Category: Literature

I’ve been reading Douglas Adams’s book The Salmon Of Doubt (Amazon.com), in which he’s pretty effusive about his passion for technology. That’s got me jazzed about tecnology, too, so I’m writing this entry on my Palm. My only problem with this little gadget is that its Wi-Fi is shot, which renders it a lot less cool than it was. Getting it fixed sounds like the obvius solution — but that means being without my calendar and contacts for however long the repair takes. In a job like mine, that’s like being without my brain. Maybe a better way to say that is that with a brain like mine, losing this little zappy is like giving myself a lobotomy.

I really love Douglas Adams. When I was in high school — or maybe junior high — in the 80’s, I discovered the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. Around that same time, my friend Steve Davis leant me a cassette tape of the HHGTTG radio series. In fact, this series of tapes has now become like the Holy Grail. The history of HHGTTG in all its forms is hard to trace — from radio to books to LPs to TV to CDs to a movie to radio again. Or something like that. Anyway, somewhere in there they re-recorded the radio series. I think they did that to switch some bits so’d they’d be more like the book. I’m still not sure whether they redid the whole serires or just parts of it, but I think that first version I heard on cassette as a teenager is still the funniest version. I guess there’s nothing for it but to check on eBay. Maybe that’s an appropriately futuristic way to find something by Douglas Adams.

Jen and I are both big fans of the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain, a.k.a. Evan Hunter, a.k.a. Salvatore Lombino. I read today that he passed away on July 6. Here’s Adam B. Very’s remembrance from Entertainment Weekly:

Without Evan Hunter, a.k.a. Ed McBain, there would probably be no Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, or Law & Order. The prolific novelist, who died of cancer July 6 at 78, essentially invented the American police procedural with a single pulp paperback.

The book was 1956’s Cop Hater, and it marked a decisive turn in a varied career. Hunter, born Salvatore Lombino in New York City (he changed his name to avoid discrimination), had staked his first literary claim two years earlier with his semiautobiographical The Blackboard Jungle, a look at the life of an inner-city high school teacher. It was made into a popular 1955 film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier.

When he penned Cop Hater, Hunter invented the McBain pseudonym to protect his reputation as a serious novelist. But it turned out to be the book that established his legacy in pop storytelling. Set in a fictitious big city, the crime story eschewed the lone PI hero that had long defined the genre and instead meticulously chronicled an entire precinct’s pursuit of a murder case. The book was a big enough success to yield 54 follow-ups over the next 50 years, the best of which were crafted with unpretentious, unflinching authority. (The final installment, Fiddlers, is due in September.) And the author amusingly nodded to his alter ego’s fame by having the two ”coauthor” the 2001 novel Candyland.

For all his influence on other crime novelists and his movie legacy (which included the screenplay for The Birds), Hunter may have made his most lasting impact on TV. ”He established so many conventions that came to be gospel,” says NYPD Blue cocreator David Milch. ”If someone came to me and asked how to write a police procedural and they hadn’t already read Ed McBain, I’d tell them to take a hike.”

© 2005 Entertainment Weekly