The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  Hunter has published more than ninety works of fiction, including four children's books, and his publisher says that he has sold more than a 100 million books around the world. He has won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association. He's had good luck with film. Both Strangers When We Meet and The Blackboard Jungle became films, and the director Frank Perry made a lovely small movie from Hunter's 1968 novel Last Summer. In 1963, Akira Kurosawa transformed an 87th Precinct novel called King's Ransom into a thriller called High and Low, starring Toshiro Mifune; it has been remade three more times in Japan, and Martin Scorsese is planning to produce another version.

  "It's always been an odd kind of success," Hunter told me. "The Blackboard Jungle was a blockbuster success, but I was hardly attached to it— it wasn't my movie. Strangers When We Meet made a lot of money; and I got to write the screenplay, but still… Last Summer was a good film, but it came in second to Easy Rider that season. I always felt like an outsider in Hollywood. I always felt like I was going out to do a job, putting on the leather gloves, and, you know, get the money and go home." In 1997, Hunter published a short memoir, Me and Hitch, about working with Hitchcock. The laconic ninety-page book is devoid of illusions, either about the British director or about Hunter's own career in Hollywood.

  Hunter talked in a rueful way about other unsatisfactory parts of his writing life. "The experiences I had in the theater never resulted in a hit play," he said. "So I never felt part of that inside theatrical community where you call Orso's and reserve three tables and rush right over. I never felt that." He shook his head and shrugged. "And I never felt the sort of acceptance one gets from the literary community. It's as if Evan Hunter got dismissed along the way. And, with Ed McBain, I've never felt quite accepted in the mystery writers community because they go, 'He's Evan Hunter slumming.' It's a strange thing. I never felt that niche that would make me feel enormously comfortable."

  Hunter was married for the third time in 1997. His wife is an elegant, dark-haired Yugoslavian woman named Dragica Dimitrijevic, and he has dedicated both The Last Dance and its predecessor to her. (His second marriage, to Mary Vann, ended several years ago.) On this morning, Dragica was out shopping. Their dog, a five-year-old Maltese, Sasha, began barking at a cable that was whipping around outside the window. Hunter shushed the dog, then stood up and explained the harmlessness of the cable to Sasha. He paused at the window. The East River was below us, and a barge was moving sluggishly on its opaque surface. Queens was on the right, the Bronx in the distance. "It's a beautiful view, isn't it?" he said.

  The beautiful view was due north along the edge of Manhattan to East Harlem, where Hunter was born, in 1926, and where he lived until he was twelve. His name at birth was Salvatore Lombino; he was the only child of Charles F. and Marie Coppola Lombino.

  "My father was a substitute letter carrier," he told me. "In those days, when you joined the Post Office Department, you had to be a substitute for a certain amount of time before you became a quote regular unquote. But when the Depression started they froze the list, and he was stuck, earning eight bucks a week. We moved in with my grandparents. My grandfather was a tailor, and he made all my clothes. I had tailor-made suits when I was eight years old. I was the best-dressed kid in the slums."

  The family lived on 120th Street between First and Second Avenues, two blocks from Sal's grandfather's shop. "There were people from all the immigrant groups," Hunter said. "There was a German lady who lived on the third floor, Jewish people elsewhere in the building. It was a very quiet neighborhood at that time, in terms of crime. Although it wasn't just an Italian neighborhood, there was an Italian feeling to it. When I went to Italy for the first time, in 1949, and I got to Naples, I heard the same sounds I heard in the streets when I was growing up. The same street sounds, the peddlers… There was no violence then. There were no street gangs. Sure, it was divided. There was East Harlem, where we lived, and then you crossed Lexington Avenue and you were in black Harlem. And I used to go with my father all the time to the Apollo, way over on the West Side, with a largely black audience. We used to get out of there at midnight and walk back home and there was never a problem. Never."

