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Learning to Kill: Stories

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Just before his sad death last year, Ed McBain oversaw the compilation of twenty-five of his earliest stories. This collection, Learning to Kill, has just been published, and it's a wonderful look back at (so my wife says) one of the best crime writers ever. Yes, that's right. I've never read an Ed McBain book before, so I probably didn't get as much out of this book as true fans would have, but even I can see the seeds to what became a brilliant career in these stories. All of these stories were published between 1952 and 1957, and they run the gamut from private detectives (a genre he swiftly removed himself from because he felt that only cops should be investigating murders) to "loose cannons" to the general cops and robbers that eventually became his bread and butter. One thing I can definitely say about this book is that it has increased my desire to read some of his 87th Precinct novels.

Learning to Kill starts out with a wonderful introduction, where McBain details the history of his start in the writing business: responding to a blind ad in the New York Times for an editor that turned out to be from a literary agency. He almost turned it down when he discovered it was an agency, but quickly changed his mind when he found out why the person he was replacing was leaving. It turns out that he was making too much money writing his own stories to make staying in that position worth it. McBain jumped at the chance, and the rest is history. Once he was established, he began submitting his own work as well as handling other clients, and many of these stories are published in this book. The book is appropriately named as he was literally learning and honing his craft here. Along with the introduction to the book, I found the previews of the stories very interesting too, as he tells where the story was published (mostly in "Manhunt" magazine, but there are a few others) and gives some background on it. This background, written fifty years after the fact, is definitely intriguing.

The meat of the book, however, is the stories, and there are definitely some good ones here. The book is divided into subject sections: Kids, Women in Jeopardy, Private Eyes, Cops and Robbers, Innocent Bystanders, Loose Cannons, and Gangs. Most impressive to me were the ones dealing with cops, as that seems to be where he's most comfortable (as fifty years of 87th Precinct novels can attest). Each of these was written with ease and just flew off the page. I really found it interesting that he said he didn't do research because he wasn't getting paid enough for each story to do much research. All of his police procedures were taken from Dragnet and other outside sources. None of the stories in this section have any real twists and turns, instead being straight police procedurals where the cops do the digging and eventually find the killer. While they're not complex, I found the simplicity refreshing.

There are other standout stories in the collection too, however. Most powerful (though unfortunately, a bit clichéd) is the last story in the book, in the "Gangs" section. It's called "The Last Spin," and details two kids in rival gangs who have agreed to sort out the gangs' differences by playing a game of Russian Roulette. In the process of the game, they get to know each other. The ending is inevitable, but I found the power in this story in the relationship that develops between these two kids. The writing is evocative, and while the ending is a foregone conclusion, that almost adds to the tragedy in the story. Another strong story is the other gang story, "On the Sidewalk, Bleeding." A young gang member lies bleeding in an alleyway, another victim in ongoing rivalry between the two gangs. At first, he doesn't believe he's dying, just in pain, and he wishes that somebody would just come to help him. As he lies there, a few people do stumble upon him, but for one reason or another, are unable (or unwilling) to help him, so he just lies there reflecting. He comes to a revelation, but the end of the story (I won't tell you if he lives or dies) makes that revelation moot, instead demonstrating that things will stay the same on the streets. Again, the writing is gripping and even though nothing "happens" (it's just a boy lying bleeding on the street), the tale of this kid's life, his dreams, and his desire to become more than just a "color" keeps the reader going.

I do have to say there were some stories in here that I actively disliked, but I think it's telling that it seems he never really went back to the genre. All of these stories are in the "Loose Cannons" section, and all of them are about seriously disturbed men who end up killing somebody because of their psychoses. I didn't find any of the subjects (I can't really say "protagonists") interesting and they were slightly disturbing. Since I don't really go for those kinds of stories, there was nothing really in this section to grab me.

Other than those stories, though, every one of the stories in Learning to Kill had at least some interest in it. Some were not as well-written as others, but all of them held my attention and the combination of them made me almost race through the book. It was interesting to take a look back at crime writing from the 1950s, especially when he made reference to "the war." In this day of CSI and its spin-off television shows, I was intrigued by the way the lab was handled in these stories. It was a different age, and these stories reflect that. Learning to Kill is a fascinating look at a developing author.

David Roy

Long before Quentin Tarantino popularized the term, there once was a real world of "pulp fiction." For the first half of the 20th century, magazines printed on cheap "pulp" paper with names like Black Mask, Manhunt and Argosy thrilled readers with lurid covers and often equally lurid tales of crime and violence, among other illicit subjects. The pulps were what businessmen read to relax on trips and teenage boys read with flashlights late at night in their rooms.

