The World's Finest Mystery Part 101

Somewhere a rainspout poured water into a catch basin. There was the sound of the steady splas.h.i.+ng, and then the sharp click of the traffic signal changing again. Their faces were suddenly tinted green.

"I didn't do nothing to cause it," Lucille said.

"I know that."

"The police'll think..."

"No, Lucille. They'll think you were victimized."

"No. My husband'll..."

"Lucille, we've got to call the police."

"No, ma'am, please."

"Did you get a good look at him?"

"Yes."

"Then you've got to describe him to the police."

"No. No, ma'am, please, I can't do that. I can't let my husband find out about this."

"Lucille..."

"Ma'am, if you'll help me find an open drugstore..."

"Lucille, listen to me..."

"If I can maybe stop the bleeding and get some new pantyhose, then my husband won't know what..."

"Your husband's got to know, d.a.m.n it! You were raped!"

The force of her own voice surprised her.

"He raped you," Laura said.

"I know, ma'am, but..."

"You've got to report it to the police."

"Then my husband'll know."

"Yes, Lucille. He'll know you were raped."

"But then he'll think..."

"It doesn't matter what he thinks. You were a victim, Lucille."

"They won't find him, anyway," Lucille said, shaking her head. "I'll tell them, and they'll know what he looks like, but they won't find him, it won't do any good, they'll think I wanted what happened, they'll..."

"Stop it!" Laura said.

The courtyard went silent.

Lucille's eyes met Laura's. They were the same eyes that had seen Bobby's hand in Nessie Winkler's lap. They searched Laura's face skeptically now, almost accusingly.

"If it was you," she said, "would you go to the police?"

"Yes," Laura said.

Yes, she thought. I would march into a police station and up to the polished bra.s.s railing and I would say to the desk sergeant, "I want to report a rape. I've been raped." Yes, she thought. I would.

They continued staring at each other.

Lucille nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Yes," Laura said. "Believe me, I would."

Lucille nodded again, more firmly this time.

Laura helped her to her feet and together they walked toward Fifth Avenue in search of a taxi. She had no idea where the local police station was but she expected the cab driver would help them find it. She would stay with Lucille while she talked to the detectives. She would remain by her side and see her through this.

And then she would go back to the apartment where she would hang her yellow slicker and rain hat in the hall closet. And she would go into the bedroom where Bobby would be lying asleep snoring lightly- he always snored so lightly, she knew so much about this man she was now ready to leave.

I want to report a rape, she would say. I've been raped.

A taxi was approaching.

Laura nodded, and then raised her hand to hail it.

Pete Hamill.

The Poet of Pulp.

WHILE WE don't often run nonfiction in this collection, "The Poet of Pulp" is such a fine piece of writing by Pete Hamill we felt duty bound to include it. Rarely has a crime writer been profiled in such depth or with such elegance. To complement an especially compelling Evan Hunter story, here is Hamill's article from The New Yorker.

The Poet of Pulp.

How Ed McBain Made the Precinct House a Respectable Place.

Pete Hamill.

For decades, I've had a secret literary pleasure: the novels of Ed McBain. As far as I know, they're not taught; they're not part of the canon. But, in some strange way, McBain and I have been pilgrims together on a long journey through what he calls the big, bad city; the novels are as woven into my life as the Lexington Avenue express. No matter where I live, part of me is always in the 87th Precinct.

I began reading the McBain novels in the late '50s, when I was starting out as a writer. The first one I read was The Mugger, which started this way, from inside the head of a criminal: The city could be nothing but a woman, and that's good because your business is women.

You know her tossed head in the auburn crowns of molting autumn foliage, Riverhead and the park.... She is a woman, and she is your woman, and in the fall she wears a perfume of mingled wood smoke and carbon dioxide.

The paragraphs that followed were a rhapsodic and gritty evocation of the city and its female nature, written in a shade of purple; today they seem more than a little ripe. But when I first read them, in 1958, they pulled me swiftly into the story and kept me there. Unlike so many of the books I was reading- by Hemingway, Fitzgerald- these novels were not set in Pamplona or Antibes; they were about the city where I lived. I stayed up most of the night reading the short novel, moving through the city with the detectives of the 87th Precinct.

As an apprentice, I admired McBain's solid paragraphs and the absence of waste or decoration. I admired his dialogue, too. McBain understood that a specially tuned ear was essential to defining the people of the city that he called Isola. He showed that speech on a printed page depended upon rhythmic approximation, and not the exact.i.tude of a transcript. Yet McBain wasn't asking the reader to pause and take note; he was asking the reader to keep reading. Everything in McBain's work served the story.