  He has a great affection for his father. Clearly, Charles Lombino was responsible for encouraging his son's creative side. "My father had a band," Hunter went on. "He played drums. He supplemented his income by playing weddings, engagement parties— he met my mother at an engagement party where he was playing. He had bands called the Louisiana Five and the Louisiana Rhythm Kings. He had a band called the Phantom Five, where they all came out in white hoods. They must've looked like Ku Klux Klan members. That's how he met my mother. He took off the hood and said 'Hi!' "

  Hunter smiled broadly remembering Charles Lombino in the years of the Depression. "He was a very smart man," he said. "Totally uneducated, but very inventive and creative. He started businesses all the time. He started something called the Ace Bureau of Clippings— the A.B.C. He'd look in newspapers and find an article, say, about somebody whose wife had just given birth to a baby boy. He'd clip it out. Then he'd send a letter saying, 'I have some articles about you in the newspaper, would you be interested in having them?' And they paid him for the clippings. It was like a clipping service, and he was doing it out of his own kitchen. He started a pool hall. Failed. He started a crochet-beading business. At that time, in the twenties, all the women were wearing crocheted beaded dresses. They were high fashion. But then they went out of fashion— and that failed. The only thing that paid any money was his band."

  In 1938, the family moved to the Bronx. Hunter's father encouraged him in many ways; together they mounted puppet shows and printed their own newspaper. When Sal was a teenager, he announced that he wanted to be an artist. He'd been drawing for as long as he could remember, sometimes copying characters from the comics, and subliminally learning the fundamentals of narrative from such strips as Terry and the Pirates. The hobby became a skill and the skill evolved into a wider ambition: to be a painter. He finished high school at sixteen, in 1942, and won a scholarship to the Art Students League; a year later, he was accepted at Cooper Union.

  "My mother was always more pragmatic than my father," Hunter said. For a while, she worked as a clerk in the mail room of the publishing house Harcourt, Brace. "She'd say, 'Why don't you go to engineering school like all your friends? Why do you want to go to art school?' 'Cause I want to be an artist, Mom.' "

  Then, as now, the Cooper Union art school was a rigorous place, its scholarship students drawn by competitive examination from the elite of the city's talented young. Sal Lombino soon discovered that it was one thing to be the best artist on East 120th Street, or even in the entire East Bronx, and quite another to go up against the students at Cooper Union. He worked hard. Influenced by such Disney films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, he began designing a layout for an animated film. But he was also getting discouraged. In 1944, with the war on, he joined the navy.

  For the first time, at the age of eighteen, he was away from home, meeting people from the world beyond Manhattan and the Bronx. For the next two years, as a member of the crew of a destroyer, he saw Norfolk, Boston, and San Diego, Pearl Harbor and the Pacific. After the war ended, he spent time among the bombed-out ruins of Yokohama and Nagasaki. He painted most of the ship's signs. He drew pictures of shipboard life and of his shipmates. More important, he began to read, greedily, eclectically, as eighteen-year-olds do, and recorded his favorites in a diary: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Richard Wright's Black Boy. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, novels by Lloyd C. Douglas, Willa Cather, Ngaio Marsh, G. K. Chesterton, Pearl Buck, and James Hilton. Inspired by his reading, and bored with his artwork, he started writing short stories and sent them off to The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Ladies' Home Journal, and, finally, the pulp magazines; they all came back, rejected. He kept
working, helped by a former professor who was on the ship, determined to be a writer.

  "There was a thing that happened when I started writing, and when I began to read so much," he said on this morning, more than half a century later. "I began to realize that there was no longer a frame around things. You weren't limited to that frame they were teaching in art school. I could go anywhere. I could go from a dust speck in the eye to a battlefield" —he snapped his fingers— "in a flash, in an instant!"

  In June of 1946, Sal Lombino was offered a bonus to reenlist in the navy; he turned it down. "I said, Sorry, I really want to get on with my life. Because I really felt, okay, now I start." Back home, he used the GI Bill to matriculate at the Bronx campus of Hunter College, and began making friends with "guys who had high aspirations." He took every writing course he could find in the curriculum, playwriting, poetry, short stories. His mother, now persuaded of his seriousness, bought him his first typewriter. He wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper. With some friends, he started a drama group called the Powdered Wig Society and did everything from acting to writing press releases. The Wigs were soon known all over the Hunter campus. "If ever I had celebrity in my life," he said, smiling, "it was then, in college."

