Ed McBain

Ed McBain0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy nine, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

On our Desert Island this week is the writer Evan Hunter, who is also another writer, Ed McBain.

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Now, Evan, are you a musical sort of man? I mean, does music mean a lot to you? I used to uh play with a swing band when I was a kid. Did you? I played piano very badly. For money? For money, of course, for money. One doesn't play piano not for money. Um yeah. It was more uh a group of friends who got together. And some of them were good musicians. I was not. But because they liked me, they uh tolerated me in the band. Have you kept it up? Not at all. Not at all. Do you play discs while you're working? Never. When I get home at night, I I play. I work in a uh a studio some hundred yards from our house and uh when I get home at night I put on music and relax, have a drink or two. What was your plan of campaign in choosing just eight records to take to your island?

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Is this nostalgic? Some of them are nostalgic. Some of them are to me literary choices. What do we start with? Benny Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing. Why'd you choose that? It was my earliest introduction to music, I guess, when Benny Goodman did his fabulous Carnegie Hall concert in 1938. I was twelve years old. And this was really my first conscious knowledge of swing and and what was happening around me. I'm sure I'd heard much of it on the radio before then, but suddenly it was exciting to me.

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Benny Goodman's Orchestra at the Carnegie Hall in nineteen thirty eight.

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Now, by which name would you like to be addressed? Evan. Evan, right. Now, neither was the name you were given.

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That's true. My mother's father came from Italy to America and my and both of my father's parents uh came to America from Italy.

Speaker 22:40

Two merit

Speaker 42:40

Yeah.

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And when I was growing up, I grew up in an Italian ghetto in New York City, surrounded by Italian immigrants for the most part, poor Italian immigrants. Obviously, there were no rich Italian immigrants. They stayed in Italy. But this was the Depression time. I was born in 1926, so I was a young boy during the Depression. The height of the Depression in America was 1932. What was your first ambition? To become an artist. I was an art major in high school.

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I then uh got a a um a scholarship to the Arts Students League and then again to Cooper Union, which is a a well known uh art and engineering school in New York. What sort of artist did you want to be? Painter. And uh initially a cartoonist. I was cartoonist for the school paper, but then I wanted to become a serious artist, a painter.

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Now the war was still on, so you went into the United States Navy. What did you do while you were enlisted? I was a radar man aboard a uh destroyer in the Pacific. When did the writing thing hit you?

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I began writing in in the Navy. Uh I used to go next door to the uh radio shack. The radar shack and the radio shack were right next door to each other.

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On a destroyer anyway.

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And um I would go in there and use their typewriter, which had only uh capital letters, no lower case, and type out stories which I would then send to the various magazines. Did you sell anything? Never sold a word.

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What happened when you were immobilized?

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By then I had decided I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed expressing myself more with words than I did with pictures.

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And um

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I went to Hunter College and took every writing course they had to offer. Hunter College, was that where you got your official name from? No, no, that's a myth. A journalist a long time ago said that I got the name from Hunter College, but it's not true. You did well at Hunter. You took a degree? A Bachelor of Arts, yes, and I graduated Phi Beta Kappa. And what happened then? I had also taken as a minor education courses so that I could prepare myself for a teaching license.

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And when I got out of Hunter, I taught briefly for about two months.

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Quit the job because I hated it.

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And I held a series of odd jobs before I began working for a literary agency. I may note here that at one time you were in the wholesale fish business. Uh sort of. I sold lobsters. I sold um lobsters to all the big restaurants in New York that I had uh never been to. But there was no career there. No.

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What happened then?

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I decided that the way to get into publishing was to get a job either with a bookhouse or a magazine publishing company, and I began sending out uh letters to all of them, and finally answered a blind ad in the New York Times that just gave a box number.

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And I answered the ad and I was called uh several days later to come in and take a test, and it turned out to be a literary agency. And I almost turned around and walked away when I got to the front door.

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But the man who was leaving the job sat down with me to interview me, and I said, Why are you leaving the job? and he said, Because I've been earning so much money selling my own stuff.

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And I said, Oh

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And immediately took the job and indeed did begin selling my own stuff. Right. At which point, let's break off your second record.

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That would be uh Stan Kenton's uh artistry jumps.

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And I think it it marks a um a change in my musical taste from swing. And and when I got back uh home after the Navy,

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Stan Kenton became the number one band in America with a a style of music that was much more exciting than swing, more like arranged jazz, and this had a lot of discordant sounds in it and a lot of exciting, throbbing stuff in it that appealed very much to me.

