Money, Girls & Guns (That's Three Titles)

Along with quite a few other people, but rather more peacefully than some, Ed McBain, king of the police procedural novel, died last Thursday, after selling nigh on 100 million books in his lifetime.

Evan Hunter, McBain's real name, had his first success in 1954 with Blackboard Jungle. This novel, which was turned into the successful movie with Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier, is essentially a youth exploitation tale and drawn from his own experiences of teaching in the inner cities. As such it bears many of the hallmarks of his later work as Ed McBain: hard-boiled stories with a strong but always compassionate moral core.



Less famously, but perhaps even more significantly, he also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcocks' The Birds, which he and Hitch adapted from the Daphne du Maurier story.

It is as Ed McBain, however, that he will be remembered, and particularly for the 55 87th Precinct novels, the last of which is due in September. McBain invented the police procedural genre, which differed from the traditional American gumshoe or British detective novels in their recognition of whole teams of good (and occasionally bad) officers fighting the good fight (or otherwise, &c). He wasn't much of a fan of the title himself: "Not procedurals," a character in Romance (1995) complains when the label is applied to him. "Never procedurals. And not mysteries, either. They were simply novels about cops. The men and women in blue and in mufti, their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, children, their head colds, stomachaches, menstrual cycles. Novels."

And it's true: I dare anyone to pick up a McBain and not be lost after a few pages. They rattle by, full of genre staples: tough men, beautiful women, vicious weapons, but absolutely styled and compelling.

In print for over forty years, the McBain novels are a paperback hunter's particular pleasure, as they've been out under a hundred imprints and a thousand covers over the decades. It is rare to find a bookshop or stall that lacks a few suitably yellowed McBains, and as they're rarely more than a quid and frequently pocket-sized, they are an essential if nothing else catches the eye.

In fact, it's become kind of a law. All lonely McBain's will find a home with me. One down, a couple of hundred to go. Go pick one up yourself.