“This one, burn,” he said.
“This one...”
Of the dozen or so stories I’d showed him, only “Welcome, Martians” met with his approval. He sold it at once to an editor named Bob Lowndes at a pulp magazine called Science-Fiction Quarterly. I got a quarter of a cent a word for it. Scott took his 10 percent commission.
I was a writer.
And I had an agent.
I left the agency in May of 1953 because — like Stephen Marlowe before me — I had begun selling so many of my own stories that it was unprofitable for me to stay there any longer. “Welcome, Martians” is not included in this collection, nor are any of the other science fiction, adventure, or Western stories I wrote while learning my craft at the agency, or while honing it later on. All of the stories in this collection are crime stories. Of the twenty-five stories represented here, you will find only one that I wrote in 1952. That’s because most of the stories I wrote when I first began working for the agency were as lousy as “Rattlesnake Cave” — though not deliberately so.
Nine of the following stories were published in 1953, six in 1954, five in 1955, two in 1956, and another two in 1957. All but five of them were first published in a detective magazine called Manhunt. None of them appeared under the Ed McBain byline. They were written as either Evan Hunter (which in 1952 became my legal name) or as Richard Marsten (a pseudonym derived from the first names of my three sons, Richard, Mark, and Ted) or as Hunt Collins (from my alma mater). But over, lo, these many years, McBain has become the name most closely associated, with matters criminal — and this collection, after all, is about learning to write crime fiction.
As you will soon discover, in those early years I was trying my hand at every type of crime story. By the time I wrote the first of the 87th Precinct novels, all of the elements were already in place. Here were the kids in trouble and the women in jeopardy, here were the private eyes and the gangs. Here were the loose cannons and the innocent bystanders. And here, too, were the cops and robbers.
Ed McBain made his debut in May of 1956.
By then, I felt I knew how to write a crime story.
Here’s how I learned to do it.
Kids
First Offense
This story first appeared in Manhunt. The editor of the magazine was someone named John McCloud. No one knew who John McCloud was. The poem parody we recited was “I wandered lonely as McCloud.” Well, John McCloud was Scott Meredith. It was very good to be working for the man who was editing the hottest detective magazine of the day; in 1953 alone, fourteen of my stories appeared in Manhunt under the Marsten, Hunter, or Collins bylines. This one was published in 1955, under the Evan Hunter byline, which by that time had been my legal name for almost three years.
He sat in the police van with the collar of his leather jacket turned up, the bright silver studs sharp against the otherwise unrelieved black. He was seventeen years old, and he wore his hair in a high black crown. He carried his head high and erect because he knew he had a good profile, and he carried his mouth like a switch knife, ready to spring open at the slightest provocation. His hands were thrust deep into his jacket pockets, and his gray eyes reflected the walls of the van. There was excitement in his eyes, too, an almost holiday excitement. He tried to tell himself he was in trouble, but he couldn’t quite believe it. His gradual descent to disbelief had been a spiral that had spun dizzily through the range of his emotions. Terror when the cop’s flash had picked him out; blind panic when he’d started to run; rebellion when the cop’s firm hand had closed around the leather sleeve of his jacket; sullen resignation when the cop had thrown him into the RMP car; and then cocky stubbornness when they’d booked him at the local precinct.
The desk sergeant had looked him over curiously, with a strange aloofness in his Irish eyes.
“What’s the matter, Fatty?” he’d asked.
The sergeant stared at him implacably. “Put him away for the night,” the sergeant said.
He’d slept overnight in the precinct cell block, and he’d awakened with this strange excitement pulsing through his narrow body, and it was the excitement that had caused his disbelief. Trouble, hell! He’d been in trouble before, but it had never felt like this. This was different. This was a ball, man. This was like being initiated into a secret society someplace. His contempt for the police had grown when they refused him the opportunity to shave after breakfast. He was only seventeen, but he had a fairly decent beard, and a man should be allowed to shave in the morning, what the hell! But even the beard had somehow lent to the unreality of the situation, made him appear — in his own eyes — somehow more desperate, more sinister-looking. He knew he was in trouble, but the trouble was glamorous, and he surrounded it with the gossamer lie of make-believe. He was living the storybook legend. He was big time now. They’d caught him and booked him, and he should have been scared but he was excited instead.
There was one other person in the van with him, a guy who’d spent the night in the cell block, too. The guy was an obvious bum, and his breath stank of cheap wine, but he was better than nobody to talk to.
“Hey!” he said.
The bum looked up. “You talking to me?”
“Yeah. Where we going?”
“The lineup, kid,” the bum said. “This your first offense?”
“This’s the first time I got caught,” he answered cockily.
“All felonies go to the lineup,” the bum told him. “And also some special types of misdemeanors. You commit a felony?”
“Yeah,” he said, hoping he sounded nonchalant. What’d they have this bum in for anyway? Sleeping on a park bench?
“Well, that’s why you’re goin’ to the lineup. They have guys from every detective squad in the city there, to look you over. So they’ll remember you next time. They put you on a stage, and they read off the offense, and the Chief of Detectives starts firing questions at you. What’s your name, kid?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Don’t get smart, punk, or I’ll break your arm,” the bum said.
He looked at the bum curiously. He was a pretty big guy, with a heavy growth of beard, and powerful shoulders. “My name’s Stevie,” he said.
“I’m Jim Skinner,” the bum said. “When somebody’s trying to give you advice, don’t go hip on him...”
“Yeah, well, what’s your advice?” he asked, not wanting to back down completely.
“When they get you up there, you don’t have to answer anything. They’ll throw questions but you don’t have to answer. Did you make a statement at the scene?”
“No,” he answered.
“Good. Then don’t make no statement now, either. They can’t force you to. Just keep your mouth shut, and don’t tell them nothing.”
“I ain’t afraid. They know all about it anyway,” Stevie said.
The bum shrugged and gathered around him the sullen pearls of his scattered wisdom. Stevie sat in the van whistling, listening to the accompanying hum of the tires, hearing the secret hum of his blood beneath the other louder sound. He sat at the core of a self-imposed importance, basking in its warm glow, whistling contentedly, secretly happy. Beside him, Skinner leaned back against the wall of the van.
When they arrived at the Center Street Headquarters, they put them in detention cells, awaiting the lineup which began at nine. At ten minutes to nine they led him out of his cell, and the cop who’d arrested him originally took him into the special prisoners’ elevator.