Ed McBain writes out of the traditions of the hard-boiled detective novel first developed in its present form by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in a series of distinguished crime novels from the 1920s through the 1950s. Unlike his predecessors however McBain developed his fiction within the precincts of the police department.

He has also admitted a debt to Ernest Hemingway and claims to have learned how to write dialogue from reading his fiction. The tough-guy style, which the distinguished American critic Edmund Wilson described as "the boys in the backroom," is an indigenous American discovery and characterizes a good deal of the fiction written since the First World War. It is an especially male form of writing and effectively captures the modern urban sensibility.

Unsentimental, direct, economical, this style of writing was perfect for depicting the industrialized landscape of modern American life. Often used for more directly...