In time, I learned that Ed McBain was a pseudonym for the mainstream novelist Evan Hunter, who had established himself in 1954, with The Blackboard Jungle. (Hunter's many other credits include the novel of '50s suburban adultery Strangers When We Meet and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's The Birds). But for me the McBain novels came first. They usually started with a corpse- on the floor, on the street, in a s...o...b..nk- and then moved swiftly into answering the cla.s.sic questions about how the body got there. The process of unraveling the mystery was never mechanical, and the novels were at once surprising and familiar. They were about a world I knew as a New Yorker and a newspaperman- they took me to places that I'd seen a dozen times as a young reporter- and, like any great journalist, McBain gave life to that world through details. In Long Time No See, published in the late '70s, a building superintendent named Reynolds lets two detectives into a third-floor apartment. A blind woman is lying on the floor beside a refrigerator.

Her throat had been slit, her head was twisted at an awkward angle in a pool of her own blood. The refrigerator door was open. Crisping trays and meat trays had been pulled from it, their contents dumped onto the floor. There were open canisters and boxes strewn everywhere. Underfoot, the floor was a gummy mess of blood and flour, sugar and cornflakes, ground coffee, and crumpled biscuits, lettuce leaves and broken eggs. Drawers had been overturned, forks, knives and spoons piled haphazardly in a junk-heap jumble, paper napkins, spaghetti tongs, a corkscrew, a cheese grater, place mats, candles all thrown on the floor together with the drawers that had contained them.

The victims, of course, are not always dead, as in Blood Relatives: The front of her dress had been ripped, and she tried to hold the torn sides of the V closed over her bra.s.siere as she ran through the rain. It had been raining since 10 o'clock. The rain was neither cruel nor driving now; it had changed to a gentle drizzle that sent mist drifting up from the pavement. In the distance, the green globes of the 87th precinct shone through the rain and through the mist.

In McBain's city, the precinct house is an outpost of civilization. To be sure, the cops of the 87th Precinct are not saints. Their private lives are often untidy. There are racists among them, and fools and schemers, too. They would not be surprised by the cases of Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo. But such aberrations would outrage most of them; even the most racist of McBain's cops, Fat Ollie Weeks, recognizes that there are lines he cannot cross. McBain's cops work in a city where it would be entirely plausible for a crackhead to hit a stranger in the head with a brick. And without cops, McBain implies, there would be no city at all. In that sense, his novels speak for conservative values. In the end, we have cops because we have bad guys. The cop, like the novelist, can bring sympathy, even compa.s.sion, to his pursuit of even the most atrocious killer.

The lead detective of the 87th Precinct novels is Steve Carella, but the job of detection and pursuit is done by a team that includes detectives, forensic specialists, lab technicians, psychologists, and a cast of informants. This reflects actual police work, and it also follows the novelist's plan. From the first of the McBain novels, Hunter's design was to feature what he calls a "splintered" hero.

In clumsier hands, splintering the tasks and talents of the squad could lead to novelistic anarchy. That never happens in McBain's narratives, which are carefully focused on the quest for understanding and resolution; they are as simple as myths. Carella, who is usually at the center of each novel, is the best detective on the squad- intelligent, skeptical, proud of what he knows, modest about what he doesn't, at peace with the bad hours and the lousy pay. He knows that he must work with all the other cops. They include Bert Kling, whose doomed romantic life provides a continuing narrative; Detective Meyer Meyer, a patient, serious, and gutsy cop who is Jewish and prematurely bald, and whose sense of humor helps him through the inevitable bad patches; Cotton Hawes, a big, handsome, sometimes reckless bachelor with many women in his life; and Artie Brown, the only black man on the squad, who often struggles with bigotry, black and white. In minor roles there are women cops, police bra.s.s, and technicians.

The characters, in short, are part of an ensemble; as in life, the stories may be overlapping, unconnected, and parallel. In McBain's 1971 Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here! there are (if I've counted accurately) fourteen plot lines. If this sounds familiar, it's because the concept has been appropriated in various ways by television cop shows like Homicide and N.Y.P.D. Blue. In Hill Street Blues, the main policeman was named Furillo, in what I took to be an homage to Carella.

