Casual
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Casual ON THE MCBAIN BEAT There's a 73-year-old guy, born in East Harlem and named Salvatore Lombino, who writes under two different noms de plume. One of those names—either Evan Hunter or Ed...
...A friend of mine keeps a list of the Dick Francis books he's completed so that he doesn't make the mistake of buying one he has already read...
...That helps explain why I've been able to read all 50 of them—because they're the sort of books you can plow through without paying really close attention...
...But Ed McBain writes about everyday things, the things urban dwellers all see and experience...
...And what they offer, over time, is a collective portrait of urban change unparalleled in contemporary writing...
...McBain began writing them before anyone had ever heard of Miranda rights or Uzis or crack or crank or gentrifica-tion—and, like police departments themselves and the cities they serve, the books have been forced to change with the times...
...One of those names—either Evan Hunter or Ed McBain—is now his official name, only I can't remember which...
...For who but a robot could literally write down so many words without developing terminal carpal tunnel syndrome...
...I think this is true of a lot of people who read mystery nov-els—we couldn't care less about who did it, we just like the characters and the setting...
...And he even does research—ah, research, the bane of every writer, because it's hard, it's time-consuming, and it reveals just how little you really know and how much of what you think you know is arrant nonsense...
...That's why it doesn't seem all that strange that the science-fiction writer Isaac Asi-mov supposedly wrote 500 novels before his death—because Asimov was writing about surreal things...
...They're mostly short, these books, around 60,000 words (to give you an idea of what that means, this article runs 850 words, while The Bonfire of the Vanities has 250,000...
...But who has that kind of time...
...The 87th precinct cops, who never age, have seen it all—the neighborhood they protect, in which the middle class and the poor once lived cheek by jowl, has been through juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, hippies in the 1960s, white flight in the 1970s, crack wars in the 1980s, and yuppification in the 1990s...
...As Ed McBain, he has just published a novel called The Last Dance, the latest in a series dating back to 1956 about a squad of detectives who work for a big-city police department...
...Oh, and he also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds...
...Sometimes, reading is play just as TV is play or movies are play...
...And for those times, there's the remarkable Sal Lombino, who I suspect is not really a man at all but an amalgam of machine and alien...
...And who but an alien would be so unaffected by the human tendency to loaf, to slough off...
...Now, for most people who scribble for a living, the very idea of producing so many books is surreal...
...McBain, who is no conservative despite the hagiographic way he depicts cops, has on occasion had his characters defend the Miranda decision and gun control...
...Taken as a whole, the 87th precinct books are a real accomplishment, in some ways more a journalistic than novelistic one...
...I have no memory of Cop Hater, the first one, and as I write this very moment I'm having trouble remembering the plot of The Last Dance, which I finished a week ago...
...This isn't surprising in one sense, since Sal Lombino has published 95 books in 45 years—69 as Ed McBain and 26 as Evan Hunter...
...I wish I could say that I had read all of Anthony Trollope's 50 novels or Honore de Balzac's 37...
...Over the past 20 years, I've read every novel in the "87th precinct" series...
...they're both writers for whom I have a particular fondness...
...I've read a few Hunters, like The Blackboard Jungle and Love, Dad, and some other, non-87th precinct McBains as well, so I figure I'm somewhere around 62 Lombino titles total...
...But I don't read these books for the plot—I read them for the atmosphere, for the portrait of the 87th precinct in constant change and the overall portrait of the large and chaotic city of Isola (which bears the same relation to New York that Ed McBain bears to Sal Lombino...
...The 87th precinct books deal, in detail, with the ways in which cops gather evidence, build cases, and make arrests, and they do so (police officers have told me) more realistically than any other novels...
...I couldn't tell you which one was which...
...Yeah, definitely an alien...
...But more important, their greatness forces you to slow down and do some spadework to mine the riches therein...
...First of all, their books are immensely long...
...Sometimes, you just don't want to work that hard...
...I couldn't begin to advise you on where to start...
...The Last Dance is the fiftieth, and I was halfway into it when it occurred to me that this meant I have read more books by Sal Lombino than by any other author...
...JOHN PODHORETZ...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 19