The pulps didn't pay much to writers, only pennies per word --- some things never change --- and most highbrow literary types considered these writers "hacks." Some were. But the best pulp writers created the modern American mystery novel, hard-boiled crime fiction and film noir. They became literary greats like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and Ed McBain.

McBain, best known as the author of the 87th Precinct police procedurals, died in July 2005. But one of his last works was to put together LEARNING TO KILL, an anthology of 25 short stories he wrote between 1952 and 1957. These stories give not only a glimpse into the long-lost world of the pulps, but also show the emergence of a great writer learning his craft.

For anyone who has ever enjoyed an 87th Precinct novel, this is essential reading. The stories were carefully selected by McBain and organized into seven mystery genres. As an added bonus, McBain wrote an introduction to each story that, unfortunately for his millions of fans, will have to serve as a memoir. The stories and commentary make this book an enjoyable, entertaining read.

Like in a great noir film, things were never quite what they seemed in the world of the pulps. For instance, when the stories in LEARNING TO KILL were originally published, Ed McBain was not credited as the author of any of them. They were written under two pen names and the name Evan Hunter, which in 1952 became the legal name of the fellow who grew up as Salvatore Lombino in East Harlem, New York.

Indeed, we learn here that nom de plum McBain was not even created until 1956. About a decade ago, I interviewed McBain and asked him why he had so many names. He told me, "When I was writing for the pulps, I used a lot of different names because I wanted to sell as much as I could."

From 1952 to 1953, he was making $40 a week working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. If a pulp wanted a 2,000-word western or mystery or science fiction story, and the agency didn't have anything like that written by a client, McBain would go home that night, write the story himself and put another name on it.

For pennies a word, a writer had to be creative. In those days, before television killed the pulps and short stories in general, a writer could learn his craft in these magazines. And we see many examples of this in LEARNING TO KILL. McBain tells us early on that the collection "is about learning to write crime fiction."

Twenty of these stories were printed in Manhunt, which McBain described as the "hottest detective magazine of the day." And one thing that Manhunt did was not just go in for the titillation and plot twists common to the genre; they also emphasized the development of character in stories.

And this is evident in McBain's early work, a clear precursor to what will follow in the 87th Precinct series. There are stories about Kids and Women in Trouble. We find stories about Innocent Bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time along with chilling tales of Loose Cannon psychopaths. There is a story featuring a deaf mute girl who eventually will be reincarnated in the 87th series as the beloved Teddy Carella, wife of lead cop Steve Carella.

All the elements are present in these stories. "The Big Day" is a perfectly planned heist-gone-wrong story, which will be repeated and expanded upon in the five deaf man novels of the 87th series. There are three fascinating Private Eye stories included here, as we see McBain struggling with that genre before reaching the conclusion that "cops were the only people who have any right to be sticking their noses in murder investigations."

In "Kiss Me, Dudley" McBain imitates an over-the-top Mickey Spillane story. As McBain wisely notes, "When you start writing parodies of private eye stories, it's time to stop writing them." And he did, fortunately for us.

This collection also contains three of his first cop stories. He acknowledges "that I knew nothing about cops or police routine except what I had learned from "Dragnet" on radio and television." That would change soon enough. He started work on the first 87th Precinct in 1955 and published the last one, FIDDLERS, in 2005.

McBain was always an excellent recorder of the times he wrote about, and that is evident here as well. We meet 1950s gang bangers with their studded leather jackets and slicked back hair, using words like "dig" and "dad."

But there is something else here. Hunter/McBain was not just a "pulp" writer; he was a serious "literary" author as well. While writing these "pulp" stories, Hunter published a novel in 1953 called THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. He had left the literary agency by then. I was amazed when he told me in 1996 that he had just $300 left in his bank account when he sold 90 pages of that book.

Even in the 1950s, the life of a writer could be a precarious one, economically, especially when Manhunt was paying, he tells us in Learning, "two or three cents a word."

But somehow, great writing prevails. There are two stories that close this collection --- "On the Sidewalk, Bleeding" and "The Last Spin --- that transcend the world of the pulps altogether and become examples of great American writing. When McBain writes from the point of view of a 16-year-old gang member bleeding to death alone in the pouring rain in an alley, the writing is as powerful and eloquent and beautiful as any short story ever written in American literature. These last two stories are heartbreaking.

"I told myself, I am going to write these well," he said during our interview about those early days. "That's going to be the first thing." This collection proves that he certainly did that and more.

In the afterword to LEARNING TO KILL, written in December 2004, McBain says a simple goodbye: "From the first offense to the last spin, it was a remarkable journey. Thank you for sharing it with me all over."