Hunter did not invent what came to be known as the "police procedural" (a label believed to have been coined by Anthony Boucher, who reviewed crime novels for the Times Book Review from 1951 to 1968). He doesn't like the term; it makes the novels sound as if they were about the mere clerking of crime. There were police detectives in American letters well before the first McBain novels began appearing, and readers and writers of crime fiction were also aware of Georges Simenon's Inspector Jules Maigret, the pipe-smoking French detective who was featured in more than seventy books written between 1931 and 1972. But McBain's novels were more realistic than their predecessors, in that he used a full range of the modern tools of detection. Above all, they were much better written. And, beginning with the first McBain, Cop Hater, published in 1956, the novels moved beyond the archetype of the Master Detective, a literary tradition that included Maigret (although Simenon and McBain resemble each other in several ways: productivity, craft, professionalism). McBain's people were cops- real cops. And when a crime is committed in the real world cops, not amateurs, are called in to deal with the mess.

This had not usually been the case in American crime fiction. During Prohibition and the Depression, the private eye- Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe- had come to dominate the popular imagination. Most urban police departments- along with big-city political machines- had been corrupted by the easy money that flowed from the bootleggers during the '20s; in many towns during the Depression, police power was marshaled against unions, leftists, protesting war veterans. The private eye was not an agent of the state, and thus had a special appeal for the children of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants- that is, of people who came from countries where the police were an oppressive force. Many Americans grew up, as I did, wary of ever going to the police for help.

But readers and writers of crime novels were changed by the experiences of the Second World War and Korea. In the armed forces, they learned that winning a war required the skills of many specialists. For such men (and many women), the platoon was the central unit of survival- and of eventual triumph- in the same way that the family was the basic unit of civilian society. The men of the 87th Precinct are described in the early books as veterans, and they form their own platoon. They are also a kind of family.

The precinct's job is to ward off threats to the family of the squad and the wider family of the city. The city around the detectives changes; they do not. In more than forty years, Carella has aged only a decade. In the fiftieth 87th Precinct novel, The Last Dance, being published this month by Simon & Schuster, Carella's fortieth birthday is behind him, barely.

But, if the elasticity of the calendar reminds us that we are reading fiction, McBain's picture of the dense, layered, sometimes scary city suggests that his achievement is much bigger than its fifty parts. In fact, I read this latest McBain as if it were a piece of a larger project: a multipart novel about New York in the second half of the century. That grand novel is now about 3 million words, and it does not seem too much of a stretch to compare it to, say, Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, in which crime and misdeeds and the pursuit of the guilty are used to illuminate a great city during a particular era. Sue- and Balzac- took readers to places where n.o.body else could go. In his own way, in our time, so does Ed McBain.

Over the past four decades, McBain has taken us into boardrooms and crack houses; into glossy law offices, the Broadway-like theater (which he revisits in The Last Dance), import-export firms, the music business, publis.h.i.+ng, network television, art galleries. He has made vivid the lives of strangers, various and bizarre. He has challenged us to think about the precarious value of human life in a huge American city- a place populated by blind beggars, youth gangs, predatory rapists, Jamaican drug posses, con men, blackmailers, race hustlers, kidnappers, burglars, and stool pigeons.

Along the way, the reader can see how the city's language changes: the topical references change; the immigrants change; the names change. There are seven daily newspapers in the early novels; by the time of The Last Dance, there are three. One can trace the arrival of television, drugs, and racism. Almost from the beginning, the books are imbued with a nostalgia that is the permanent curse of so many native New Yorkers. In a city where all is in flux, New Yorkers of every generation carry around the memory of a lost city. In 1977, Carella (in Long Time No See) was feeling nostalgia even about murder: There used to be a time when most murders started as family quarrels resolved with a hatchet or a gun. Find a lady dead on the bathroom floor, go look for her husband. Find a man with both legs broken and a knife in his heart besides, go look for his girlfriend's husband, and try to get there fast before the husband threw her off the roof in the bargain. Those were the good old days.

Still, McBain is too much of a New Yorker to become maudlin. Near the end of The Big Bad City, the forty-ninth 87th Precinct novel, published last year, Carella sits with the black detective, Artie Brown. Carella is remembering old cases, riffing about cops who died and bad guys who were punished: Jesus, remember the times? I remember them all, Artie. I remember all of it, all of it. Every single minute. It goes by too fast, Artie. I'll be forty in October. Where did it all go, Artie?"

He looked up.

"Artie?" he said.

Brown was snoring lightly.

Several times in the past year, I met with Evan Hunter in his apartment, on the twenty-second floor of a building in the East Seventies. He is seventy-three but talks with the restless energy of a much younger man. He is lean and trim, with thinning hair and a neat beard that is scratched with gray. He usually wore a sweater, slacks, and loafers, and was at once relaxed and focused. He used to smoke, but three heart attacks have cured him of the habit.