  In 1949, he married a woman named Anita Melnick. He had found an apartment on North Brother Island, and to get there you had to take a bus and a ferry. "It was the same ferry that went to Riker's Island. We'd be going to our apartment and all the women would be going to see their boyfriends and husbands on Riker's Island. But it was a great apartment. It was like this, right on the river.

  He now had a plan for the future. "My dream was that I was going to do what Hemingway did," he told me. "As soon as I graduated, I was going to go to Paris and live on the Left Bank and write a novel." But, almost immediately, his wife got pregnant. Sal Lombino graduated with honors from Hunter in January of 1950; a son, Ted, was born in August. "There was no way we could go to Paris. I had a family now."

  He scrambled for work. He had taken an education minor at Hunter, which allowed him to obtain an "emergency license" that September and a teaching job at Bronx Vocational High School. "I couldn't stand it," he said. "I'd go in and give them everything I had. I would use all my acting talents, all my creative talents, trying to make interesting assignments for them. They weren't buying. They didn't give a rat's ass. All they wanted to do was fix automobiles and airplane engines."

  He remembers one student who sat in the back of the classroom. "He used to come in and read the newspaper every day," he said. "He was waiting to get drafted. Then one day I said, 'You, in the back row; put down that newspaper. I'm trying to teach a class here.' He pointed the newspaper at me, and said, 'You don't bother me, I won't bother you.' " Hunter acted out the sense of menace in the young man's challenge. "I didn't bother him. I didn't care what he did for the rest of the term."

  By Christmas of 1950, he had quit Bronx Vocational. He took a job answering telephones for the Automobile Association of America, and, when that didn't last, a job selling lobsters. Then he read an ad in the Times and his life changed abruptly.

  "It was an ad for an editor," Hunter recalled. "No experience necessary. So I went to the address in the ad— 580 Fifth Avenue. I went up and looked for the number on the door. It was a frosted door and it said 'Scott Meredith Literary Agency.' I almost made the biggest mistake of my life. I had my hand on the doorknob and I thought, Aw, gee, this isn't what I want. I started to turn away from the door. But then I said, What the hell, I'm here. I was on my lunch hour from the lobster place. I went in and they said sit down."

  Meredith wasn't present, but his employees told Lombino they were looking for an executive editor. They handed him a story without telling him that it had been written by one of their own editors. "It was a model of ineptness," Hunter recalled. "He did it deliberately, but I didn't know that. They said, 'Read the story and tell the writer why you think it's salable or unsalable.' I said, 'Okay.' It was a dreadful story and I wrote exactly what I thought of it. Told whoever wrote it, 'Burn it,' and told him exactly why."

  Then Hunter went back to the lobster place. A few days later, he got a call from the agency, which wanted to interview him. He met the man who was leaving the editor's job. There were, the departing editor explained, two kinds of clients at the Meredith agency: amateurs, who paid fees to get their manuscripts critiqued, and professionals. The latter included P. G. Wodehouse, Mickey Spillane, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson. Spillane's almost comically hard-boiled Mike Hammer novels, which had started with I, the Jury, in 1947, were a huge success; Anderson and Clarke were bringing new vitality and sophistication to science fiction; Wodehouse was trying to recover from the scandal of his naive broadcasts from Nazi Germany. Sal would handle the professionals, writing critiques as if they had come from Scott Meredith himself. The pay was forty dollars a week.

  "I said to him, 'Why are you leaving the job?' He said, 'I'm selling so much of my own work it doesn't pay to stay here anymore.' Puh-kooo. My ears went up, and I said, 'I'll take it.' "

  The Scott Meredith Agency was Evan Hunter's graduate school. "I learned everything there was to know about writing there," he told me. "Not only by reading stories by professional writers but by hearing the comments of editors." Often, he was the middle-man, taking notes from editors and passing them on to the writers. He saw that professionals always took advice from editors; only insecure amateurs protested about trimming or rewriting. After a few months, Sal Lombino brought in some stories of his own for Meredith's scrutiny. The agent took them home for the weekend.

