The Deaf Man is back! In his first appearance since Eight Black Horses in 1985, the nemesis of the 87th returns with a vengeance. Zeroing in on Steve Carella, his favorite foil, he bombards the squadroom with directives that seem to describe in detail exactly what he's up to this time - but not quite. What he's planning is his most devilish million-dollar caper to date. In the squadroom, an otherwise slow March night is enlivened by the murder of a graffiti writer under a highway bridge. Over the course of several weeks, more of the city's outlaw artists are killed under mysterious circumstances, and a team run by Detective Parker begins to put the pieces together. Meanwhile, a new criminal activity surfaces: Someone is abandoning helpless elderly men and women at different locations around the city. As if all this weren't enough, racial tensions in the city are at an all-time high. While pressure mounts on various fronts, the city announces a free rap concert in the park, set for a day in the very near future. As the shattering finale of Mischief looms, seemingly unrelated developments intertwine in an ending that sets a new standard even for McBain's most discerning fans. It's been said that "nobody writes the police procedural as well as Ed McBain" (San Diego Union). And in his latest tale of the 87th Precinct, Mischief McBain proves his mastery of the genre beyond reasonable doubt.
Ed McBain was one of the many pen names of the successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926 - 2005). Born Salvatore Lambino in New York, McBain served aboard a destroyer in the US Navy during World War II and then earned a degree from Hunter College in English and Psychology. After a short stint teaching in a high school, McBain went to work for a literary agency in New York, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and P.G. Wodehouse all the while working on his own writing on nights and weekends. He had his first breakthrough in 1954 with the novel The Blackboard Jungle, which was published under his newly legal name Evan Hunter and based on his time teaching in the Bronx.
Perhaps his most popular work, the 87th Precinct series (released mainly under the name Ed McBain) is one of the longest running crime series ever published, debuting in 1956 with Cop Hater and featuring over fifty novels. The series is set in a fictional locale called Isola and features a wide cast of detectives including the prevalent Detective Steve Carella.
McBain was also known as a screenwriter. Most famously he adapted a short story from Daphne Du Maurier into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). In addition to writing for the silver screen, he wrote for many television series, including Columbo and the NBC series 87th Precinct (1961-1962), based on his popular novels.
McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. He passed away in 2005 in his home in Connecticut after a battle with larynx cancer.
