Born "Lombino" in New York City in 1926, Evan Hunter, under that pseudonym and the further noms de plume of Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten and Ed McBain, has published upward of 60 books of fiction since 1952, which should make him one of America's most prolific authors over the past 30 years. Lately, without greatly affecting production, Marsten and Collins have dropped from the picture. But in the banner year of 1956, all four were represented, McBain weighing in with three thrillers a...

There's a high degree of magic in a novel when you now and then find yourself so acutely frustrated by the self-destructive behavior of a character in it that you want to grab him by the shoulders and shake sense into him. Or her. Nor is the frustration eased by your awareness that of course this behavior stems from the very nature of the character and has a terrible inevitability. Evan Hunter's Love, Dad has that magic. A long book but never a dull one, it deals with a segment of comparativel...

Although it gets off to a slow start, "Paper Dragon" does develop into a quite interesting story of a five-day plagiarism trial. As a novel, though, there are shortcomings which do not permit me to give unqualified praise, although the author is consistent within his own style of presentation. Evan Hunter is an extremely prolific writer who has turned out six novels under his own name, as well as many pseudonymous works and short stories. Perhaps the best known of these is the "Blackboa...

"Streets of Gold," by Evan Hunter, is a novel which encircles the character Ignazio Silvio di Palermo who is also called Iggie, Ike, Blind Ike, and Dwight Jamison. This blind pianist was born in Harlem in 1926, one fourth of a century after his Italian grandfather emigrated from a little southern Italian village. He came, like so many others, in order to make his way on and over New York City's "gold paved" streets. The grandfather of this briefly idolized pianist wanted t...

The first of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct stories, "Cop Hater," appeared in 1956, and for a while he published two or three tales about the Precinct each year…. Mr. McBain did not invent the police procedural story, in which the investigation of a crime is shown as it is handled by a police department, but his books are among the best in the field. This is chiefly because Mr. McBain has succeeded in making his detectives distinct individuals. Steve Carella, who appears most frequent...

Hooked into a cat's cradle of life-sustaining apparatus, few of us today can hope, with Keats, for an "easeful Death" in which we "cease upon the midnight with no pain"—to say nothing of the humiliation of having tubes jammed into every available orifice. So thanks to the marvels of modern medical science, it takes Morris Weber, the moribund central figure of Evan Hunter's 17th novel ["Far From the Sea"], a full Monday-to-Friday workweek in whic...

Ed McBain is an acknowledged master of the detective subgenre known as the police procedural, and in "Ice" he returns us to the Detective Division of the 87th Precinct in Isola. That imaginary metropolis bears more than a passing resemblance to New York City, McBain's hometown. Like its more than two dozen predecessors in the 87th Precinct series, "Ice" features a conglomerate hero—in this case, officers Carella, Meyer, Kling and Brown. Their ethnic identities corre...

Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" is the most realistic account I have ever read of life in a New York City vocational Evan Hunter 1926– Photograph by Mary Vann Hunterhigh school. I can testify to its accuracy, having had some years of experience in one of them, as has Mr. Hunter. His novel more than matches the sensations in some of the stories we have seen recently, in newspapers that have become happily sch...

Novels of any real significance are rare these days. The role of the artist, or the poet, or the novelist as a social commentator doesn't seem to be appreciated. The most effective and the most trenchant comment has often been the least "acceptable" to the "establishment". "Sons" can be an important exception to this observation since it is a powerful novel that says something about the chronic problems that retard the pursuit of the American Dream. Evan Hunt...

"The Blackboard Jungle" is that rare combination—a problem novel in which both the problem and the novel are intensely interesting and in which both elements are blended so skillfully as to be inseparable. Evan Hunter's problem is New York vocational schools, where, as he presents it, all the students who are not intelligent enough to qualify for academic high schools are shunted by the city. The author, who has himself taught in one of these schools, gives a shocking picture of ...

The country may not be exactly drooling with hunger for another novel about "Westering," but Evan Hunter, in ["The Chisholms"] evokes some freshness from the tritest materials and focuses our concern on complex, often perverse, human beings rather than on the vacuous panoramic vista that too often dominates this genre. When the Chisholm family pull out of barren Virginia in 1844 and head doggedly for the promised land, they do not automatically become archetypes, rendered feature...

To read "Sons" is to read the just-published work of a serious novelist in a Joan Crawford movie. It covers thousands of miles and more than 60 years while unfolding the story of a 20th-century American family over three generations. But it is no mere rugged epic. It has an intellectual frame, like horn-rimmed glasses. Wat, Will and Bert Tyler take turns narrating the novel in the continuously repeated sequence of son, father, grandfather. This is meant to expose ironic twistings in the family...

