Barking at Butterflies

A showcase of short stories by Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master, Evan Hunter.

Ed McBain is a pen name of Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplays for his own novel “Strangers When We Meet,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” and the novel “The Blackboard Jungle.” As Ed McBain, he has written fifty 87th Precinct novels, the blueprint series for every successful police procedural series.

This original collection of eleven short stories takes you onto the gritty and violent streets of the city, and into the darkest places in the human mind. “First Offense” is narrated from behind bars by a cocky young man who stabbed a storeowner in a robbery attempt. In “To Break the Wall,” a high school teacher has a violent encounter with several punks. And a Kim Novak look-alike blurs the line between fantasy and reality in “The Movie Star.” These and eight more stories showcase the mastery for which the San Diego Union-Tribune dubbed McBain “the unquestioned king.”

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Chapter 1

Trying to pin down the stories in this collection is like trying to take a snapshot of a pit of vipers. Of the eleven stories in the book, only two of them were originally published under the Ed McBain pseudonym. “The Intruder” first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1970. Barking at Butterflies, from which the collection takes its title, was first published in 1999. In fact, before May of 1956, when the first 87th Precinct novel was published, Ed McBain didn’t exist.

You may wonder why there was a need for Ed McBain at all. By 1956, Evan Hunter was already a best-selling novelist. So why Ed McBain? Here’s why. My publishers felt that if it became known that Evan Hunter was writing mystery novels, it would be damaging to my career as a “serious novelist,” whatever that may be. I personally consider writing mysteries as serious an occupation as writing any other kind of fiction. But these were older, wiser men (I was not yet thirty at the time) and so I followed their advice. Besides they had given me a contract for only three books, and I never once suspected the series–with its renegade concept of a conglomerate cop hero in a mythical city–would ever capture the public imagination. The irony, of course, is that Ed McBain may now be better known around the world than Evan Hunter is.

Nine of the stories in this volume were published under my own name. Three of them have never before been published in the United States. Most beginning writers think that once a writer is published–and The Blackboard Jungle was an enormous success, mind you–the rest is sliding on ice. You send a new story to a magazine, it’s automatically purchased and a check for $10,000 arrives in the mail the very next day. Sure. But no editor in the United States thought “Short Short Story” or “Motel” were good enough to publish in any magazine. (The most recent American rejection on “Motel” was in 1999.) Before now, “Short Short Story” was published only in Australia and Germany in 1978. “Motel’s” first (and only) appearance was in the German edition of Playboy in 1978. “The Movie Star” was never published here, either. It first appeared in a British anthology in 1996, and has since been published in Holland and South Africa.

Of the published Evan Hunter stories in this volume (my publishing life hasn’t been entirely one of rejection, abandonment and loss) “Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles” first appeared in Redbook in 1963, “First Offense” in Manhunt in 1955, “On the Sidewalk, Bleeding” in that same magazine in 1957, “The Beheading” in a now defunct Playboy imitator called Escapade in 1965, and “The Birthday Party” in Playboy itself in 1967. Perhaps the short story that accounts for Evan Hunter still being here at all is “To Break the Wall.” It first saw the light of day in an experimental magazine called Discovery, published in paperback format by Pocket Books, Inc. in 1953. You may recognize it as the penultimate chapter of The Blackboard Jungle.

Evan Hunter a.k.a. Ed McBain

Weston, CT