward worked briefly as a teacher in a vocational high school in the Bronx — the experience that provided the material for The Blackboard Jungle.
Published in 1954, The Blackboard Jungle depicted the violence, racial tension, and institutional failure of an inner-city vocational school with a directness that shocked readers and became a cultural phenomenon. The 1955 film adaptation, featuring Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” over its opening credits, is often cited as a catalyst for the rock-and-roll era. The book established Hunter as a serious novelist, and he continued to publish literary fiction under this name for the rest of his career.
The 87th Precinct
In 1956, Hunter began publishing under the pseudonym Ed McBain, and the first 87th Precinct novel, Cop Hater, appeared. The series was set in an unnamed city that was transparently New York — McBain called it “Isola” — and centred on the detective squad of the 87th Precinct, a group of men (and eventually women) who investigated crimes through the slow, unglamorous procedures of real police work: canvassing witnesses, running forensic tests, interrogating suspects, filling out paperwork, waiting.
This was revolutionary. Before the 87th Precinct, crime fiction was dominated by the brilliant amateur detective (Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe) or the lone-wolf cop working against a corrupt system. McBain’s innovation was to make the precinct itself the protagonist — a collective entity whose members brought different skills, temperaments, and personal problems to the common work of investigation. Steve Carella, the series’ most prominent detective, was no genius: he was a competent, decent professional whose effectiveness derived from diligence and teamwork rather than intellectual brilliance.
The Innovation
McBain’s procedural realism was not merely a matter of accurate police detail — though his research was thorough. It was a structural innovation: each novel presented crime as a problem to be solved through institutional process rather than individual insight. The reader watched detectives follow leads that went nowhere, interview witnesses who lied, make mistakes, and arrive at solutions through persistence rather than inspiration. The crimes were often messy, motiveless, or only partially resolved — a departure from the neat solutions of Golden Age detection.
The series also introduced narrative techniques that anticipated television ensemble drama. Multiple storylines ran simultaneously within each novel, different detectives handled different cases, personal lives intersected with professional duties, and the precinct itself had a seasonal rhythm — the criminals of August were different from the criminals of January. This ensemble structure was directly adopted by television shows from Hill Street Blues to NYPD Blue to The Wire, and McBain is routinely cited by their creators as a primary influence.
Range and Productivity
McBain published fifty-five 87th Precinct novels over nearly fifty years, an output remarkable not merely for its volume but for its consistency. The early novels — Cop Hater (1956), The Mugger (1956), The Pusher (1956) — established the series’ format. The middle period — Sadie When She Died (1972), Ice (1983), Kiss (1992) — showed McBain at the height of his powers, handling increasingly complex plots and increasingly nuanced characterisations. The late novels, published when McBain was in his seventies, maintained a remarkable level of energy and craft.
Under the Evan Hunter name, he wrote literary novels, screenplays — including the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) — and several novels exploring racial themes, Italian American identity, and the changes in American urban life over the second half of the twentieth century. The two identities coexisted uneasily: Hunter wanted to be taken seriously as a literary novelist, while McBain was a genre writer who sold millions of copies. The irony was that McBain’s best work was more artistically accomplished than most of Hunter’s literary fiction.
Influence
McBain’s influence on crime fiction and popular culture is difficult to overstate. Before the 87th Precinct, there was no established tradition of the police procedural as a distinct form; after it, the procedural became the dominant mode of crime fiction worldwide. His direct heirs include Joseph Wambaugh, who brought autobiographical authenticity to the form; Michael Connelly, whose Harry Bosch series combines procedural detail with literary ambition; and the creators of virtually every television police drama from the 1980s onward.
Collecting McBain/Hunter
First editions of the early 87th Precinct novels were published as mass-market paperback originals (Permabooks, later Signet) and are scarce in fine condition. Cop Hater (Permabooks, 1956) is the most sought-after title. The transition to hardcover publication in the 1960s makes later titles more accessible to collectors. The Blackboard Jungle (Simon & Schuster, 1954), published under the Evan Hunter name, is the most collected of the mainstream novels. McBain was a prolific signer, and signed copies are available from specialty dealers.