What could be easier? He had a confessed killer, clear fingerprints, and a witness. Everything was sewed up tight. Or was it Detective Steve Carella could not forget Gerald Fletcher standing beside the body of his beautiful wife, Sarah, announcing how glad he was that someone had stabbed her. And when Fletcher kept wining and dining him, flattering and heckling him, tossing him clue after clue, Carella could sniff that there was more to Sarah's death than just bungled burglary. When Sarah's little black book turned up a mile-long record of her nocturnal adventures, Carella knew it was time to call in the boys of the 87th, to find out why everyone was calling her Sadie when she died.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
