The Best American Noir of the Century

Evan Hunter (1926-2005) was born Salvatore A. Lombino, legally changing his name in 1952. He was admitted to New York’s Cooper Union after winning a scholarship to the Art Students League, then served in the Navy during World War II; he graduated from Hunter College after his return from the Pacific theater. He had begun writing stories while based on a destroyer, then wrote numerous short stories and several novels in the years after the war. After several unsuccessful adult and children’s books, he published The Blackboard Jungle in 1954, which was an instant success, filmed the following year and starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, and Sidney Poitier. In 1956 he created the Ed McBain byline, which became more famous than his own, as he wrote the iconic Eighty-seventh Precinct series, in which the members of an entire squad room, rather than a single police officer, serve as the hero. Fifty-four novels succeeded Cop Hater, the first book in the series. Under the McBain name, he also produced thirteen novels about Matthew Hope, a Florida lawyer, and several standalone mysteries. Hunter also wrote under the pseudonyms Richard Marston, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon, Curt Cannon, and John Abbott, producing more than one hundred books. Other films made from his works include Strangers When We Meet (i960), High and Low (1962), Last Summer (1969), Fuzz (1972), Blood Relatives (1977), and The Chisholms (1979). He also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

The Blackboard Jungle was the first significant book to deal with juvenile delinquents and gang violence in New York, and many of Hunter’s early short stories, collected in Learning to Kill (2006), deal with these subjects, often in a sympathetic manner.

“The Last Spin” was first published in the September 1956 issue of Manhunt; it was collected in Hunter’s The Jungle Kids the same year.

The boy sitting opposite him was his enemy.

The boy sitting opposite him was called Tigo, and he wore a green silk jacket with an orange stripe on each sleeve. The jacket told Dave that Tigo was his enemy. The jacket shrieked ‘Enemy, enemy!’

‘This is a good piece,’ Tigo said, indicating the gun on the table. ‘This runs you close to forty-five bucks, you try to buy it in a store.’

The gun on the table was a Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special.

It rested exactly in the centre of the table, its sawed-off two-inch barrel abruptly terminating the otherwise lethal grace of the weapon. There was a checked walnut stock on the gun, and the gun was finished in a flat blue. Alongside the gun were three .38 Special cartridges.

Dave looked at the gun disinterestedly. He was nervous and apprehensive, but he kept tight control of his face. He could not show Tigo what he was feeling. Tigo was the enemy, and so he presented a mask to the enemy, cocking one eyebrow and saying, ‘I seen pieces before. There’s nothing special about this one.’