In the early ‘50s a young Brooklyn-born writer with the pseudonym Evan Hunter wrote a novel that became a sensation and helped define the paranoia of an America evolving out of pre-World War II social constructs.
The novel was The Blackboard Jungle. It was a gritty look at American urban life and education, and it challenged some of the basic myths that Americans had for years clung to like life-preservers in a vast sea change.
Post-war, amid a generalized growing affluence and resulting flight to a smug suburban existence, American cities began to degenerate. None more so than New York City, Hunter's turf. Cities, left to their corrupt vices, teeming with impoverishment and soaring crime, became the raw material of anthropologists and literary realists alike. Hunter caught the wave and wrote about a group of kids and a school in crisis. A former teacher, he knew his subject well.
Faced with the facts, many Americans panicked. Youth, juvenile delinquents, poked and prodded by something called rock ‘n’ roll, became the era's bogymen. Sex and drugs had come out of the closet, and teenagers were to blame.
I can recall my fifth-grade teacher, perhaps fearful himself and trying his best to help save us from ourselves, read the novel aloud to our class. He read it, from start to finish, for an hour every afternoon. I can recall being absolutely captivated by its fluid narrative, its beautiful sentences, its mood, and characters that I could understand. This is great, I recall thinking. I'd like to be able to write like that.
I still would like to write like that, or at least that well.
Or as well as Ed McBain. You see Evan Hunter, whose real name was Salvatore Lombino, created the new pen name McBain (and a few others) in the sixties and turned to writing a series of procedural crime novels set in the mythical metropolis of Isola. Isola was of course New York, and McBain’s new literary domain became the 87th Precinct, a place where dumb and brilliant cops came together every day to solve Isola's most grisly and bizarre murder cases.
My favorite McBain novel is Fat Ollie's Book, a hilarious story about what happens when a decidedly nonliterary cop attempts to cash in on his crime fighting expertise by writing a book about detectives.
Fat Ollie loves to eat. He loves women, but he's shy around them, and he gets it in mind that the writing business is an easy racket. He determines he may as well become a famous author and make a fortune.
He won't be denied, until a street kid accidentally steals his novel-in-progress and throws a monkey wrench into an important case and Ollie's dream.
Fat Ollie's Book is brilliant, packed with a righteous view of human foibles and, quite deliberately, much to say about the creative-writing process.
Ed McBain was a genre master. He died in 2005 at age 79, leaving a long list of highly readable books to his huge fan base.
TS
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