If you enjoy cop novels or detective stories, you were probably saddened to learn of the recent death at 78 of Evan Hunter, alias Ed McBain — whose real name was Salvatore Lombino. (When he began writing in the 1950s, he didn't think his real name could cut it.)
Although Lombino worked as a teacher and a lobster salesman, he moved onto an amazing, prolific writing career, beginning with "Blackboard Jungle," based on his own teaching experience. He then became famous for the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain, the first being "Cop Hater" in 1956.
Some critics have called him the natural successor to Erle Stanley Gardner ("Perry Mason") or Dashiell Hammett ("The Thin Man").
He not only wrote numerous novels at the rate of a couple per year, but a number of screenplays, including Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."
The use of pseudonyms is mostly dead today, although a number of writers have used them over the years.
Bernard DeVoto, the legendary narrative historian who is famous for his trilogy "The Year of Decision," "Across the Wide Missouri" and "The Course of Empire," also wrote several thriller novels under the pseudonym John August — because he couldn't make any money from scholarly works.
Stephen King wrote a number of novels ("Thinner," "The Running Man") as Richard Bachman — and tried to keep it a secret.
One of the few writers left who adopts this eccentric trait today is Donald Westlake, a 72-year-old crime novelist who also writes under the name Richard Stark. Westlake has written more than 70 novels, 23 of them under the name of Stark.
When I interviewed Westlake a few years ago, I asked him why he uses the pseudonym, and he said it was traceable to "youthful exuberance," meaning he wrote too much for most publishers to handle and they prefer not to publish more than one book each year from any one author. "So I threw another name on my excess verbiage," said Westlake, "most of it on crime, but some on emotional issues and some comic. It was like a Chevrolet vs. a Buick. Secrecy seemed less important than branding it and using up the excess material. Once I had three short stories in the same magazine with three different names."
Lombino as Evan Hunter invented the so-called "police procedural," a genre in which the precinct or the detective's squad room is the focus of the action instead of a solitary detective. When Steven Bochco made television history in the 1980s with "Hill Street Blues," Lombino was irritated that he hadn't done it himself.
Lombino said that he tried to make cops into believable human beings — and he did that by making their conversation homey and conversational, giving them head colds and first names. But he didn't like writing consistently in a hard-boiled style, so he made Ed McBain the author of the cop novels, and Evan Hunter, the emotional writer, the author of more unpredictable dramatic stories.
Some of McBain's stuff was pretty raw and violent, but Hunter tried to write closer to everyday people. At some point in his 50-year career, Hunter started to merge the two. Then, in 2001, came "Candyland," allegedly written by both Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. The jacket even touted both authors, McBain looking seedy and dangerous while and Hunter appearing more urbane. Allegedly, Hunter and McBain shared the writing of the book, a ghastly mystery. Later, Hunter bragged that he got the best reviews for "Candyland" he had ever received. Yet the book was surely one of his darkest, filled with violence and sexual crudity. (The protagonist is an architect who spends a lot of time in a brothel and ends up being suspected of a grisly murder.) What is even more surprising is that during his extended career, Lombino also wrote under the names Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon, Richard Marsten, John Abbot and Curt Cannon.
As McBain, Lombino got one more 87th Precinct novel into the hopper before he died — "Fiddlers" will appear in September. And McBain's "Learning to Kill," a collection of 50 years of his stories, will be published in the spring.
But don't look for too many authors to use pseudonyms. As Westlake put it: "Writing is ego — and doing it under another name is so anti-ego."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com