Evan Hunter is a man of many talents and many names. As Ed McBain, he is writing the most authentic squad-room thrillers since Sidney Kingsley researched "Detective Story." You may have read him as Richard Marsten. A couple of other aliases tag his science-fiction and paperback and pulp output. Under the parent name, Evan Hunter, he has written what he must consider his serious novels … "The Blackboard Jungle," "Second Ending," "Strangers When We Meet&...

It's hard to see why the Ed McBain books about the 87th Precinct have been so popular through the years. He turns them out by formula, and his 26th title, "Let's Hear It from the Deaf Man,"… is no exception. The best that can be said is that the prose moves fast, even if it is of the roughhewn-features-and-flinty-blue-eyes department. Otherwise, this novel about police routine has nothing to recommend it…. (p. 34) Newgate Callendar, in The New York Time...

[Ed McBain] has, in some ways, broken his usual format [in "Hail to the Chief"]. Gang war is the substance of the book. There is no mystery. McBain, early along, introduces us to the strange mind of the guiding genius of one of the teen-age groups, the young man responsible for all the trouble. His name turns out to be Randall M. Nesbitt. He has dark hair, dark brooding eyes, a sloping, bulbous nose and heavy jowls. He looks as though he always needs a shave. And he has his own kind of logic&#...

Evan Hunter has a good sense of structure, he can write a lively scene with realistic dialogue, and he can keep a plot in motion; nevertheless, his "Nobody Knew They Were There" is curiously out of focus. It is a futuristic sort of book with only contemporary relevance and very poor projection, a realistic sort of parable that fails in realism though it has its moments of strength as a parable. It starts off with a man about to blow up a bridge. He manages to project the image of fearless, pra...

In its simplest terms, "Second Ending" covers the step-by-step disintegration of a trumpet player named Andy Silvera who has become a hopeless hophead. The theme is what happened and how, not the why. Now in his last days, Andy is full of promises to kick the habit and get back in shape for a job audition. Alternating between exultation and despair, emotional anguish and abnormal lucidity, his is a tortured soul…. Any reader whose personal experience has touched the arena where drugs an...

[In "Second Ending" there] is nothing stereotyped or simply sensational in Hunter's portrait of the trumpet player Andy Sivera. It is a very human and moving achievement. When he comes for aid to the apartment of his old jazz band associate Bud Donato, who is now boning up for examinations at the College of the City of New York, the trumpeter talks of curing himself by the agonizing method he knows as "cold turkey" (stopping at once, no tapering off). Hunter almost immedia...

A maudlin score of violins has maundered down the scale. 'Well then,' admits the officer in charge, 'the airplanes got him.' But our hero has another theory: 'Ohhh no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.' And thus the last, melancholy seconds of King Kong surrender to the credits. Ed McBain, effortless progenitor of so many mutilations, amputations, and general spiller of the common corpuscles, is up to the third in his new sequence of no...

The country may not be exactly drooling with hunger for another novel about "Westering," but Evan Hunter, in his 17th book ["The Chisholms"], evokes some freshness from the tritest materials and focuses our concern on complex, often perverse, human beings rather than on the vacuous panoramic vista that too often dominates this genre. When the Chisholm family pull out of barren Virginia in 1844 and head doggedly for the promised land, they do not automatically become archetypes, r...

Mothers and daughters who manage to speak to each other without the urge to kill are going to love this novel because it will make them feel so good. If you can believe Evan Hunter, there can't be many mothers and daughters who enjoy what we like to think of as a normal, happy relationship. Indeed, he wasn't able to find any, and ["Mothers and Daughters"] is a ghastly parade of intolerably messed up people with tormented psyches and quivering ids.

[The case of Lizzie Borden] has inspired more than a dozen books, several plays, two television treatments, even a ballet. Like many of those before him who have been fascinated by the case, Evan Hunter [in "Lizzie"] comes away from his research with a theory, a handful of facts rounded out with supposition and the zealous conviction of the amateur sleuth who's cracked an elusive nut. Widely known for the police novels he has written as Ed McBain, Mr. Hunter is a keen analyst of crimina...

I must be one of the unfortunate few who have never read Ed McBain before. He has written more than 60 novels—including those under his real name, Evan Hunter—and that is clearly impressive in itself. But more important is the fact that his work is good and entertaining—something I am pleased finally to discover for myself…. [In "Ice"], "the Eight-Seven" must solve the murders of Sally Anderson, a dancer in a hit musical; Paco Lopez, a teen-age cocaine...

The mystery novel has changed in many ways since 1900, and this Matthew Hope adventure [Jack and the Beanstalk] is a tour de force of the new genre. Hope, who has appeared in three earlier novels, is a long way from the omniscient Sherlock, and even from the suave, self-assured sleuths of the Forties. He is a lawyer with apparently an indifferent practice, and his former wife despises him…. He can't fight too well, and even an old country lawyer with diploma-mill credentials outfoxes him. Wors...

