An Educated View:
PART I
Writing As Evan Hunter,
Writing As Ed McBain
By Martin Kich
Likewise, in Last Summer and Come Winter, Hunter explores the nature of sexual attraction and of evil much in the smooth, compelling manner of Irwin Shaw, following characters who move from the edges of middle-America to the underside of the high life. Yet, he exhibits a much different sensibility in Mothers and Daughters, tracing the life choices of a group of women much as Mary McCarthy has done in The Group and Alice Adams, in Superior Women.
In the noir tradition that has its locus in the spare novels of James M. Cain, several of Hunter's novels develop from dark situational premises: for instance, in Buddwing a man wakes up at dawn in Central Park with amnesia, and in Don't Crowd Me, a man wakes up next to the corpse of the woman with whom he has been having a summer fling. On the other hand, Sons, a generational saga of American men at war, is reminiscent of the sprawling, crowded novels of Leon Uris, and Streets of Gold is an immigrant saga of the sort penned by Howard Fast and Jerome Weidman.
The Paper Dragon, a trial novel in the style of the novels of Allen Drury and the films of Otto Preminger, is very unlike Love, Dad, a touchingly intimate, autobiographical novel. Every Little Crook and Nanny is a predecessor to the wryly, even farcically brutal Prizzi novels of Richard Condon, while Nobody Knew They Were There is a psychedelic thriller that might be viewed as a successor to the Cold-War brain-washing of Condon's The Manchurian Candidate.
Lizzie is a historical novel, recreating the most notorious crime of nineteenth-century America. Far from the Sea, A Matter of Conviction, and Second Ending are contemporary potboilers, blending the surface appeal of Harold Robbins' novels with the more penetrating perceptions of more reputable novelists of much the same terrain, such as Vance Bourjaily and R.V. Cassill. And Strangers When We Meet, a novel of infidelity, is as parochially steamy as the nearly forgotten novels of Charles Mergendahl and Edmund Schiddel and more memorable works of the same general category such as John Updike's Couples.
This overview may suggest that Hunter, when writing under his own name, produced largely derivative works, and to some extent, such a conclusion is warranted. Certainly, he did not find the sort of signature subject that promotes name recognition and permits ready classification. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that, in writing police procedurals under the pseudonym Ed McBain, Hunter achieved both broader recognition and more substantive critical attention. The underlying paradox is, of course, that Hunter's "serious" novels should be overshadowed by his work in a genre regarded on the whole as sub-literary.
On the basis of his 87th Precinct series, Hunter, as McBain, received such honors as the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award. Before his death, the series extended into its fifth decade, with the first of the novels having been written in the mid-1950s and the total number of novels in the series exceeding fifty, or an average of roughly one novel per year over the course of the series. A few of the novels have remained almost continuously in print, but most have been reissued at ten to fifteen year intervals, as the new novels published in each decade attract fresh readers to series. By the late 1970s, more than 50 million copies of the novels had been printed worldwide.
One might expect that the later books in such a lengthy series would become at least somewhat stale--that the characters would become increasingly predictable and the situations ever more mechanically devised. Instead, much the opposite occurred. Whereas most of the early novels in the series were between 150 and 175 pages long, the more recent novels averaged twice that length. With this increased length came not only a broader scope in terms of incident and character but also a richer narrative texture.
Whereas each of the early novels basically focuses on the commission and solution of a single crime and presents several sub-plots largely for the purposes of pacing and diversion, the distinction between focal and secondary plotlines narrows considerably in the later novels. Because each element of the narration usually involves a distinct element of the social milieu of the large city which is the setting, each of the later novels provides, in effect, a broader framework for the expression of a rich diversity of attitudes and voices. Although from the start the novels were notable for their striking juxtapositions of tones, what was done for effect in the early novels became integral to the later novels. As a result, the novels became increasingly interesting as novels, not just as crime novels.