Hunter has published more than ninety works of fiction, including four children's books, and his publisher says that he has sold more than a 100 million books around the world. He has won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers a.s.sociation. He's had good luck with film. Both Strangers When We Meet and The Blackboard Jungle became films, and the director Frank Perry made a lovely small movie from Hunter's 1968 novel Last Summer. In 1963, Akira Kurosawa transformed an 87th Precinct novel called King's Ransom into a thriller called High and Low, starring Tos.h.i.+ro Mifune; it has been remade three more times in j.a.pan, and Martin Scorsese is planning to produce another version.

"It's always been an odd kind of success," Hunter told me. "The Blackboard Jungle was a blockbuster success, but I was hardly attached to it- it wasn't my movie. Strangers When We Meet made a lot of money; and I got to write the screenplay, but still... Last Summer was a good film, but it came in second to Easy Rider that season. I always felt like an outsider in Hollywood. I always felt like I was going out to do a job, putting on the leather gloves, and, you know, get the money and go home." In 1997, Hunter published a short memoir, Me and Hitch, about working with Hitchc.o.c.k. The laconic ninety-page book is devoid of illusions, either about the British director or about Hunter's own career in Hollywood.

Hunter talked in a rueful way about other unsatisfactory parts of his writing life. "The experiences I had in the theater never resulted in a hit play," he said. "So I never felt part of that inside theatrical community where you call Orso's and reserve three tables and rush right over. I never felt that." He shook his head and shrugged. "And I never felt the sort of acceptance one gets from the literary community. It's as if Evan Hunter got dismissed along the way. And, with Ed McBain, I've never felt quite accepted in the mystery writers community because they go, 'He's Evan Hunter slumming.' It's a strange thing. I never felt that niche that would make me feel enormously comfortable."

Hunter was married for the third time in 1997. His wife is an elegant, dark-haired Yugoslavian woman named Dragica Dimitrijevic, and he has dedicated both The Last Dance and its predecessor to her. (His second marriage, to Mary Vann, ended several years ago.) On this morning, Dragica was out shopping. Their dog, a five-year-old Maltese, Sasha, began barking at a cable that was whipping around outside the window. Hunter shushed the dog, then stood up and explained the harmlessness of the cable to Sasha. He paused at the window. The East River was below us, and a barge was moving sluggishly on its opaque surface. Queens was on the right, the Bronx in the distance. "It's a beautiful view, isn't it?" he said.

The beautiful view was due north along the edge of Manhattan to East Harlem, where Hunter was born, in 1926, and where he lived until he was twelve. His name at birth was Salvatore Lombino; he was the only child of Charles F. and Marie Coppola Lombino.

"My father was a subst.i.tute letter carrier," he told me. "In those days, when you joined the Post Office Department, you had to be a subst.i.tute for a certain amount of time before you became a quote regular unquote. But when the Depression started they froze the list, and he was stuck, earning eight bucks a week. We moved in with my grandparents. My grandfather was a tailor, and he made all my clothes. I had tailor-made suits when I was eight years old. I was the best-dressed kid in the slums."

The family lived on 120th Street between First and Second Avenues, two blocks from Sal's grandfather's shop. "There were people from all the immigrant groups," Hunter said. "There was a German lady who lived on the third floor, Jewish people elsewhere in the building. It was a very quiet neighborhood at that time, in terms of crime. Although it wasn't just an Italian neighborhood, there was an Italian feeling to it. When I went to Italy for the first time, in 1949, and I got to Naples, I heard the same sounds I heard in the streets when I was growing up. The same street sounds, the peddlers... There was no violence then. There were no street gangs. Sure, it was divided. There was East Harlem, where we lived, and then you crossed Lexington Avenue and you were in black Harlem. And I used to go with my father all the time to the Apollo, way over on the West Side, with a largely black audience. We used to get out of there at midnight and walk back home and there was never a problem. Never."