  "On Monday morning he said, 'Can you come in for a minute?' Sure. I went into his office. He said, 'This you should burn. This is no good. This I think I can place. This— if you want to rewrite the thing— we can try it. This, no good. This, burn.' "

  Meredith sold a science-fiction story entitled "Outside in the Sand," about men landing on Mars, to the magazine Science Fiction Quarterly. It paid a quarter cent a word, and, after commissions, the check came to $12.60. Sal Lombino was now a professional writer. And he was learning much from Scott Meredith. "He was a brilliant guy, who hit upon a formula that absolutely defined the successful pulp story," Hunter said. "And in today's world of fiction most of the stuff on the market is pulp stuff. John Grisham is pulp fiction. And Scott defined it perfectly."

  The world of pulp fiction is now largely forgotten, in spite of Quentin Tarantino's resurrection of the phrase as the title of his 1994 movie. The pulps started around the turn of the century, when the publisher Frank Munsey saw a market for low-priced popular fiction. He published a magazine called Argosy, which was printed on low-grade wood-pulp paper and sold for ten cents a copy. It did extremely well, and hundreds of imitators followed. All swiftly organized themselves around genres: Westerns, sports, adventure, science fiction, fantasy, and crime. The format also became standardized: 120 seven-by-ten-inch pages and a wonderfully lurid cover. One of the best of the crime pulps was Black Mask, started in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as a way of underwriting their political and literary magazine, The American Mercury. Most of the writing was dreadful hackwork, but good writers did emerge— Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner.

  By the time Sal Lombino was starting to write for money, the pulps were past their Depression-era peak, subverted at first by radio melodramas and comic books and, a few years later, by television and Playboy and its imitators. Then came digest-size mystery magazines, the best of which was Manhunt, and original paperback novels in the pulp genres. (Their great star was John D. MacDonald, who wrote dozens of paperback novels before making the hardcover best-seller lists, in the '70s.) Sadly, just as the pulps were beginning to die (Black Mask folded in 1951; most of the others were gone by 1955), the writing was getting better, focusing more on characterization than on brainless action. Still, the pulp formulas remained valuable to fiction writers in search of a large audience, which is to say writers who planned to write for a livin
g. Even today, Hunter can recite Meredith's definition of a pulp story. Meredith's Writing to Sell, which remains in print, in its fourth edition, puts it this way:

  A sympathetic lead character finds himself in trouble of some kind and makes active efforts to get himself out of it. Each effort, however, merely gets him deeper into his trouble, and each new obstacle in his path is larger than the last. Finally, when things look blackest and it seems certain that the lead character is finished, he manages to get out of his trouble through his own efforts, intelligence, or ingenuity.

  Sal Lombino applied that formula to his short fiction. He began to sell more stories to the pulps, serving the same kind of Grub Street apprenticeship that shaped the styles and work habits of many nineteenth-century writers. Some stories were science fiction. Some were adventure stories, about men lost at sea or forced to battle alligators with their bare hands. "Sometimes they started with the illustration— some heroic guy fighting animals or crazy people— and asked me to come up with a story," Hunter recalled. Some of the better stories drew on his experiences as a schoolteacher. He rose to Bluebook, a large-format, higher-class pulp, and to the '50s version of Argosy. He climbed from a quarter of a cent per word to five cents per word. Now he left work at the agency at six, took the subway home— he had by then moved to the Bronx— finished dinner by eight and wrote until one. Not one of his stories appeared under the name Salvatore A. Lombino. He used Richard Marsten, Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon. (Some of these were reissued years later under the Ed McBain name.) "I'd sometimes have five stories in the same issue of a pulp magazine," he recalls, "and the editor didn't know they were all me."