CHEAP SHOTS
Click to view the review in bigger size
AT LUNCH WITH Evan Hunter
So Why Shouldn’t
A Crime Writer
Have Several a k a’s?
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Having an identity crisis is bad enough. But having a crisis over somebody else’s identity borders on the absurd.
There it was all the same when, midway through a long lunch at P. J. Clarke’s up popped a question that probably should have been dispensed with earlier: how should this man sitting across the table be identified?
You have to understand that the lunch date was with Ed McBain, the author of the popular series of crime novels involving defectives of the 87th Precinct in the fictional city of Isola, a jumpy city that sounds suspiciously like New York. No. 48, “Nocturne,” had just been published by Warner Books.
But there is no Ed McBain; that’s just a pseudonym. The real name is Evan Hunter, and he has written his own share of successful books and screenplays under that moniker. Let’s not even get into other novels and short stories that he has pounded out as Richard Marsten, John Abbott and enough other names to fill a small town’s telephone directory. And certainly let’s stay clear, for the moment, of the fact that even Evan Hunter is not his original name, which was a long handle of Italian origin that he legally changed many years ago.
So, which is it. Mr. McBain or Mr. Hunter?
“I’m Evan Hunter,” the writer said, smiling at his companion’s bemusement. But to tell the truth, he added, Mr. McBain is a lot better known. ” I can call a restaurant and make a reservation as Ed McBain, and when I get there the chef will be coming out of the kitchen with books for me to sign,” he said. “If I call as Evan Hunter. I get a table near the phone booths.”
From here on, let it be Mr. Hunter, even if it was Mr. McBain’s work that led to the appointment at P. J. Clarke’s, a venerable hangout on Third Avenue at East 55th Street. It is an old New York throwback, with a tile floor, a long bar of unvarnished wood that has absorbed its share of spilled beers and speaking of tables near phone booths honest to-goodness booths, the old fashioned types worthy of Superman.
After settling in at a rear table, Mr. Hunter scanned the small menu, disheartened by all the burgers listed until he saw salads on the reverse side. “Here’s good stuff on the back,” he said. “I mean, not deadly stuff.”
“You worry about that?” he was asked.
“Oh, yeah,”‘ he replied. “I’ve had three heart attacks already. But every now and then I can splurge.” He paused. “Yeah, writing is a tough business. There’s a lot of stress.”
His splurge this time went no further than a tomato and garlic pasta, a small salad and a beer. He probably could have indulged himself more. Mr. Hunter wears his 70 years well, a relatively new beard making him look 60, tops.
But then you realize that he must he 70. He has, after all, been at this tough business of his for nearly half a century, since even before he took Evan Hunter as his name.
He is a tribute to the idea that a writer’s first obligation is to write, whenever and wherever whether it be his scores of detective books, which have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide; screenplays, like the script for “‘The Birds,” which he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, or short stories for pulp fiction magazines, which he churned out by the barrelful in his early days, so many that he used pseudonyms to disguise the fact that they were all done by one man.
As Evan Hunter, he became a best-selling author with “The Blackboard Jungle,” a 1954 novel made into a popular movie, about teachers struggling in a tough city school. But nothing has succeeded like the McBain “87th Precinct” series, which began in 1956 and focuses on a stock company of detectives wrestling with city crime.
At first, it was complicated getting inside precinct houses for research “The cops were suspicious,” he said. “I had just come off ‘The Blackboard Jungle,’ which was looked upon as art attack ors the New York school system They said, ‘He did a number on them, and now he’s going to do one on us.’ ”
Eventually, Mr. Hunter persuaded the police that this would not be a hatchet job. Even now, as an old hand who does not ride in squad cars nearly as much as he used to, he considers it one of his tasks to “make cops likable.” It isn’t always easy.
“You don’t have many people who like cops,” he said, as he polished off the pasta. “They never think of the cop as the guy who’s going to save their lives, just the guy who’s going to give them a ticket.
“I had a hard time with my own conscience in the 60’s when the cops in Chicago and here in New York were hitting hippies on the head with clubs—protestors of the Vietnam War, which I was against—and here I am writing about cops sympathetically. Every time a cop does something stupid, like Mark Fuhrman or the L.A.P.D., I just think: you make my job much more difficult. Why don’t you behave yourself?”
