Creator Profile: Evan Hunter

Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain) was the author many believe invented the American police procedural with his gritty 87th Precinct series featuring an entire detective squad as its hero.

Born Salvatore Lombino on October 15, 1926, in New York City, he started writing while serving in the Navy during World War II. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College and held a teaching job that he would later draw on for The Blackboard Jungle.

With the publication of Cop Hater in 1956, the first of the 87th Precinct novels, he took police fiction into a new, more realistic realm, a radical break from a form long dependent on the educated, aristocratic detective who works alone and takes his time puzzling out a case.

Set in the factices Isola, Cop Hater laid down the formula that would define the urban police novel to this day, including the big, bad city as a character in the drama; multiple story lines; swift, cinematic exposition; brutal action scenes and searing images of ghetto violence; methodical teamwork; authentic forensic procedures; and tough, cynical yet sympathetic police officers speaking dialogue. As he proved with Cop Hater and continued through the entire run, he was not afraid to kill off regular characters that the reader had gotten attached to.

In addition to his large body of work as a mystery writer, he is also a noted screenwriter. Under Evan Hunter, he wrote such notable movies as Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for The Birds.

The Mystery Writers of America awarded Hunter/McBain its Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986, and in 1998 he was the first American to receive a Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. It is estimated that in 50 years of writing, he had sold more than 100 million copies of his work.