The good surface realism of "The Blackboard Jungle" hides its lack of depth. Hunter lays to rest for all time the notion that high-school teaching is simply a white-collar job with "short hours and long vacations." Education, for thousands of boys in New York City, is often a violent hypocrisy, prime examples of which are the "trade schools" set up as depositories for the unmanageables of the academic school system. The original reason for establishing these schools...

[Ice] is grim stuff, as McBain usually is. By now McBain has the 87th Precinct down pat: he could probably write in his sleep. But then Arnold Bennett wrote a good bit of his prose in his sleep too, and if a writer really knows his craft, there surely comes a time when it is possible to coast. Ice begins with a seemingly senseless killing on a New York City street—not a novel idea—and moves through the underworlds of drugs, diamond smuggling, and a scam involving theater tickets, with the usua...

Evan Hunter writes the kind of reliable engrossing novel that is a welcome sight in the paperback racks at airports and bus stations. The police procedurals he's written under the name of Ed McBain, and his popular novels, which include The Blackboard Jungle, Strangers When We Meet, and Love, Dad, are sometimes slick or overwritten, but always readable. In Far From the Sea, he's done it again, but he's chosen to work with a most dismal set of circumstances…. Hunter's inter...

[Heat] demonstrates why McBain, even when he is not at the top of his form, still writes the best American police procedurals. The McBain hallmarks are there: dogged police leg-work, crisp dialogue, Q. and A. transcripts with the ring of authenticity, detectives who have become human beings with personal lives, victims and murderers lifted full-bodied from big-city streets, and sinewy, taut prose.

[In Lizzie] Hunter has … produced a hybrid work that is not successful as a novel and only partially convincing as a detective story. Using the actual transcripts of the inquest and Lizzie Borden's trial in August 1892, he intersperses fictional flashbacks to Lizzie's trip to Europe two years previously, and comes up with a provocative theory to explain both the motivations and circumstances under which the murders were committed. The contrast between the actual and the invented materia...

[Lizzie] is a retelling of the famous murder trial of a spinster girl of New England whose name has become immortalized in the four-line bit,               Lizzie Borden took an ax,              And gave her mother forty whacks.         &...

The most consistently skillful writer of police novels is undoubtedly Ed McBain. Under his real name of Evan Hunter … he has written some highly successful novels, and he has used other pseudonyms, but the formula of the police novel suits his talent particularly well. He began with Steve Carella, a detective working for an unnamed big-city police force, and equipped him with a wife named Teddy, who is beautiful but both deaf and dumb. As the series developed, Carella's fellow detectivesȁ...

Through the years, Evan Hunter has written stories under a number of pseudonyms, including those of Richard Marsten and Hunt Collins. His most familiar nom de plume, is, however, that of Ed McBain. The McBain Brief is a collection of his short stories which were published at various times under other names…. This book isn't just an excuse for McBain to clean out his closets, though; it is a museum of an author in transition. Arranged in no apparent order, the stories reveal a writer in search ...

[A Horse's Head] is a lively, fast-moving tale of big-time robbery in New York City recounted by the innocent victim of an abortive plot to spirit the loot out of the country with a genuine corpse. Instead of becoming the corpse, the narrator has two days of whirlwind chases and hair-breadth escapes from Newark to the lower East Side to the Bronx to the Aqueduct race track…. In the end, when the harassed narrator, who is in fact a book salesman on a year's gambling junket, gets trapped ...

["Streets of Gold" is a] pop epic that takes the form of a family history and autobiography by Iggie Di Palermo—in later years known as Dwight Jamison—a blind jazz pianist who rises from a New York slum and attains stardom briefly in the fifties and sixties…. At times, Iggie speaks of the confusion of someone who has exchanged his ethnic past for an Anglicized "American" illusion; since Mr. Hunter is also of Italian blood, the book can be read as a disguised ...

[McBain's hero in "Where There's Smoke"] is a retired detective lieutenant named Benjamin Smoke, and McBain labors greatly to make him believable. But he doesn't really succeed…. Smoke is a bored man; he has left the force because he is bored. Crime is predictable, criminals are stupid…. He has always solved anything that came his way; he wants to fail in a case, to come across a mind smarter than his.

Grant that the designation is ours rather than the author's or publisher's—[A Horse's Head] is a light comedy of male menopause. It would make a fine movie vehicle, motor-governed to Jack Lemmon's speed and it's lots lighter and brighter than Hunter's big sellers that went to Hollywood—The Blackboard Jungle and Strangers When We Meet. It's all about the killingly scheduled hours in the life of Mullaney who was standing on the corner of 14th Stre...

