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hunter_streetsofgoldLet’s talk about names.

He was born Salvatore Albert Lombino, and his first sale was a science fiction story bylined S. A. Lombino. His employer, whose name at birth was a far cry from Scott Meredith, convinced him that an Italian name was an impediment to success, and Evan Hunter was born out of his high school (Evander Childs) and college (Hunter). There were other pen names during those pulp years—Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten—but Evan Hunter was first among them, and he hadn’t been using it long before he went to court and made it official.

When I worked at Scott Meredith, the receptionist, an Englishwoman named Joan, still called him Sal. “It’s Sal on line one,” she’d inform Scott. And at his memorial service half a century later, a sister of Evan’s indicated that he was still Sal to her.

Everybody else called him Evan. It annoyed him that some people felt he was sailing under false colors, or ashamed of his Italian heritage. His enduring series character was Steve Carella, and Evan wrote about him with great success for 50 years. Evan’s early years were spent in Italian East Harlem, and he used that background in one of his finest novels, Streets of Gold, narrated by a blind Italian-American jazz pianist. He was open enough about who he was, but he felt that one’s name was a matter of choice. You could keep the one you were born with or pick one that better suited you, as you preferred.

When Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels outperformed Evan Hunter in the marketplace, Evan found himself addressed as Ed by fans and interviewers. He didn’t mind. But he knew who he was. He was Evan Hunter.

Before he started writing, Evan thought he’d be an artist. He was good enough at it to win an Art Students League scholarship and to be admitted to Cooper Union. He started writing stories during his World War II naval service, and was to say that as an artist he had seen everything in a frame, and later came to see everything with a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

The job with Scott Meredith made him a writer, but it’s hard to believe he ever considered doing anything else. Evan loved to write, and it was something he could do rapidly and well. He turned out an extraordinary volume of work, and never lost his enthusiasm for it.

In his mid-'70s, after a couple of heart attacks, an aneurysm, and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his larynx, Evan did something that sums up the man. He decided that what the reading public most wanted was books about women in jeopardy, so he sat down and, as Ed McBain, wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on Becca in Jeopardy, with every intention of working his way through the alphabet.

hunter_thejunglekidsDon’t you love it? Here’s a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and he’s perfectly comfortable launching a 26-book series.

The Dean Hudson novels give further evidence of Evan’s enthusiasm for the task of stringing words together.

In the late ’50s, the genre of soft-core erotica was born, and a number of us found it to be a well-paying apprenticeship, and a very forgiving medium in which to find oneself as a writer. Along with Don Westlake and Robert Silverberg, I became a steady producer of pseudonymous books. (We called them sex novels; today’s term seems to be erotica, and I must say I like that better; I feel like Moliere’s character who is startled and rather pleased to discover that all his life he’s been speaking prose. Damn! I’ve been writing erotica!)

The foremost publisher of this erotica was Bill Hamling, whose imprints included Nightstand Books and Midnight Reader, and Scott Meredith had an exclusive deal to feed Hamling a steady supply of manuscripts. (Scott got 10 percent of what his writers were paid, of course, and we’ve since learned he also got a packaging fee of $1,000 a book. So when I wrote a book for $1,000, I received $900 and my agent pocketed $1,100. What a guy!)

By this time Evan was a bestselling author with an estate in Pound Ridge, up in Westchester County. He was writing about Carella and the guys in the Eight-Seven, and he was writing mainstream fiction as Evan Hunter, but he had time on his hands. He told Scott he could certainly spare a few days each month to knock out a book for Hamling.

And the extra dough would come in handy, because no one but Scott would know he was writing the books, and Scott would pay the money into a special account, which Evan could then use to pay the expenses of the girlfriend his then-wife didn’t know about.

Thus Dean Hudson, a pen name not too hard to decipher; Evan lived on or near the Hudson River, and was certainly entitled to see himself as the dean of Hamling’s faculty of eroticists. I don’t know how many books he wrote as Dean Hudson; somewhere along the way he tired of the sport, or perhaps broke up with the mistress, and Scott, never one to let go of a good thing, found some young hopeful to ghost Dean Hudson books, even as Don and I enlisted various up-and-comers (or down-and-outers) to write under the banners of Andrew Shaw and Alan Marshall.

Evan always refused to acknowledge that he’d written as Dean Hudson. He insisted, to interviewers and on his website, that he’d had nothing to do with the books. I don’t know what he might have said privately because the subject never came up between us.

While Evan hit the bestseller list a couple of time, it frustrated him that he didn’t sell better. Men and women who couldn’t write their names in the dirt with a stick were hitting the list all the time, and he wasn’t, and he couldn’t understand why. Once he and Don Westlake were on a plane together, lamenting the fact that neither of them was writing the sort of book that had a real shot at bestsellerdom. They agreed that each would make a special effort to come up with a genuinely commercial idea, and before the plane landed Don told Evan triumphantly that he’d done the trick.

The perfect can’t-miss idea had come to him.

The idea? The narrator’s an angel, sent to earth on a mission. Don wrote the book, called it Humans, and three or four people went out and actually bought it.

So much to say, so little space. Tune in next issue for the rest of the story...

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #118.