The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  Then Meredith came to him with an offer. Lester Del Rey had written a number of plot summaries that were to be developed into short novels for the young-adult market and published by the John C. Winston company, in Philadelphia. Hunter can't remember much about those outlines, but he did remember Scott Meredith's question: Would Sal like to write one? He begged off, saying that he didn't know how to write a novel. Meredith insisted. Hunter remembers the agent saying, "You can do it, you can do it," and then adding, "If you run into any problems, I'll help you."

  The publisher was paying $2,500 for each novel, a huge sum for the young writer. The first was called Find the Feathered Serpent, a time-travel yarn, which is where Lombino first used the name Evan Hunter. The pseudonym had nothing to do with his alma mater, he says: "It was just a name."

  By May of 1953, Lombino had $3,000 in the bank, and he told Meredith that he was leaving the agency to freelance. Meredith was not happy; he was about to offer Sal Lombino a partnership, which would entitle him to a percentage of profits. But Lombino told Meredith, "I don't want to be an agent, Scott. I want to be a writer."

  Hunter began his first real novel. The raw material came from his experience at Bronx Vocational. After five months, he had ninety pages and an outline for The Blackboard Jungle. The day he learned the novel had been accepted by Simon & Schuster, he told me, "I was in a bakery on Eighty-sixth Street. I don't know what we were doing there— we were living in Hicksville, Long Island. My wife was buying bread or cake and I said to her, 'I think I'll call Scott and see how we're doing on the book.' " His voice began to rise in excitement. "You know, had we heard back from Simon & Schuster?" A pause. "I called, and Scott said, 'They're taking it.' And I hung up the phone and just came dancing out of that booth." He grinned, his hands pumping the air. "There are only a couple of times in my life when I've done that."

  The apprenticeship was now part of the past. So was Salvatore A. Lombino. Some years earlier, an editor named Charles Heckleman had told him, "Evan Hunter will sell a lot more tickets." In those years— before anyone had heard of Mario Puzo, or Gay Talese, or Nick Pileggi— there was still much bigotry against Italian-Americans, and it extended to publishing. Salvatore A. Lombino sounded too "ethnic." Lombino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter. When he told his father about the change, Hunter recalled, "he said, 'That's a good idea, let me see what I can come up with.' He came back the next day with two hundred names! All variations on what the name was. He was hot stuff."

  A few years later, Ed McBain came into the world. It is no accident that Steve Carella is the most rounded of the characters in the 87th Precinct novels, and the one who serves most often as an alter ego for his creator. In almost every book there are some references to the strength of the Italian family and to Italian values. Here is Carella brooding in Long Time No See:

  His grandfather had come to America from Italy because he'd been told the streets here were paved with gold. They were not, of course, and Giovanni Carella learned that almost at once, driving a horse and wagon for the milk company, the horse dropping the golden nuggets anywhere in view. Nor were the streets as clean as those to be found in Giovanni's native Naples, or so Giovanni claimed, a premise perhaps disputable. But in those days, when Carella's grandfather first got here at the turn of the century, the European sense of tradition and of place caused immigrants like himself to look upon even their slum dwellings as something to be cared for with pride.

  The pride is there, but Hunter is clearly not happy with what is now called "identity politics"; he still believes in the melting pot. Carella spoke for him in The Big Bad City:

  He never thought of himself as Italian, however, because, gee, you see, he'd been born here in these United States of America, you see, and an Italian was someone who lived in Rome, or was he mistaken? He never thought of himself as an Italian-American either, because that was someone who'd come to this country from Italy, correct? An immigrant? As for example, his father's father, whom he'd never met because the man had died before Carella was born. He was the Italian-American, the hyphenate, the man who'd come all those miles from a walled mountaintop village midway between Bari and Naples, Italian at the start of his long journey, Italian when he'd reached these shores and this big bad city, becoming Italian-American only after he'd recited the pledge of allegiance under oath.

  Hunter's writing has one other very subjective distinction, and I think it derives from the disappearance of Sal Lombino. In the 87th Precinct novels, there are dozens of characters with names other than the ones they were born with; usually, they aren't pseudonyms but aliases. There are also countless examples of people who need to wear masks in order to become their best, or most powerful, selves. I remember asking Susan Sontag once if she'd ever thought about writing a detective story, and she said, "First, I'd have to invent the writer who was writing the story."

