Evan Hunter

This bad news is going around quickly, but I have to weigh in on it. Evan Hunter has passed away at age 79 after a long struggle with cancer. I've been reading and enjoying his work for more than four decades now. I was in elementary school when I read his Winston SF novel DANGER--DINOSAURS!, written under the name Richard Marsten. Of course, I had no idea then that it was really by Evan Hunter. I just knew it was a terrific book. A few years later I discovered the 87th Precinct books by Ed McBain. I began grabbing them up and racing through them as fast as I could, and I still remember vividly sitting in study hall and reading COP HATER, THE MUGGER, and THE PUSHER. Terrific books, every one. Eventually I found out about all the various pseudonyms he used and began tracking down his other books, including a couple of Gold Medals as by Curt Cannon, I'M CANNON--FOR HIRE and I LIKE 'EM TOUGH. They were great, and incredibly hardboiled. (Those books were, of course, based on the Matt Cordell stories published in MANHUNT under the Hunter name. I didn't know that then, but it doesn't really matter, either.) I read THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE after seeing the movie. I read some of his other mainstream novels like SONS. Luckily, I still have quite a few of his novels on hand that I've never read, such as a hardback of THE PAPER DRAGON that sits about two feet from me on the shelves as I type this. I kind of drifted away from the 87th Precinct series in recent years, but I'm sure I'll read all of them eventually. Hunter was just a great writer.