E-Mail This Article to a Friend Perfect crime Salvatore Lombino BY AL DIAMON

When Salvatore Lombino died of cancer on July 6, at the age of 78, he took more people with him than a suicide bomber. Gone are Ezra Hannon, John Abbot, Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten, and Curt Cannon. Also among the casualties: Steve Carella, Bert Kling, Andy Parker, Meyer Meyer, Eileen Burke, and Fat Ollie Weeks.

Maybe the latter group don’t belong in the body count, seeing as how they’re all fictional characters. Carella and company are cops in the big, bad (but always nameless) city, where they staff the 87th Precinct, which is the title of a series of books that began in 1956 and will come to an end this fall when the final volume is published posthumously.

Lombino isn’t listed as the author of any of these books. In 1952, he changed his name to Evan Hunter because he thought the publishing industry was prejudiced against Italian-Americans. He might have been right. He might still be right. Once you get past Mario Puzo and Gay Talese, there aren’t a lot of Italian names on the spines of bestsellers.

But Hunter couldn’t take credit for the 87th Precinct books, because he was already established as a "serious" writer, having produced the bestseller The Blackboard Jungle. That book brought him a measure of fame, but it didn’t pay the bills. So disguised as Hannon, Cannon, Marsten, etc, he churned out pulp-magazine stories for a half-cent a word. When in 1955 he signed a three-book contract to produce a new detective series, he wanted a different name on the covers, one separate from both his lowbrow and highbrow identities. So he invented Ed McBain.

He also invented a new kind of fiction, the police procedural. For the first time, stories focused not on private eyes or amateur sleuths but on realistic cops slogging through false starts, dead ends, and the continuing annoyances of everyday life. In Lullaby, McBain wrote, "Carella did not like chasing people. Neither did Meyer. That was for the movies. In the movies, they filmed a chase in 40 takes that were later edited to look like one unbroken take where the hero cop is running like an Olympics gold-medal track star and the thief is running like the guy who won only the bronze. In real life, you did it all in one take."

The books were about more than cops. Sometimes Carella and his co-workers barely figured in the plot. But the weather was always a factor: too hot, too cold, too wet, even too nice. And the unnamed city — sort of a twisted version of New York — became a character in the evolving story.

"This city was dangerous, too," McBain warned. "Never mind the reassuring bulletins from the Mayor’s office. Ask the Mayor to take an unescorted 2 am stroll through any of the city’s barren moonscapes and then interview him in his hospital bed the next morning to ask him about lower crime rates and improved police patrols.

"So if you came here thinking, Gee, there’s going to be a neat little murder take place in a town house and some blue-haired lady will solve it when she isn’t tending her rose garden, then you came to the wrong city at the wrong time of the year."

Carella wrestled with his inadequacies. Kling struggled with his love life. Burke dealt with being raped. Nothing simple here. Nothing predictable. Even when it came to the bad cops.

"Parker and Weeks got along fine together," McBain wrote in Kiss. "That’s because they were both bigots. Weeks was perhaps a bigger bigot than Parker, but nobody can be only a little pregnant, although Weeks did in fact look a little pregnant — in fact about three months gone."

But Weeks, as the later books attested, was a deeper soul than the W.C. Fields buffoon he portrayed. Parker was . . . well, yeah, Parker was just a jerk.

A few years ago, McBain was asked by an interviewer about his goals. He said he’d like to win a Pulitzer, a Nobel, and a Tony. "Aside from these," he added, "my aspirations are modest ones."

Like most writers who say such things, he was probably only half kidding. Unlike most writers, he wasn’t asking for more than he deserved.

Except, maybe, the Tony.

Al Diamon | ishmaelia@gwi.net