Evan Hunter

The man who had to kill himself to be born

Salvatore Albert Lombino knew that with that name he wouldn't sell a single manuscript in postwar New York. Editors of the time had clear prejudices against Italian surnames and pigeonholed their authors into minor genres or immigration stories. In 1952, he made a drastic decision and legally changed his name to adopt an identity with Anglo-Saxon echoes.

And the gamble paid off.

Under the name Evan Hunter, he published his rawest work to date in 1954. Seeds of Evil dissected the American education system with a verbal violence few dared to put in print. The book was not only a bestseller but also defined social realism in commercial fiction of the 1950s.

After the impact of his first novel, Hollywood came calling. The film adaptation of 1955, directed by Richard Brooks, put his name on the desks of the major Hollywood studios. Hunter quickly understood that visual storytelling required a different dryness than his prose, but he always kept his cynical view of authority.

The Screenplay That Infuriated Hitchcock

In 1963, Hunter took on one of the most complex technical challenges of his career. Alfred Hitchcock hired him to write The Birds based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. The process was grueling because the director wanted a structure of mounting tension in which the characters played second fiddle to the unexplained threat.

Hunter cut nearly all of Du Maurier's original material to build an oppressive atmosphere. But the relationship between the two broke down during the shoot of Marnie in 1964. Hunter refused to write a rape scene he considered unnecessary for the development of the character, and the director fired him on the spot.

Hunter was a craftsman of order.

Despite that falling-out, his ability to build tension in confined spaces remained intact. In 1972 he worked on the screenplay for Walk Like a Dragon, proving he could adapt other people's works without losing his dry narrative punch. He never sought personal glory in his scripts; instead, he prioritized the architecture of conflict over literary ornament.

The Lasting Shadow of Ed McBain

While Evan Hunter was writing serious dramas and screenplays for the industry, his most profitable alter ego was born. In 1956, he published Cop Hater under the pen name Ed McBain. With this name, he launched the 87th Precinct 87 series, which ran for decades and changed how people understood police procedurals on the page and on screen.

McBain didn't focus on a single heroic detective. His approach was ensemble-based and technical, because he was interested in how the machinery of a New York police precinct worked. This structure directly influenced later TV series such as Hill Street Blues, where the spotlight is spread across a group of weary professionals.

But Hunter always felt a strange hierarchy between his two identities. He considered the books published under Hunter to be prestigious literature, while those under McBain were pure professional entertainment. The public disagreed, and the stories of the 87 Precinct sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

In the end, only the words remained.

In 2005, throat cancer took his life in Connecticut. He left behind more than a hundred novels and a working structure that is still studied in screenwriting schools today. His last work published during his lifetime came out that same year under the title Fiddlers, closing a production cycle that spanned more than half a century of uninterrupted activity.

He died at age 78 with three Edgar Awards on his shelf.