Evan Hunter, the author who, writing as Ed McBain, virtually invented the American police procedural with his gritty 87th Precinct series featuring an entire detective squad as its hero, died Wednesday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 78.
The cause was cancer of the larynx, said his agent, Jane Gelfman.
In a 50-year career, Mr. Hunter, sometimes as Ed McBain and sometimes using other names, wrote a vast number of novels, short stories, plays and film scripts. 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, a radical break from a form long dependent on the educated, aristocratic detective who works alone and takes his time puzzling out a case.
Set in a New York-like metropolis named Isola, “Cop Hater” laid down the formula that would define the urban police novel, including the big, bad city as a character in the drama; multiple story lines; swift, cinematic exposition; brutal action scenes and searing images of city violence; methodical teamwork; authentic forensic procedures, and tough, cynical yet sympathetic police officers.
For all the studied muscularity of his style as Ed McBain, Mr. Hunter considered himself an emotional writer rather than a hard-boiled one. “I think of myself as a softy,” he once said. “I think the 87th Precinct novels are very sentimental, and the cops are idealistic guys.” He was also a stern moralist, and in many of his novels, this aspect surfaced as a keening lament for the battered soul of his city.
Although other practitioners adopted the conventions that continue to distinguish the realistic police procedural from the hard-boiled American private-eye novel and the genteel British detective mystery, many critics, like Mr. Hunter, considered his command of the form matchless.
“I feel that there is no other writer of police procedurals in the world from whom I can learn anything,” he told John Carr, editor of “The Craft of Crime,” “and in fact they all learn a lot from me.”
There wasn’t any point in his reading the competition, he said. “That’s like Michelangelo watching an apprentice paint in the white of an eye.”
The Mystery Writers of America awarded Ed McBain its Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986, and in 1998 he was the first American to receive a Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.
Despite his renown as Ed McBain, it was as Evan Hunter that the author had his first taste of literary acclaim.
That was in 1954 for “The Blackboard Jungle,” a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young teacher whose ideals are shattered when he is assigned to an urban vocational high school with a half-savage student body.
The next year it was turned into a movie with Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Mr. Hunter followed “The Blackboard Jungle” with other best-selling novels, including “Mothers and Daughters” (1961) and “Last Summer” (1968).
The most acclaimed of his 75 or so screenplays was the one for “The Birds,” the 1963 film that he and Alfred Hitchcock adapted.