The world of the pulps might be gone and so is Ed McBain. But his work, as demonstrated in LEARNING TO KILL, will live on and be read for generations. For that, we should be thanking him.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

Ed McBain was one of those writers who must have never slept. Writing under four separate pseudonyms, he produced more than a hundred novels in a span of less than fifty years. His contributions to crime fiction are legion. He is credited with being the creator and undisputed master of the police procedural novel, as exemplified by his 87th precinct series. His writing style was spare and effective. Only slightly wordier than Papa Hemingway, his work inspired numerous writers including Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy.

His career began in the mid 1950s, almost by a fluke, when he responded to an ad for a low-paying copy editor position in New York City. The job fell into his lap, and pretty soon he found himself writing short stories, as well as checking facts and correcting typos. His stories resonated with the same tone that Raymond Chandler had perfected, and he was able to crank them out at will. They were gritty and pulpish, peopled with ruffians, lowlifes and cheap gumshoes. Set in the abandoned warehouses and run-down tenement neighborhoods of the lower west side, the material was drawn from McBain's own experiences as the son of first-generation Eastern European immigrants.

Shortly before his death in 2005, the author sat down with his publishers at Harcourt and compiled this collection of early stories dating back to the 1950s. These writings represent his early attempts at crime fiction, hence the title of the collection. There are 25 stories here, every one written in his fast-paced and edgy style. The stories are divided into sections based on character types. There are tales about juvenile delinquents, femme fatales, private eyes, precinct detectives, innocent bystanders, the mentally imbalanced, gangsters and so on. The action moves quickly, and the dialogue is snappy and filled with countless ironies. In one story a young punk celebrates his first arrest, only to discover that he's accidentally killed his victim. In another, numerous passersby refuse to give aid to a stabbing victim because he's wearing a gang jacket. He must have had it coming, they figure.

There are hardly any good guys here, at all. Sometimes the protagonist is only barely likeable, and that's only because he's not as bad as everyone else around him. These are not tales of good versus evil; they are stories about the pretty bad going up against the downright ugly. There's a kind of emptiness in them, too, a sadness about the depravity that sometimes obscures the human condition. These poor characters have resigned themselves to life on the streets, doing what they do because it's the only thing they know.

McBain does not glorify crime, or even make it seem exciting. Instead, he reveals it as the ugly thing it is. The brutality here is mundane, the kind that police officers shrug off as inconsequential. "What does it matter if one more hoodlum ends up on a stretcher," one character asks? These are stories about muggings and knifings, gang brawls and the like. If its glamour you seek, you won't find it on these pages. What you will find, though, is real literature masquerading as penny fiction. You will find a maturing writer exploring the seedy and tawdry underworld around him, trying to humanize the very thing he deplores. This is social commentary without the preachiness, art without the niceties. It's easy reading that purposefully disguises the genius behind it. Why McBain moved away from the short story isn't fully clear. What is clear, however, is that this collection is a raw masterpiece, one that you aren't likely to forget anytime soon.

The late Evan Hunter (1926-2005) wrote some books under his legal name, many under the name Ed McBain, and still others under other pseudonyms. The Ed McBain police procedurals, his 87th Precinct novels, were and still are best sellers that are beloved by his fans. This volume was written before but published after his death. It contains a seven page introduction by McBain in which he tells the history of the 25 excellent short stories collected in this volume. All of them were written between 1952 and 1957. The stories are introduced by McBain saying something about them, such as how the story later developed into a novel. The book ends with an afterword where McBain relates more about his writing history and a bibliography giving the date, publication, and pseudonym used for each of the 25 tales.
In short, Ed McBain fans will gain two things from reading this book. They will read fascinating crime stories and will see how their hero developed his masterful writing style.

This is a collection of 25 short stories by the author, written under different pen names, and originally appearing in various magazines. They still hold your interest, years later, as most have no particular time stamp. The stories are separated into seven groups and can be read in almost any order. They make interesting light reading when you are between novels. The cost is low, so you get good value for your money.

The collection Learning to Kill offers a selection of Ed McBain's short stories,
all published in the period 1952-1957, the years that saw the launch of his literary
career; as the jacket notes proclaim, between the book's covers are to be found
stories written by Ed McBain before he was Ed McBain, stories that first appeared
under either his legally adopted name of Evan Hunter or a variety of noms-de-
plumes. Granted that the selected stories are representative of Mr McBain early
work they afford the reader a chance to look over his shoulder as he masters his
craft.

