ED MCBAIN by Dana King

Thursday, December 18, 2014

ED MCBAIN  by Dana King

ED MCBAIN  by Dana King

Work on the web site continues, with the soft deadline I set for myself of January 1 looking eminently doable. (The text and graphics are ready, with a few updates required. All that remains is to get the colors to match on all 34 pages.) Included in the pre-planning work were inspections of other writers’ web sites. I wasn’t interested in making mine as elaborate as some. What I cared about were what kinds of things were included elsewhere. I was able to find a consensus, and lost several hours wandering the halls of various writers’ sites.

Among those I enjoyed most was Ed McBain’s. He’s been dead almost ten years, so I’m not sure why I checked. Maybe to see what a more or less bare bones site looked like, if anything was there at all. Turned out he did (does?) have a site, though it has not been updated since 2010, when he was made an honorary citizen of Ruvo, Italy.

The site consists of what you might expect from the web presence of an author with his background. The navigation bar links to pages titled Home, Newsdesk, Booked, Bios, etc., Forum, Links, and Contacts. It’s the “Newsdesk” page that caught my eye. In it is a page called Articles by the Author. These are essays—blog posts, essentially—written by McBain between May 23, 2002, and March 18, 2004. (He died July 6, 2005.)

The posts are priceless. (For those of you who are unaware, “Ed McBain” is a pen name of Evan Hunter, who was born Salvatore Lombino.) Evan Hunter a Ed McBain. He writes of growing up in “the big, bad city” in such a way even a country boy such as myself gets it. Why an author should never fake it. His contract with the reader. Books he abandoned, and why. Altogether there are nine. I read them all, and can’t pick a favorite.

What I like best is how they work so well as vehicles for McBain to speak candidly and directly to the reader. The wit found in his books is present, as are the little bits of whimsy. Phrasings just different enough to let you know this came out exactly how he wanted it, if not quite how you expected. In “Trials and Errors,” he writes of four novels he began as Evan Hunter, never to finish any of them; one only got three paragraphs written. This essay concludes with, “I've never started an 87th Precinct novel I didn't finish,” which, to me, spoke volumes about how he felt about his seminal, and most successful, series.

In “About That Novel,” Evan Hunter explains how he writes a novel, in the guise of explaining to you how to write one. All writers should read this, regardless of your level of experience. That’s not to say you should then follow his advice to the letter, but everyone who has made the effort will appreciate what he’s talking about.

for the rest go here:

http://danaking.blogspot.com/