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Stand Canton and his orchestra Artistry Jumps

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So, Evan, you were working in this literary agency and you began to sell your own stuff, right? Yes, I did. What sort of stuff?

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Mysteries, science fiction, westerns.

Presenter7:09

Uh anything. Uh you see, I was in a in a most uh fortunate position. I was dealing with editors every day of the week, and they would call and say, Do you have a uh twenty five hundred word Western?

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And I would say yes.

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And if we didn't have one, I'd go home and write it that night. Under all sorts of names. All different names, yes. When I submitted a story under my own name.

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They would invariably bounce it. They would say, Oh, yeah, that's the editor up at the agency.

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But when I started submitting them under pseudonyms, they bought them. So what you really needed was some capital behind you to give you enough security to write a long piece, a book, or whatever? Well, actually, while I was working at the agency, I did write several novels. I wrote a mystery novel, I wrote several uh science fiction novels, juvenile science fiction novels for the uh age range between twelve and sixteen.

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And um

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Uh I began hitting when the pulps began folding, a series of uh sort of hairy chested men's magazines came out, the precursors to Playboy. They they were not sex oriented, they were adventure oriented.

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and I began uh writing for those.

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And they paid better money.

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And eventually I saved uh three thousand dollars and decided that was enough to take me uh six months uh writing and I left the agency and began writing full time. What?

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I first wrote a mystery novel, and then I wrote a science fiction novel, and then I wrote the Blackboard Jungle.

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That was about your experiences in teaching. Yes.

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And much after the fact, I had taught uh immediately after I was graduated in 1950. And in the summer of 1953, I wrote The Black Bull Jungle. How was it received by the teaching profession? Badly. They didn't like it at all. They they tried to stop publication of the book. They tried to stop release of the film. They sent a delegation to Hollywood. You know, MGM had only invested God knows how much money in it.

Speaker 28:52

Definitely.

Presenter9:00

And they expected them to shelve it, being rather innocent about the ways of big movie moguls. All this did no harm to the sales figures at all, of course. It didn't. There was a big controversy when the book came out. And in America, I don't know how it is here in in England, but in America, when controversy surrounds any subject, it automatically uh attracts attention. Just the same here. Yeah.

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So the writing career of Evan Hunter was set forth.

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It was, indeed, and and it had happened rather quickly, uh considering I really didn't suffer that that long in a garret.

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I was graduated in 1950 and the Blackboard Jungle was published in October of 1954. So it was a relatively short time and it was a big success. Fine.

Speaker 29:32

Right.

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Another record, number three now.

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This is Stravinsky's Rites of Spring. I came late to classical music. We didn't listen to classical music in the slums too much. And this particular record seemed to me a continuation in classical music of what my popular musical tastes had become. And perhaps that's why it it so attracted me.

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Igor Stravinsky conducting his own The Rite of Spring.

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So Evan Hunter was busy and doing all right.

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Is there any one major characteristic of the Evan Hunter books?

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I think I deal uh largely with uh social themes in them, social themes as they apply to America at any rate. Um The Blackboard Jungle was about uh the school system, uh Second Ending was about drug addiction, and was written in nineteen fifty six when uh drug addiction was not as prevalent as it is today.

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Yeah.

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Strangers When We Meet was about uh extramarital love and on and on. And uh the most recent novel, uh Streets of Gold, was about the collapse of the American dream. The uh

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The dissolution of the melting pot theory, its failure.

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Now how and and why did Ed McBain come on the scene?

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This was in 1955, I guess. The the first of them was published in 1956, so this must have been 1955 or thereabouts.

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The uh Blackboard Jungle had already been published.

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and Pocket Books had brought out the paperback edition.

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And uh we sent them a novel that I had written under a pseudonym, a mystery novel, and the editor at uh Pocketbooks Inc. recognized the style of writing and called my agent and said, Is this our friend Evan Hunter? and then said, I didn't know he wrote mysteries.

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and asked me to have lunch with him.

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It uh turned out that uh they were uh attempting to groom a new mystery writer to replace uh Earl Stanley Gardner, who was becoming rather old and and who had sold a great many copies of books for them.

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He asked me if I had any notion for a series character, and I came up with with the idea of a a police squadron being a conglomerate hero.

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He liked the idea very much, and they gave me a contract for three books, just to see what would happen.