Most of the stories in this collection first saw publication in Manhunt, one of the
last of the pulp magazines (the pulps, alas, were a dying breed by the time Mr
McBain began his writing career in the early 1950's); many were written while
the author earned his living working for a literary agency as a reader of unsolicited
manuscripts (In an author's introduction he credits his stint of employment at this
agency for providing him with an entry into the publishing world, opening the way
for his own career).

The stories collected in Learning to Kill are arranged, according to their thematic
content, into separate sections, under headings such as "Private Eyes", "Cops and
Robbers", "Innocent Bystanders", and "Gangs".

Among the most memorable stories in the collection are those gathered under the
headings "Kids" and "Gangs", affecting tales of youths who, though barely in their
teens, are already trapped by the mean streets into lives of crime from which there
is no real hope of escape.

Two stories in this vein are especially noteworthy, "On the Sidewalk, Bleeding"
and "The Last Spin", a pair of stories about youngsters who lose their lives to
the violence engendered by the pointless rivalries and turf wars of neighborhood
street gangs.

In "On the Sidewalk, Bleeding" a sixteen year old boy belonging to a street gang
lies in the shadowed recesses of an alleyway, hidden from the view of passers by,
rain drenched and mortally wounded; ambushed and stabbed by a member of a
rival gang, he has been left to die on the cold pavement, alone. Sensing it ebbing
away from him, he grieves the loss of a life he has been robbed of the chance to
live, a life casually stolen from him by someone who knew (and cared for) nothing
about him other than his gang affiliation

In the poignant "The Last Spin" two boys belonging to rival gangs form all too brief
a friendship in the short time it takes for the pair of them to play out a deadly game
of Russian Roulette (a game set up to settle a turf war in a 'civilized' fashion); the
youths, who otherwise could have met only as enemies, discover a greater affinity
for one another than either one ever felt for the confraternity of his gang .

To judge from the stories gathered under the heading "Private Eyes", I have the
sense that Mr McBain couldn't really put his heart into his private eye stories; still,
though written in large part before he had found his true literary calling (more on
that momentarily), they have as much craft invested in them as all the others in the
collection and offer perfectly good entertainment value for the money.

In two of the private eye stories included here Mr McBain allows himself a little
fun playing with the cliches of the genre; one story, "Kiss Me, Dudely" is an out
and out parody (hopefully Mikey Spillaine could take a joke) and "Good and Dead",
a story that otherwise plays things pretty straight, features Matt Cordell, a former
gumshoe who has become a lovelorn wino, driven to the bottle by the infidelity of
the woman he loves, surely a character lampooning all those tough guy P.I.'s who
always keep a bottle of whiskey in their desk drawer, right next to the Smith &
Wesson, and who have no use for two-timing dames. (Only one of the Matt Cordell
stories is included in Learning to Kill but, for anyone wanting more of him, he is
also the protagonist of a full length novel, The Gutter and the Grave, that has been
reissued by Hard Case Crime.)

In a brief introductory note to one of the private eye stories ("Death Flight"), and
through the voice of its first person narrator as well, Mr McBain expresses his belief
that murder investigations are a matter private detectives have no business meddling
in but should rather be left to the police; such a basic discomfort with the private eye
genre led him, early on in his career, to abandon it entirely and turn instead to writing
stories about cops and the milieu they work in.

The cop stories included in Learning to Kill have a bare-bones, slightly formulaic
aspect to them; each centers on a pair of police detectives, following their actions
as they investigate and eventually solve a crime; only as much of the human side of
these men is shown as comes out in the context of their professional activities; in
fact, the police duos featured in these stories are almost pairs of archetypes, virtually
interchangeable with one another.

The bare-bones quality of these early cop stories was intentional on the author's
part as a portrayal of the humanistic side of police work is not what Mr McBain
was after; rather, they mark a milestone in his career because they showcase the
same meticulous attention to the kitchen details of police work that would later
show up in the author's celebrated 87th Precinct novels.

The stories about cops have, in their miniature format, all the essential traits of the
'police procedural', a genre Mr McBain is usually credited with having virtually
invented; he showed that the conduct of criminal investigations by the police, with
all their attendant drudgery and tedious legwork ,can make for fascinating and
compelling fare when portrayed with the kind of scrupulosity and verisimilitude he
perfected in the course of writing the early cop stories.

Two standout entries in this collection's selection of cop stories are "Chinese Puzzle"
and "Kid Kill", (The latter story is actually found among those under the heading of
"Kids", stories dealing with youthful criminals, but it could just as well be considered
a story about cops.)