McBain’s Isola, which means “island”‘ in Italian, rings of Manhattan, where Mr. Hunter was born, on a kitchen table in East Harlem, before his family moved to the Bronx. In recent years, he has lived in Connecticut, and he plans to move to the town of Weston, in the southwest part of the state, after he and Dragica Dimitrijevic, a drama coach, marry in September. It will be the third time around for Mr. Hunter, who has three sons and a daughter from the first two marriages. The wedding is to take place in Venice, reflecting his interest in Italy and his love of foreign travel in general.
While he insists that he does not consciously replicate York in Isola or use any one precinct as his model, the feel of the big city is there; its sophistication and side of the mouth humor, its relentless profanity and unspeakable violence, which remains woven into the New York fabric even if crime is down.
In the more recent McBain books, Mr. Hunter has sprinkled social commentary among the murderers, to the delight of many readers. In “‘Nocturne,” he deplores how the English language is mangled in the name of political correctness, as when people come up with sentences like, “Everyone is a suspect until their story checks out,” to avoid having to say, “his story.” It troubles him that so many people regard themselves as hyphenated Americans of one sort or another, instead of simply Americans. He hates, he said, how the melting pot has yielded to “the impoverished expression, ‘gorgeous mosaic’ ”—a phrase often used by former Mayor David N. Dinkins.
“Maybe a I’m starting to get cranky,” Mr. Hunter said. Actually, he observed, the melting pot theory was in trouble even in the early 1950’s, when he started writing on the side while working at the Scott Meredith literary agency as a young man with an Italian name, which he prefers not to reveal:
After writing the manuscript for “‘The Blackboard Jungle” —putting Evan Hunter on the title page, though he still went by his original name— he got a call from an editor at Popular Library. The editor, Charles Heckleman, wanted to meet this Evan Hunter. Once it became clear who Evan Hunter really was, they shared a laugh.
“Then I said, ‘Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, why don’t we use my own name on the book?’ He said, ‘Well, you can do whatever you want — it’s your book.’ And he just looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘But Evan Hunter will sell a lot more tickets.’
“And I thought, ‘So that’s what America’s about, huh? That’s the melting pot theory. Right out the door of Charlie Heckleman’s office in a minute flat.’ I changed my name a couple of weeks later.”
Given the grim realities that the 87th Precinct deals with, it was surprising to hear that the appeal of the series is greatest among women.
“That’s because it’s really about a family,” Mr. Hunter said, adding that he does not like it when his books are described as “police procedurals.” He feels that the term reduces his cops to “pieces to a puzzle, with no humanity.”
‘”Mario Puzo has said that the reason ‘The Godfather’ was such a big success was not because it was about gangsters but because it was about a family at a time in America when the family was falling apart,” he said. “I think that, in the same way, the people who read ‘The 87th Precinct’ look upon the cops as a family. They’ve become very familiar with these people.
So familiar that Mr. Hunter detects echoes of his characters in other works. He is convinced that the successful television series “Hill Street Blues” lifted its gritty squadroom characters out of “The 87th Precinct.” (While there have been “87th Precinct” television movies, there has been no series.) He was so bothered by the similarities he detected between his work and “Hill Street Blues” that he was ready to go to court over it in the early 1880’s.
“The lawyer thought I had a case, but he asked if I had $500,000 to lose, because it could go either way,” Mr. Hunter said. “I did not have $500,000 I was willing to lose, and I was going up against NBC. So, we let it drop,”
But in his mind he never really let it drop. It clearly bothers him that many people do not appreciate how much he helped shape modern police dramas, whether in books or on the screen.
“Here’s the irony of it,” he said, telling a story about how, years later, the actor and producer Michael Douglas wanted to do a television series based on the McBain books. The network he pitched the idea to was NBC. “One of the young executives sitting there says, ‘Gee, this sounds just like “Hill Street Blues,” ’ ” Mr. Hunter said, “And Michael says, pointing at me. ‘He was here first.’ “