He has a great affection for his father. Clearly, Charles Lombino was responsible for encouraging his son's creative side. "My father had a band," Hunter went on. "He played drums. He supplemented his income by playing weddings, engagement parties- he met my mother at an engagement party where he was playing. He had bands called the Louisiana Five and the Louisiana Rhythm Kings. He had a band called the Phantom Five, where they all came out in white hoods. They must've looked like Ku Klux Klan members. That's how he met my mother. He took off the hood and said 'Hi!' "

Hunter smiled broadly remembering Charles Lombino in the years of the Depression. "He was a very smart man," he said. "Totally uneducated, but very inventive and creative. He started businesses all the time. He started something called the Ace Bureau of Clippings- the A.B.C. He'd look in newspapers and find an article, say, about somebody whose wife had just given birth to a baby boy. He'd clip it out. Then he'd send a letter saying, 'I have some articles about you in the newspaper, would you be interested in having them?' And they paid him for the clippings. It was like a clipping service, and he was doing it out of his own kitchen. He started a pool hall. Failed. He started a crochet-beading business. At that time, in the twenties, all the women were wearing crocheted beaded dresses. They were high fas.h.i.+on. But then they went out of fas.h.i.+on- and that failed. The only thing that paid any money was his band."

In 1938, the family moved to the Bronx. Hunter's father encouraged him in many ways; together they mounted puppet shows and printed their own newspaper. When Sal was a teenager, he announced that he wanted to be an artist. He'd been drawing for as long as he could remember, sometimes copying characters from the comics, and subliminally learning the fundamentals of narrative from such strips as Terry and the Pirates. The hobby became a skill and the skill evolved into a wider ambition: to be a painter. He finished high school at sixteen, in 1942, and won a scholars.h.i.+p to the Art Students League; a year later, he was accepted at Cooper Union.

"My mother was always more pragmatic than my father," Hunter said. For a while, she worked as a clerk in the mail room of the publis.h.i.+ng house Harcourt, Brace. "She'd say, 'Why don't you go to engineering school like all your friends? Why do you want to go to art school?' 'Cause I want to be an artist, Mom.' "

Then, as now, the Cooper Union art school was a rigorous place, its scholars.h.i.+p students drawn by compet.i.tive examination from the elite of the city's talented young. Sal Lombino soon discovered that it was one thing to be the best artist on East 120th Street, or even in the entire East Bronx, and quite another to go up against the students at Cooper Union. He worked hard. Influenced by such Disney films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, he began designing a layout for an animated film. But he was also getting discouraged. In 1944, with the war on, he joined the navy.

For the first time, at the age of eighteen, he was away from home, meeting people from the world beyond Manhattan and the Bronx. For the next two years, as a member of the crew of a destroyer, he saw Norfolk, Boston, and San Diego, Pearl Harbor and the Pacific. After the war ended, he spent time among the bombed-out ruins of Yokohama and Nagasaki. He painted most of the s.h.i.+p's signs. He drew pictures of s.h.i.+pboard life and of his s.h.i.+pmates. More important, he began to read, greedily, eclectically, as eighteen-year-olds do, and recorded his favorites in a diary: Das.h.i.+ell Hammett's Red Harvest. Richard Wright's Black Boy. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, novels by Lloyd C. Douglas, Willa Cather, Ngaio Marsh, G. K. Chesterton, Pearl Buck, and James Hilton. Inspired by his reading, and bored with his artwork, he started writing short stories and sent them off to The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, Colliers, Ladies' Home Journal, and, finally, the pulp magazines; they all came back, rejected. He kept working, helped by a former professor who was on the s.h.i.+p, determined to be a writer.

"There was a thing that happened when I started writing, and when I began to read so much," he said on this morning, more than half a century later. "I began to realize that there was no longer a frame around things. You weren't limited to that frame they were teaching in art school. I could go anywhere. I could go from a dust speck in the eye to a battlefield" -he snapped his fingers- "in a flash, in an instant!"

In June of 1946, Sal Lombino was offered a bonus to reenlist in the navy; he turned it down. "I said, Sorry, I really want to get on with my life. Because I really felt, okay, now I start." Back home, he used the GI Bill to matriculate at the Bronx campus of Hunter College, and began making friends with "guys who had high aspirations." He took every writing course he could find in the curriculum, playwriting, poetry, short stories. His mother, now persuaded of his seriousness, bought him his first typewriter. He wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper. With some friends, he started a drama group called the Powdered Wig Society and did everything from acting to writing press releases. The Wigs were soon known all over the Hunter campus. "If ever I had celebrity in my life," he said, smiling, "it was then, in college."

In 1949, he married a woman named Anita Melnick. He had found an apartment on North Brother Island, and to get there you had to take a bus and a ferry. "It was the same ferry that went to Riker's Island. We'd be going to our apartment and all the women would be going to see their boyfriends and husbands on Riker's Island. But it was a great apartment. It was like this, right on the river.

