Ed McBain made his debut in 1956. In 2004, more than a hundred books later, he personally collected twenty-five of his stories written before he was Ed McBain. All but five of them were first published in the detective magazine Manhunt and none of them appeared under the Ed McBain byline. They were written by Evan Hunter (McBain’s legal name as of 1952), Richard Marsten (a pseudonym derived from the names of his three sons), or Hunt Collins (in honor of his alma mater, Hunter College).

Here are kids in trouble and women in jeopardy. Here are private eyes and gangs. Here are loose cannons and innocent bystanders. Here, too, are cops and robbers. These are the stories that prepared Evan Hunter to become Ed McBain, and that prepared Ed McBain to write the beloved 87th Precinct novels. In individual introductions, McBain tells how and why he wrote these stories that were the start of his legendary career.

A young woman is found hanging from a lamppost in a deserted area of the 87th Precinct. That same night, another woman is raped — for the third time in succession, by the same man each time. Not long after that, a second murder victim is found hanging from a lamppost in another part of the precinct. The murders are obviously linked. But how? And why are both murder victims female athletes and — more specifically — runners on the track teams of two different colleges? Why is someone, as it turns out, systematically raping different women twice, three times, sometimes four times in succession? Has the Deaf Man put in a return appearance, as the detectives of the 87th Precinct secretly suspect? Can Fat Ollie Weeks help the men of the 87th solve these crimes? Will Eileen Burke, working as a decoy for the Rape Squad, be forced into a confrontation that may change her life and her views about police work?

Lightning can strike twice — and sometimes even more often.

In his new 87th Precinct novel, Ed McBain once again shows how the patient, hard-working professionals with the golden shields cope with crime and killers, putting together the pieces of each difficult case with immense skill, intuition... and old-fashioned pounding of the streets... testing their expertise to the limit of endurance.

The Crofts live with their blond, teenage daughter, Lissie, in a converted sawmill in Rutledge, Connecticut, an exclusive community of achievers. Lissie’s mother, Connie, is a Vassar graduate; her father, Jamie, a successful photographer. But these were the sixties — the time of Nixon and moon walks, prosperity and war, Woodstock and Chappaquiddick — and the Crofts are caught in a time slot that not only caused alienation but in fact encouraged it.

Lissie, in her rush to independence and self-identity, along with others of her generation, goes her own way. She leaves school, skips to London and begins a journey across Europe to India. Breaking all the rules, flouting her parents’ values, she causes in Jamie a deep concern that frequently turns to impotent rage.

When Lissie returns, she is surprised and angry to find that things are not the same. While she was out living her own life, her dad was falling in love with the woman he would eventually marry. Hurt and confused over her parents’ divorce, Lissie is not ready to accept for them what she sees as clear-cut rights for herself. And try as he will, her father cannot comprehend the new Lissie.

More than a novel about the dissolution of a family in a turbulent decade, Love, Dad is an incredibly perceptive story of father and daughter and their special love — a love that endures even though understanding has been swept away in the whirlwind of change.

This anthology features some of the most famous authors writing at the peak of their careers!

The four books that make up this novel — Amanda, Gillian, Julia and Kate — span three generations and nearly thirty years of time. Except that Kate is Amanda’s niece, none of these women is related, but their lives cross and recross, linked by Julia’s son David.

Julia Regan belongs to the “older” generation in the sense that her son David was old enough to fight in the war. That he ended the war in the stockade was due more to his mother than to himself, and the book devoted to Julia shows what sort of woman she was — why, having gone to Italy before the war with an ailing sister, she constantly put off her return to her family — and why, therefore, David is the man he is.

Unsure of himself and bitter (for good reason) David finds solace in Gillian, who had been Amanda’s room-mate in college during the war. He loses her because he does not know what he wants from life. Gillian is an enchanting character who knows very well what she wants: she is determined to become an actress. In spite of the extreme tenderness and beauty of her love affair with David (and Evan Hunter has caught exactly the gaieties and misunderstandings of two young people very much in love, when a heightened awareness lifts the ordinary into the extraordinary and the beautiful into the sublime) she is not prepared to continue indefinitely an unmarried liaison, and she leaves him. When, eleven years later and still unmarried, she finally tastes success, the taste is of ashes, and she wonders whether the price has not been too high.