  In important ways, the invention of Evan Hunter allowed Sal Lombino to write novels with a wider focus, exploring in smooth, urban prose a variety of aspects of American life. But the invention of Ed McBain allowed him to dig more deeply into the world that had shaped him when he was a boy in East Harlem and the Bronx. The Evan Hunter novels are about the world of others; the McBain novels are about their creator, a creator who remains Sal from 120th Street, figuring out that you'd better join with friends— a gang or a detective squad— who will help you when you need them. If you are a writer, you freeze time in order to more carefully examine a particular place at a particular time. "I think there are a lot of things in those books, the Ed McBains, that will have some value later on, years from now," he told me. "You can feel the city in them, see it, the people and the places and the weather. At least, I hope so."

  We went out for lunch one afternoon, walking along the bright, noisy street outside Hunter's Manhattan apartment. Construction workers shouted at each other, while a crane hauled Sheetrock to the upper story of a new building. "Everything is unfinished," Hunter said. "Everywhere." He was irritated because a new house he was building in Connecticut was still not done, after a year of work. "My books are in boxes, my files, my reference books," he said, walking in a style that was common in the neighborhood where I grew up in Brooklyn: the upper torso still, the legs moving swiftly, the weight heavier on one foot than the other.

  We passed women pushing infants in strollers, kids humpbacked with book bags, a tall, angular young woman heading toward the river. As I walked in the company of Evan Hunter— or, more exactly, Ed McBain— each seemed a potential victim of mayhem. At the corner, a squad car moved slowly up First Avenue, and I wondered if the cops in the car knew Steve Carella or Meyer Meyer, or Fat Ollie Weeks. If not, they should. Those characters are part of this New York, too, and the man walking beside me had put them there. When we turned the corner, I asked Hunter how many more 87th Precinct books he thought he would write. He shrugged. "There's one that I have in mind," he said. "It'll be published after I'm dead." He smiled. "I call it 'Exit.' Not bad, huh?" His hands flexed, as if he were anxious to start typing. And we bopped up the avenue together, each of us stepping more heavily on one foot than on the other.

  Honorable Mentions: 2000

  "Copycat" by Joan Myers, Deadly Dozen.

  "The Killing Floor" by Clark Howard, Crippen and Landru.

  "Quantum Teleporter" by Michael Burstein, Analog September.

  "The Stealing Progression" by Tom Tolnay, EQMM, August.

  "Slave Wall" by Hal Charles, EQMM, February.

  "Anna and the Players" by Ed Gorman, EQMM, November.

  "The Bluebird" by Alison White, EQMM, February.

  "Chatty Patty" by Taylor McCafferty, Magnolias and Mayhem.

  "The Third Manny" by Terrence Faherty, EQMM, February.

  "The Fading Woman" by Ed Hoch, EQMM, April.

  "Blue Wolf" by John M. Floyd, AHMM, February.

  "The Christmas Mitzvah" by Doug Allyn, EQMM, December.

  "My Best Fred McMurray" by Rob Kantner, AHMM, October.

&nb
sp; "Widow's Peak" by Rochelle Krich, Unholy Orders.

  "The Unborn" by Serita Stevens, Nefarious.

  "The Consul's Wife" by Steven Saylor, Crime Through Time 3.

  "Porkpie Hat" by Peter Straub, Magic Terror.

  "Missolonghi" by Walter Satterthwait, AHMM, October.

  "Booger" by Beverly Brackett, Handheld Crime.

  "Lark in the Morning" by Sharyn McCrumb, Crime Through Time 3.

  "Smoke" by William Sanders, Crime Through Time 3.

  About the Editors

  Ed Gorman has been called "one of suspense fiction's best storytellers" by Ellery Queen, and "one of the most original voices in today's crime fiction" by the San Diego Union.

  Gorman has been published in magazines as various as Redbook, Ellery Queen, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Poetry Today.