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I decided at that time that I would use a pseudonym on the Mysteries because I wanted to reserve the Evan Hunter name for what I considered to be more serious work.

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Um th there there is, you know, a lingering prejudice against um mystery writers in America. They're they're sort of considered stepchildren of of the more quote literary unquote writers. How did you pick on Ed McBain? Has that got any credit? That that came out of the blue, it really did. And I liked the name and it and it sort of had a good ring to it and I put it on the first novel.

Speaker 213:09

Consider

Speaker 213:16

That's

Presenter13:23

Yes, you talk about a conglomerate character, as it were. In fact, there is a group here, the squad of detectives of the 87th Police Precinct, who more or less take it in turns. The members of the squad more or less take it in turns to be leading men in successive books. At least in the beginning it was that way. Corella has now stepped more into the spotlight, but it it wasn't intended that way, and it was intended that each would step into the spotlight in subsequent books, and another would fall back into the shadows. Now these are stories of the 87th Police Precinct in an imaginary city.

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which seems pretty close to New York. Why do you keep this a secret? It was done for very realistic reasons to begin with. Uh when I began researching uh the series before I started it, I recognized that the police in New York changed their uh

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routines as often as they change their underwear. And I didn't want to be saddled with a real police department with whom I would have to check every ten seconds while writing a book.

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So I made it a mythical city, but it also gives me room for my imagination to wander and and invent curious geographical peculiarities and historical facts that do not exist. All the procedural detail is is very convincing. You've obviously spent a lot of time with the police. I spent a lot of time with the police before I began the series, and I spend a lot of time with them now in sort of refresher courses, if you will. I ride with them, I go with them on the beat, and I keep up with what they're actually coping with.

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Record number four.

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Uh yes, that would be Ode to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. And uh I chose this because it is a perfect example of music as uh not only a story,

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But a mystery story. A as the record progresses it becomes more and more ominous as we begin to recognize just what did happen on the Tallahatchie Bridge.

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Was the third of June another sleepy dusty delta day?

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I was out chopping cotton and my brother was balin hay

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And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat.

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Bobby Gentry Owed to Billy Joe.

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Where do you find your basic crime ideas? News clippings? No, no, never. I never base any of the stories on real events. Where do they come from?

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Out of the blue, usually from a title.

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Um, Long Time No See, for example, struck me as a good title, a nice catchphrase that everyone always uses. And once I had the title, I figured, well, who ought to be the victims? And obviously they have to be blind people.

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And then I like the other resonance of it, uh, resonances of the title.

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Long time no C, so it has to be something, a crime that has its motive rooted in the distant past, a long time ago. Long time, no C. It takes Corella and the other men in the squad a long time to figure out what's going on. And when I wrote that book, it was at the time the longest 87 Precinct novel that I had ever written. So it all seemed to work of a piece. It all ties together. Yes. Now, obviously, the Evan Hunter books take a long time. How quickly can you knock off an Eight McBain? Do you do it at more or less white heat, because that's the kind of impression one gets reading it.

Speaker 416:42

I'm a

Presenter16:55

Well, I'm glad they do, but it it normally takes about a month and a half to do the first draft.

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And then another few weeks, uh, revising and tightening and trying to catch the errors and and all that. How many McBain books have there been now?

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I think uh thirty two or three and and there's one in the oven now.

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You also write children's stories.

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I've written a few of them, yeah. I I did uh one with my sons from a former marriage, uh which they illustrated, and they won a prize, as a matter of fact. The book didn't win a prize, but the illustrations did. Great. Record number five.

Speaker 417:26

Mm-hmm.

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That would be Messiah's ascension.

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And again, I I I think you may be beginning to detect a taste in my uh at least in my classical uh music selections for um rather discordant, strident

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Violent music. There's a lot in Messian that sounds like a scream for help.

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And uh this excites me when I listen to it and and uh

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I like to hear it again and again.

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The closing passage of Messayan's L'Assancience

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The Prayer of Jesus to God His Father.

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Now you like writing for the visual media. You you've written a number of stage plays.

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I wrote uh two stage plays, one of which was uh first performed uh here in uh Birmingham, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre had its uh premiere in England. Did it come to London? Came to London, failed in London, was a huge success in Birmingham.

