Mystery writer Evan Hunter, who wrote under several names and is best known as Ed McBain, died this week. Marilyn Stasio, New York Times mystery and crime fiction reviewer, wrote a wonderful obituary in Thursday's paper. It's also available in our Proquest newspaper database. (Link takes you to the article, but it will first want a login and password. Call the library if you don't already have it.) Stasio credits Hunter/McBain with having invented the modern police procedural novel and, from the description, an entire lineage of TV shows as well. Excerpts:
"Evan Hunter, the author who as Ed McBain virtually invented the American police procedural with his gritty 87th Precinct series featuring an entire detective squad as its hero, died yesterday at
his home in Weston, Conn. He was 78... 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... 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 so real that it could have been soaked up in a Queens diner between squad shifts."We have a number of his books written as Evan Hunter, including The Blackboard Jungle (1954), which first brought him literary fame. And we have most of his many books written as Ed McBain.
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