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The snap and crackle of Ed McBain's dialogue is unforgettable and uplifting. In the 87th Precinct series, which stretches to more than 50 books, he creates a sound world that is beguiling, arresting and warm. The roughness and the darkness of the streets is made flesh in the characters inhabiting the squad room behind the green globes that glow above the steps.

Through that door, to the desk where Sgt Murchison stands guard, come the innocent and the weird and the guilty, and when you get to know Detective Steve Carella, with his strangely slanting eyes, and all the boys - Cotton Hawes with his flash of white hair, the bald Meyer Meyer, the priapic Bert Kling and the rest - you're at home, too, with a city (“she sleeps like a woman”, he often writes) where the most melodramatic things happen in the most prosaic surroundings. The plots are never complicated but they are humdrum life turned into high drama.

He was born in New York as Salvatore Lambino, then became Evan Hunter (author of The Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds) and, in the end, took the pen-name McBain. In the course of that journey he distilled a style that echoes Chandler and has kinship with Elmore Leonard but is absolutely his own. There are many Hunter novels, but McBain's 87th Precinct is his home territory, and the origin of what has become the “police procedural”.McBain is concise. He is also wise and humane. The New York that he turns into Isola (“the island”) attracts him and brings him close to despair as the years go by. When there's a body in a doorway and an awful secret to be uncovered, no one takes you through these streets with more understanding, and more comprehension of the thrill of discovery, than McBain. A master.

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Background

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Related Internet Links

• Top 50 Crime Writers - Main Page

One to read: Ice (1983)

James Naughtie is a radio presenter and journalist. His book about Blair and Brown inspired the TV drama The Deal

Audio: Ed McBain on BBC Radio 4

Video: McBain talks about writing dialogue

Ed McBain’s obituary

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