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uh failed in London and then went to New York and was a failure there. So I think the Birmingham people are people of excellent taste. Obviously. And the film scripts. Did you write the screenplay for Blackboard Jungle? No, uh Richard Brooks did, who also directed it. He writes all his own screenplays. I wrote the screenplay for um

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Uh one of my novels called Strangers When We Meet. That's another Evan Hunter novel. Yes, I wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and I wrote the screenplay for one of the McBain novels, Fuzz. I believe you also worked for Hitchcock on Marney, but that that didn't work out. I worked uh through the first draft and then we had an artistic disagreement about a particular scene in the movie.

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And I wanted to do it one way and uh Hitch wanted to do it another way and uh

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A hitch prevailed.

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Another record. This uh will be uh Tony Bennett's uh When Joanna Loved Me.

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And I chose this it's a somewhat adolescent choice, I guess, but for me it sums up uh every girl or woman I've ever fallen in love with and then fallen out of love with or vice versa.

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When Joanna loved me

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Every town was Paris.

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Every day was Sunday.

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Every month was made

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Tony Bennett When Joanna Love Me

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What are your writing habits, Evan? Do you do you work regular hours? Yes, I start about 8:30 or 9 o'clock in the morning.

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And I break for lunch at my desk. I usually have a sandwich and a bottle of beer.

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at about uh one o'clock.

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And then I work straight through to five, five thirty, sometimes six o'clock. How much of the year is spent like that? I would say perhaps two months of the year are spent in vacations and the rest of the year I'm working. You said you you go a hundred yards to work every day? About that. Long commute. Yes. You live in in an old sawmill, I believe. Eighteenth century.

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Yes. Used to be a sawmill during the Revolution. It was converted into a house in 1910, and when my wife and I moved into it, we.

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sort of reconverted it again and modernized it, electrified it. When we first moved in, you had to walk to the center of the room to pull a a a chain to get a light on, no light switches on the walls and uh

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But it's a lovely house right on the river where the logs used to come down and where they used to be sewn into lumber in what is now the basement. How far outside New York? About fifty minutes.

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We got to

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Number seven. Number seven is a song called Something by the Beatles. Before my wife and I were married six years ago, I gave her one Christmas Abbey Road, which I felt at the time was the Beatles at their peak, the very top of their performance and creativity. I'll never forgive them for breaking up, ever, ever, ever. And we both loved the song Something and sort of latched onto it as our theme song. And for me, it represents our continuing love affair.

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Something in the way

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She moves.

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Attracts me like no other lover

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Something in the way she wooes me

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Something by the Beatles

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Now, as an ex-Navy man, you should be pretty good at looking after yourself. Do you remember any survival drill? None. I never expect to be on a destroyer again in my life. And the several times we've been on boats, my wife and I have expert sailors with us, and they will tell me when to put on the life jackets, which I hope will be never. You have no expert sailors on this island. You're on your own.

Speaker 223:21

And if you like hope.

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Could you rig up some kind of shelter? Are you good with your hands? Oh, I'm awful. I uh if I go to hammer two pieces of wood together they come out crooked. Uh uh that's worrying. What are you going to eat? Whatever fruit is around, and mangoes and papaya. Would you try to escape? Try to get off it? Of course.

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Well I would

Speaker 223:46

Uh

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How? I I probably would um try to devise a raft of some sort. But I don't intend to stay on this island the rest of my life. There are too many exciting things happening elsewhere. Last record.

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Milks

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The last is Rachmaninoff's piano concerto number three in D minor opus thirty. And I chose this because

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Especially on a desert island. This to me is continuously exciting. It's a movie of the mind. I can find.

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Two thousand motion picture plots in it just listening uh to the music unfold.

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Part of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. three, Lazar Behrmann with the London Symphony Orchestra.

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If you could take just one disc and not eight, which would it be? Uh the Rekmaninov. And one luxury.

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I'm assuming I cannot take my wife. I'm assuming also that you cannot take your wife. No, we we have this in the rule. And luxury must be inanimate.

Ed McBain25:44

We have this on the road.

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I think in lieu of my wife I would take a very good bottle of whiskey and I would dole it out very sparingly over the months and perhaps years that I'd be on the island.

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And one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we don't approve of big encyclopedias. This will sound very immodest.

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But I think I would take my own novel, Streets of Gold. It's largely autobiographical. I think I was writing very well in 1975, and it summed up for me, at that time of my life anyway, when I was approaching 50, all the things I knew and had learned, and by then that I was capable of expressing. Streets of Gold by Evan Hunter. And thank you, Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Ed McBain26:54

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.