  He has won numerous prizes, including the Shamus, the Spur, and the International Fiction Writer's award. He's been nominated for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Golden Dagger, and the Bram Stoker awards. Former Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin noted that "Ed Gorman is a powerful storyteller."

  Gorman's work has been taken by the Literary Guild, the Mystery Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and the Science Fiction Book Club.

  * * *

  Martin H. Greenberg is the CEO of TEKNO•BOOKS, the book packaging division of Hollywood Media, a publicly traded multi-media entertainment company. With over 900 published anthologies and collections, he is the most prolific anthologist in publishing history. His books have been translated into thirty-three languages and adopted by twenty-five different book clubs. With Ed Gorman, he edits the 5 Star Mystery line of novels and collections for Thorndike Press, and is co-publisher of Mystery Scene, the leading trade journal of the mystery genre.

  In the mystery and suspense field, he has worked with at least fifteen best-selling authors, including Dean Koontz, Mickey Spillane, Tony Hillerman, Robert Ludlum, and Tom Clancy.

  He received the Milford Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction editing in 1989, and in April, 1995, he received the Ellery Queen Award for lifetime achievement for editing in the mystery field at the 50th Annual Banquet of the Mystery Writers of America, becoming the only person to win major editorial awards in both genres.

  Dr. Greenberg received his Ph.D in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Connecticut, and was the founding chairperson of those departments at Florida International University in 1972–1975. He retired as Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Literature after a twenty-year teaching and administrative career at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where he served as the university's first Director of Graduate Studies.

  Table of Contents

  THE YEAR IN MYSTERY AND CRIME FICTION: 2000 Jon L. Breen

  A 2000 YEARBOOK OF CRIME AND MYSTERY Edward D. Hoch

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: GREAT BRITAIN Maxim Jakubowski

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: AUSTRALIA David Honeybone and Lucy Sussex

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: CANADA Edo van Belkom

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: GERMANY Thomas Woertche

  THE 2000 SHORT STORY EDGAR AWARDS Camille Minichino

  THE YEAR 2000 IN MYSTERY FANDOM George A. Easter

  SPINNING Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THE SUMMER PEOPLE Brendan DuBois

  AFRAID OF THE DARK Nancy Pickard

  FOR ALL THE SAINTS Gillian Linscott

  LET'S GET LOST Lawrence Block

  UNDER SUSPICION Clark Howard

  CHILDHOOD S. J. Rozan

  ART & CRAFT Donald E. Westlake

  THE ALLOTMENT Peter Crowther

  TWELVE OF THE LITTLE BUGGERS Mat Coward

  MISSING IN ACTION Peter Robinson

  THE HAGGARD SOCIETY Edward D. Hoch

  SCORPION'S KISS Stuart M. Kaminsky

  NOBLE CAUSES Bob Mendes

  THE SLEEPING DETECTIVE Gary Phillips

  A NIGHT IN THE MANCHESTER STORE Stanley Cohen

  WHAT MR. MCGREGOR SAW Dorothy Cannell

  DELTA DOUBLE-DEAL Noreen Ayres

  THREE NIL Mat Coward

  THE MAN IN THE CIVIL SUIT Jan Burke

  BLACK AND WHITE MEMORIES Robert J. Randisi

  NOTHING TO LOSE Robert Barnard

  WIDOWER'S WALK Joseph Hansen

  CHARACTER FLAW Christine Matthews

  GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE— A VIEW FROM BELOW Jürgen Ehlers

  BOO Richard Laymon

  VETERANS John Lutz

  THE ABBEY GHOSTS Jan Burke

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND Doug Allyn

  HAPPINESS Joyce Carol Oates

  THE CONFESSION Ian Rankin

  THE PERFECTIONIST Peter Lovesey

  A WALL TOO HIGH Edward D. Hoch

  THE SILENCE Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THE BIG BITE Bill Pronzini

  THE GATHERING OF THE KLAN Les Roberts

  WHEN THE BLACK SHADOWS DIE Clark Howard

  REBIRTH (CAIN AND ABEL) Miguel Agustí

  HELENA AND THE BABIES Denise Mina

  OLD SOLDIERS Brendan DuBois

  THE VICTIM Ed McBain

  THE POET OF PULP Pete Hamill