Amanda is considerably less sure of herself than Gillian, though foe a time it looks as if her music will bring her achievement. But she has in her too much of her sexually cold mother to be passionate in love or in her music. She marries Matthew who is a lawyer, and, without children of their own, they bring up her sister’s child, Kate, who, in the last book, is growing up out of childhood into womanhood — with a crop of difficulties of her own.

Unlike all his earlies novels (except in extreme readability) Mothers and Daughters is not an exposure of social evils, but a searching and sympathetic study of people.

She is a Broadway dancer, exquisite and mercurial. He is a dedicated psychiatrist, happily married to a beautiful woman, the father of two lovely children vacationing with their mother on Martha’s Vineyard. “Good morning, sir”, she said, as she passed David Chapman on a sunny June day in Central Park. Moments later, she was locked in mortal combat with a mugger, and David came to her rescue...

They tell each other some truths, but only some. They know each other’s mysteries, but only some. They slip into a realm of sensual deception and imminent danger...

For who is Kate Duggan really, the woman who makes sexual fantasies come true? And who is David Chapman, the doctor who spends his day with other people’s neuroses, guilt, and lies? Now, in the heat of a New York City summer, they will learn everything — when a stalker turns their mad lust into a murderous affair.

Enter a world of seedy nightclubs, dangerous, dimly-lit street and cool, wisecracking dicks pitting themselves against armies of ruthless gangsters. This is pulp fiction, a genre spawned amid the disillusionment of post-World War I America — and now reaching new heights of popularity.

Writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett turned that unique blend of rapid-fire action, violence and cynical humour into an art form that is being recreated by a fresh wave of young writers whose stories have all the drama and atmosphere of their predecessors’.

This page-turning collection, brought together by a true aficionado of the hardboiled story, includes, of course, Chandler and Hammett, but also Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, Ed McBain and James Hadley Chase from the vintage years and from the current generation James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino, to name just a few of the twenty great writers featured here. Even Stephen King, doyen of the world of horror, has turned his hand to pulp fiction and is represented in this book.

The world of the hard-drinking, fast-action, apparently indestructible private eye, personified by Chandler’s creation, Philip Marlowe, was never more vibrant. It’s all here, and more, in a book that no fan of the genre can afford to miss.

He was a model child. In fact, he’d been made to order...

Ed McBain is a pen name of Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Evan Hunter, who wrote The Blackboard Jungle. As Ed McBain, he has written fifty 87th Precinct novels, the blueprint series for every successful police procedural series.

In this original short story collection, you’ll see that McBain’s stories are not neat little plot pieces; just as in real life, the characters’ messy problems aren’t cleared up at the end with pat solutions. In “The Interview,” an egotistical director manages to antagonize and alienate everyone connected to the movie industry when he is grilled about a drowning that occurred during a film shoot. A circus owner hires an aerialist in “The Fallen Angel,” and gets more than he bargained for. The most affecting, famous story in the collection is “The Last Spin,” in which two opposing gang members play a game of Russian roulette.

The eleven stories in this collection serve to remind us of how versatile and unique a writer Ed McBain a.k.a. Evan Hunter can be.

Shimmering blonde hair framing an exquisite pale face. Deep green eyes, a generous mouth. Matthew Hope took one look and fell instantly in love.

Sarah Whittaker had everything: stunning good looks, youth, money, social standing. Everything, that is, but her freedom. Because Sarah Whittaker was currently residing, against her inclinations and her will, in Knott’s Retreat — familiarly known to the residents of Florida’s booming West Coast as Nut’s Retreat. In the State of Florida, County of Calusa, Sarah Whittaker was a certified paranoid schizophrenic. That’s what the doctors said. It’s what her widowed mother said. It’s what the court-ordered psychiatric commitment papers said. It was not what Sarah Whittaker said — and that was why she had called Matthew Hope. Would he, she asked, act as her attorney and fight for her freedom — not to mention fighting for the $650,000 left her by her father and now controlled by her mother.

Hope might have lost his heart, but he hadn’t lost his wits. He probed Sarah’s story of a mother driven by hate to confine her only child to a mental institution and decided she was telling the truth. He took the case.