["A Matter of Conviction" seems] intended, by both author and publisher, as a serious mainstream novel; and I hate to report that Hunter's commercial and pseudonymous paperbacks, especially those by "Ed McBain," are more satisfactory by any serious standards. The present book starts off well with a blunt account of a teen-gang killing in Harlem; but most of the novel is devoted to the agonizing of Harlem-born assistant D.A. Henry Bell, who must prosecute the case. The coin...

[Last Summer is a] slow-building but compelling story that begins innocently enough with an idyll involving three bright and funny young people—two teenage boys and a girl just turned sixteen—and a seagull on a summer-resort seashore island. The shocking end of that episode should prepare one a little, though not entirely, for what comes later when a new girl joins the three. It is an unforgettable—and highly sophisticated—story, for all its apparent simplicity, of young love and...

[Ghosts], Ed McBain's latest 87th Precinct mystery (the 34th), has a new twist for the many fans of this long-running police procedural series. Can you imagine Steve Carella, the hard-nosed cop experienced in the routine of tracking down criminals in a grimy big city, going off with a psychic to a New England haunted house?… The spooky scene in an abandoned summer cottage (yes, Carella does see ghosts) is scary enough. Yet, it's a strange interlude. Carella and McBain are much more conv...

In Ed McBain's 87th Precinct when you "Give the Boys a Great Big Hand" … it's human, of course, and turns up in a small suitcase without the rest of the body. The inquiry that follows makes for as good a tale as any McBain has spun in his lively, lengthening series. The mode is procedural and the company includes, of course, a number of old acquaintances including Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes…. The precinct, the city, some curiously contradictory evidence about a ...

McBain, fortunately, is not concerned with writing according to the McBain formula, and can sometimes depart from it almost entirely. This latest ["See Them Die"] is not a detective exploit of the 87th Precinct, but something close to a straight novel about life in the precinct, in which the police are among the characters. A bigtime Puerto Rican hood, half-despised, half-idolized by his compatriots, is hiding out from the law. The spectacular police siege of his hideaway serves as dramatic fo...

[In "King's Ransom"] here am I once more saying, "McBain has done it again." Praise of a consistently admirable performer must get monotonous and even boring. If you're tired of reading here about McBain, the best remedy is simply to drop this paper and start in reading the book itself. This one's about a kidnaping, with quite a number of fresh variations on the Big Snatch theme. It's as immediate and convincing as any of the 87th precinct tales, and a...

[In "Goldilocks", Ed McBain] leaves his famous 87th Precinct to write a novel about murder and adultery in Florida. A man coming home finds his wife and children murdered. His story has a few holes in it, and he comes under suspicion…. There is considerable soul searching before things get straightened out. McBain goes through all this in his usual professional manner. But there is one little mistake in the book. A suspect says she was listening to the radio. "They were playing a...

["The Heckler" tells] how the boys of the Eighty-seventh Precinct worked vigorously and valiantly—and failed to prevent or to punish a singularly daring crime which laid waste a large part of the city…. Despite a number of promising leads, the precinct cops never quite reached [the criminal] (our good friend Steve Carella getting himself nearly killed in the final flight and pursuit.)… Fortunately, the Eighty-seventh is so warmly established in our affections by now that w...

McBain's forte is his ability to evoke the atmosphere of big-city streets and the workaday world of a police squadroom. In Bread …, the familiar faces of the 87th Precinct are investigating arson in a fire that gutted a warehouse jammed with a half-million dollars worth of miniature wooden animals. This lilliputian menagerie leads to a tale of greed, double-dealing, a real estate firm and love nest in the black ghetto, and some very unpleasant characters and facts…. McBain not only solv...

[In "The McBain Brief"] the creator of the famed 87th Precinct gives us eight stories with policemen…. Also included are an amusing story about a con man who gets conned ("Hot Cars"), a private eye mini-whodunit ("Death Flight") and a miscellany of other amusements, including a case of infanticide and one of fratricide. Mostly, the violence is by men against women, but there's one ruthless female here. The stories vary in merit—a few are too pre...

[In Lizzie] Hunter presents his case in chapters that alternate between the imagined story of Lizzie's seduction by a hedonistic English lady during an 1890 European tour and the almost verbatim court record of her 1893 murder trial. This approach is not always satisfying and at times seems a curious cross between a court stenographer's emotionally uninvolving transcript and a sexed-up version of Henry James. Yet the portrait of Lizzie that emerges is fascinating, ultimately sympathetic: a mur...

["Til Death" is] the ninth of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct stories and as good as any of them. Its perturbation for Steve Carella is a threat sent to his brother-in-law on the day of his wedding. McBain's manipulation of a split-narrative mode in tracing the subsequent excitements is nimble, and although he has taken an easy-chancey way out plotwise to justify the multiple thrills, they seem genuine enough at the time and to a lot of people he has made us suitably worried about.