He now had a plan for the future. "My dream was that I was going to do what Hemingway did," he told me. "As soon as I graduated, I was going to go to Paris and live on the Left Bank and write a novel." But, almost immediately, his wife got pregnant. Sal Lombino graduated with honors from Hunter in January of 1950; a son, Ted, was born in August. "There was no way we could go to Paris. I had a family now."

He scrambled for work. He had taken an education minor at Hunter, which allowed him to obtain an "emergency license" that September and a teaching job at Bronx Vocational High School. "I couldn't stand it," he said. "I'd go in and give them everything I had. I would use all my acting talents, all my creative talents, trying to make interesting a.s.signments for them. They weren't buying. They didn't give a rat's a.s.s. All they wanted to do was fix automobiles and airplane engines."

He remembers one student who sat in the back of the cla.s.sroom. "He used to come in and read the newspaper every day," he said. "He was waiting to get drafted. Then one day I said, 'You, in the back row; put down that newspaper. I'm trying to teach a cla.s.s here.' He pointed the newspaper at me, and said, 'You don't bother me, I won't bother you.' " Hunter acted out the sense of menace in the young man's challenge. "I didn't bother him. I didn't care what he did for the rest of the term."

By Christmas of 1950, he had quit Bronx Vocational. He took a job answering telephones for the Automobile a.s.sociation of America, and, when that didn't last, a job selling lobsters. Then he read an ad in the Times and his life changed abruptly.

"It was an ad for an editor," Hunter recalled. "No experience necessary. So I went to the address in the ad- 580 Fifth Avenue. I went up and looked for the number on the door. It was a frosted door and it said 'Scott Meredith Literary Agency.' I almost made the biggest mistake of my life. I had my hand on the doork.n.o.b and I thought, Aw, gee, this isn't what I want. I started to turn away from the door. But then I said, What the h.e.l.l, I'm here. I was on my lunch hour from the lobster place. I went in and they said sit down."

Meredith wasn't present, but his employees told Lombino they were looking for an executive editor. They handed him a story without telling him that it had been written by one of their own editors. "It was a model of ineptness," Hunter recalled. "He did it deliberately, but I didn't know that. They said, 'Read the story and tell the writer why you think it's salable or unsalable.' I said, 'Okay.' It was a dreadful story and I wrote exactly what I thought of it. Told whoever wrote it, 'Burn it,' and told him exactly why."

Then Hunter went back to the lobster place. A few days later, he got a call from the agency, which wanted to interview him. He met the man who was leaving the editor's job. There were, the departing editor explained, two kinds of clients at the Meredith agency: amateurs, who paid fees to get their ma.n.u.scripts critiqued, and professionals. The latter included P. G. Wodehouse, Mickey Spillane, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson. Spillane's almost comically hard-boiled Mike Hammer novels, which had started with I, the Jury, in 1947, were a huge success; Anderson and Clarke were bringing new vitality and sophistication to science fiction; Wodehouse was trying to recover from the scandal of his naive broadcasts from n.a.z.i Germany. Sal would handle the professionals, writing critiques as if they had come from Scott Meredith himself. The pay was forty dollars a week.

"I said to him, 'Why are you leaving the job?' He said, 'I'm selling so much of my own work it doesn't pay to stay here anymore.' Puh-kooo. My ears went up, and I said, 'I'll take it.' "

The Scott Meredith Agency was Evan Hunter's graduate school. "I learned everything there was to know about writing there," he told me. "Not only by reading stories by professional writers but by hearing the comments of editors." Often, he was the middle-man, taking notes from editors and pa.s.sing them on to the writers. He saw that professionals always took advice from editors; only insecure amateurs protested about tr.i.m.m.i.n.g or rewriting. After a few months, Sal Lombino brought in some stories of his own for Meredith's scrutiny. The agent took them home for the weekend.

"On Monday morning he said, 'Can you come in for a minute?' Sure. I went into his office. He said, 'This you should burn. This is no good. This I think I can place. This- if you want to rewrite the thing- we can try it. This, no good. This, burn.' "

Meredith sold a science-fiction story ent.i.tled "Outside in the Sand," about men landing on Mars, to the magazine Science Fiction Quarterly. It paid a quarter cent a word, and, after commissions, the check came to $12.60. Sal Lombino was now a professional writer. And he was learning much from Scott Meredith. "He was a brilliant guy, who hit upon a formula that absolutely defined the successful pulp story," Hunter said. "And in today's world of fiction most of the stuff on the market is pulp stuff. John Grisham is pulp fiction. And Scott defined it perfectly."