And in so doing was led into a hall of mirrors in which reality and delusion blurred into murder, mutilation, and the greatest danger Hope had ever known.

This is the history of an unfaithful husband — his illusions, his stratagems, his fears, his entrapment.

The young husband in Evan Hunter’s new novel is not a philanderer, not a disturbed personality. He has been a responsible family man. He loves his wife.

But at a moment when his ego is slightly bruised, he meets a woman, a neighbor, who gives him a dangerous new image of himself — the image of a man who is not fully alive. He is convinced, and he is caught.

In Strangers When We Meet, Evan Hunter charts the progress of infidelity: the beginning of the affair — stage fright and an illusion of romance; the first small deceptions that multiply into a nightmarish entanglement of lies; the panic when the phone rings at home; the endless, tortuous arrangements for hurried meetings; the strained chance encounters in public (“Did I give myself away?”); the rising guilt and desperation. And in the background — the person who knows, the confidant who should never have been told, who might some evening drink too much and bring the walls crashing down.

Practically everybody will remember Bingo and Handsome, partners in the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America (or, to put it more bluntly, street photographers), whose earlier adventures were related in The Sunday Pigeon Murders and The Thursday Turkey Murders.

Readers may have forgotten, however, that from these events our heroes assembled assets of $2,773 and some odd cents. This inspires them to try their fortune in Hollywood. (“After all,” Bingo said, “we’re photographers, aren’t we?”) Along with the bankroll they were blessed with Bingo’s complete faith in himself, Handsome’s photographic memory, and the innocence of city slickers.

It seemed perfectly sensible to them, for example, to make a down payment of $2,000 on an empty Charles Addams type mansion because it had once belonged to April Robin, the great star of silent-screen days. Immediately thereafter, they paid a deposit against the rental for a small building on the Strip. These negotiations left them with no cash, but considerable prestige.

They soon, inevitably, acquired a landlord who had supposedly been murdered four years earlier, a housekeeper who was murdered the night they moved in, a cop who would like to arrest them both just so that he can be doing something positive, and assorted characters who are willing to pay Bingo and Handsome (a) to find the body, and (b) not to find the body.

All this inspires Bingo and Handsome into furious activities which are — well, not exactly efficient, but certainly fascinating. In trying to cope with their commitments they meet some remarkable people, the kind that supposedly are found in Hollywood but actually could have been conceived of only by Craig Rice.

In other words, The April Robin Murders is funny, hilariously complicated, knowing, sentimental: that mixture of mirth and murder uniquely the product of one of the best-loved and best-selling mystery writers of our time.

Best-selling author Scott Turow takes the helm for the tenth edition of this annual, featuring twenty-one of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.

Elmore Leonard tells the tale of a young woman who’s fled home with a convicted bank robber. Walter Mosley describes an over-the-hill private detective and his new client, a woman named Karma. C. J. Box explores the fate of two Czech immigrants stranded by the side of the road in Yellowstone Park. Ed McBain begins his story on role-playing with the line “ ‘Why don’t we kill somebody?’ she suggested.” Wendy Hornsby tells of a wild motorcycle chase through the canyons outside Las Vegas. Laura Lippman describes the “Crack Cocaine Diet.” And James Lee Burke writes of a young boy who may have been a close friend of Bugsy Siegel.

As Scott Turow notes in his introduction, these stories are “about crime — its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 is a powerful collection for all readers who enjoy fiction that deals with the extremes of human passion and its dark consequences.

Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories — many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant.

Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you’re in the mood for — suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural — can be found in these pages.

FEATURING:

— Unscrupulous Santas

— Crimes of Christmases Past and Present

— Festive felonies

— Deadly puddings

— Misdemeanors under the mistletoe

— Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.

This is EVAN HUNTER whose powerful and controversial first novel, THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, was a book, magazine and motion-picture sensation last year. Despite his youth (29), he has sold many short stories, a play, seven mysteries and several novels.

Here are a group of his short stories concerning youngsters and crime. Stories of teen-age gangs, of girls in trouble, of Russian Roulette. The ordeal of a dope addict, the sex murder of a baby sitter, the menace of a mugger. Here are the stories behind the headlines — tragic, frightening, accurate episodes of life in the modern jungle, the streets and cellars, the hallways and roof tops, the parks and slums of a big city.