Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer best known for mysteries under the pseudonym Ed McBain.
On the island
Eight records
Benny Goodman and His Orchestra
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 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, 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.
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.
I chose this because it is a perfect example of music as uh not only a story, 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.
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 violent music. There's a lot in Messian that sounds like a scream for help. And uh this excites me when I listen to it and and uh I like to hear it again and again.
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.
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.
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30Favourite
Lazar Berman & London Symphony Orchestra
I chose this because especially on a desert island. This to me is continuously exciting. It's a movie of the mind. I can find. Two thousand motion picture plots in it just listening uh to the music unfold.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:45What was your first ambition?
To become an artist. I was an art major in high school. 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.
Presenter asks
3:30When did the writing thing hit you?
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. On a destroyer anyway. 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.
Presenter asks
8:30How was [The Blackboard Jungle] 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.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Evan Hunter
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.
The luxury
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.
How and why did Ed McBain come on the scene?
The uh Blackboard Jungle had already been published. and Pocket Books had brought out the paperback edition. 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. and asked me to have lunch with him. It uh turned out that uh they were uh attempting to groom a new mystery writer to replace uh Earl Stanley Gardner... 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... 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.
Presenter asks
13:59Why do you keep [the city in the 87th Precinct series] 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 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. 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.
“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. 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.”
“I never base any of the stories on real events. Where do they come from? Out of the blue, usually from a title.”
“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.”