"Chinese Puzzle" is a 'fair play ' murder mystery recounted in the classical manner,
laying out in full, for the discerning reader to find and piece together, all the clues
needed to solve the crime; the difference here is that the murderer is unmasked not
by a brilliant amateur sleuth (a 'gentleman detective' in the lineage of Dupin, Holmes
and Poirot) nor by a 'lone wolf' private eye (in the vein of Sam Spade and Mike
Hammer) but by professionals, a pair of police detectives doing the job that the tax-
payers pay policemen to do.

In "Kid Kill" a pair of police detectives are sent to investigate what appears to be
an accidental shooting: a widow's youngest son has been shot to death by his older
brother who was playing with a Luger sent home, as a war souvenir, by the elder
son (who did not return from the war). The story departs a little from the strictures
of a 'by-the-book' procedural: it does not conclude with a tidy resolution nor, even,
with the certitude that a crime has, in fact, occurred; in a fashion that eschews
sensationalism the story considers a matter often touched upon in crime fiction:
the existence, in our midst, of moral monsters.

Learning to Kill is worth reading for sheer entertainment value (it is a collection
of Good Stories) but I would especially commend it to those who are interested in
following along the literary footsteps of a future grand master of the form as he
learned and perfects the skills of his craft.

If you've ever whiled away an evening watching 21 Jump Street or Law & Order, you owe Salvatore Lombino a debt of gratitude. He virtually created the police procedural, that durable crime-fiction subgenre of which Americans never seem to tire. Not that you'd know him by that name, though. When he began his creative career as a reader at a literary agency, Lombino learned that editors didn't like publishing pieces from authors with "ethnic" names, so he changed his to Evan Hunter. Then when he wanted to pen crime tales, he went by Ed McBain and eventually wrote the influential 87th Precinct novels, churning out scores of them from 1956 until 2005. But in the early days, McBain cut his teeth on short stories, twenty-five of which are collected in Learning to Kill.

A number of the shorts have kept their sheen over half a century since original publication. A private investigator quickly ends up over his head while trying to discover why a "Death Flight" fell out of the sky. A pair of feuding gang members strike up a tentative friendship over a game of Russian Roulette in the poignant "The Last Spin." And McBain puts deliciously noirish twists on stories about a bystander accused of a crime he didn't commit ("Runaway") and a north-Florida boat operator who gets more than he bargained for when he takes out a pair of clients during a week of bad weather ("Downpour").

Unfortunately, the rest have gone a bit dull with the years. The procedurals, in particular, feel tired and rote. Decades of weeknight television have stripped any surprise from storylines about bank heists gone wrong ("The Big Day"), dead infants dumped in churches ("Small Homicide") and cops killed by hit-and-run drivers ("Accident Report"). Also, one doesn't have to be a card-carrying member of N.O.W. to feel uncomfortable with a story that centers on a woman being felt up during a subway ride ("The Molested") or a private-eye satire that has a gal getting cold-cocked multiple times ("Kiss Me, Dudley"). McBain fans will probably find lots to like, but there are better ways for the rest of us to murder our free time.

This isn't really Learning to Kill but really Learning to Become a Professional Writing-101.
Salvatore Lombino, aka Evan Hunter, aka Richard Marsten, and aka- freakin' finally, Ed McBain, was a Grandmaster of the Mystery genre and in this collection of his earliest short stories we get a wonderful introduction and personal glimpse at how it all began.
You don't just become a great writer; it is an evolutionary process and long before you learn how to walk upright you first have to crawl out of the primordial prose and go from grunting to articulation.
That's what you get here; McBane's writing origins and genetic credential check. With these early pulp magazine stories we see the DNA forming, the synapses firing, the links coming together that over time produced a great mystery and police procedural writer.
Are some of the stories in this book out-dated? Sure. They were written in the 50s but they still read well. Better yet, you get McBane's comments on how they came to into being.
This book offers a great introduction into writing and the writing business, from no experience and a wall plastered with rejection slips to pulp magazine acceptance and a life-long career.
Is this book for the modern reader? Probably not but it is for the serious modern writer.
You're missed Sal, Evan, Richard and Ed. You truly are.

These are short stories by "The author later known as Ed McBain". Learned that he was born to Italian/American Parents. (Though he obviously didn't care for that categorization - See Steve Carella's comments from more recent 87th Precinct Novels). The Author.. was born in NYC (believe it was Italian Harlem).
IF you are an Ed McBain addict (as I am) then buy this, to get an idea of the author's development. IF you are new to McBain Try a later 87th Precinct Novel. ("Fiddler's" is quite good.) OR the Matthew Hope Series is Excellent. ("There was a Little Girl" comes to mind.)