The large city, identified as Isola in the novels but clearly modeled on New York, has always been more than a mere setting--a composite character, if you will, of human possibilities and failings. In the early novels, however, it had a sort of choral function, something akin to the disembodied voice that introduced each episode of the television serial The Naked City. In the later novels, it became the central character, the protagonist in the continuing drama of its survival in the face of its own improbability. For this city contains an unfathomable multiplicity of circumstances and personalities, of motives and opportunities, compulsions and decisions. And yet it provides as suggestive a microcosm of a considerable segment of contemporary life as one is likely to find.
Of course, the signature aspect of the series has always been McBain's detailed knowledge of police procedure and his ability to integrate that knowledge selectively and engagingly into his narratives. As the tools of criminal investigation became more sophisticated and automated, he remained well informed. And yet, beyond all of the technical aspects of police work, he consistently emphasized the human element involved in the collection and interpretation of evidence and in the identification and consideration of suspects.
In this respect, McBain's 87th Precinct series is very comparable to Erle Stanley Gardner's series of Perry Mason novels, in which the knowledge of legal procedures and of legal technicalities is essential and yet always subordinate to the lawyer's singularly perceptive and imaginative maneuvering within the law, as well as his reliable sense of justice. In fact, the difference between the two series lies in Gardner's increasing emphasis on the force of Mason's personality and reputation at the expense of dramatic credibility--so that, as Joe Bonanno remarked to Gay Talese, never have so many cold-blooded killers blurted confessions simply to escape further cross-examination.
The detectives of the 87th precinct are on one level familiar types reproduced in such television series as Hill Street Blues and, more recently, Homicide and N.Y.P.D. Blue: one is a painstaking, prematurely bald Jew with the burdensomely whimsical name Meyer Meyer; another, Steve Carella, is darkly handsome, sometimes mercurial but generally reflective, reflecting his mixed Italian and Chinese ancestry; still another, Bert Kling, is young, blond, and at times painfully well-intentioned; at the other extreme Cotton Hawes is a rangy redhead whose imperturbable demeanor is belied by the broad streak of white in his hair; another of the detectives, Andy Parker, is a loud bigot with a wardrobe to match his colorful tactlessness; still another is a reserved, burly African-American named Arthur Brown; and, lastly, Eileen Burke has instincts as sharp as her luck is suspect, and predictably struggles to be accepted by her male colleagues while preserving her own sense of her femininity.
The main difference between these detectives and those featured in the television series is, however, in the manner by which they are individualized. In the television series, the storylines are designed to work off the stereotypes very pointedly, so that complexities of each character are dramatically revealed against the backdrop provided by the obviously stereotypical characteristics suggested by appearance and manner. As a result, there is a repeated need to reinforce the stereotypes in order to show evidence of depth of character beyond the stereotypes. The tension between these two aims eventually makes the detectives' personalities, rather than their work, the primary focus, and, not surprisingly, the number of potential storylines is eventually--and often rather quickly--exhausted.
The effort to move the characters beyond caricature limits the situations in which depth of character might be revealed, since such revelations require, in effect, some fresh evidence of the apparent caricature. In short, how many ways are there to show that an apparently callous cop has some reserves of sympathy and sensitivity? Or how many ways are there to show that an apparently carefree cop has some deep-seated insecurities or fears? Or that an apparently even-tempered, self-controlled cop is beset by some private demons, some suppressed rage? Or that an apparently sensitive, wholly compassionate cop has some blind spots and is in his own way as biased as another cop may be bigoted? When such revelations become the primary focus, the crime is made to illuminate the detective's character, rather than the detective's personality being made to cast a certain light on the crime.
In contrast, in McBain's novels, the detectives were much more quietly and gradually individualized. Because the emphasis remained consistently on their work, their personalities were developed primarily in terms of their impact on that work. Clearly, the realistic depiction of grimly mundane crimes demands more than caricature to make their resolutions credible: imagine Charlie Chan or the Thin Man or even Dirty Harry investigating the murder of a junkie one week, a series of violent muggings the next week, and the rape of a middle-aged bookkeeper the next. If nothing else, the grinding monotony of the work would dull such force of personality, whether it were grounded in witty perception or in a barely contained rage.
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