Instant holepoking at a legacy

Like Ed Gorman, I get the feeling that the weekend piece in the NYT by Frank Prial on Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) seems just a bit, I dunno, pointed? But judge for yourself with comments like these:

How long the Ed McBain books will hold their huge audience is

anyone’s guess. Mystery writers go out of style. Hunter, as Ed McBain,

was once considered by his publishers to be the logical successor to

Erle Stanley Gardner, whose crime novels sold by the millions half a

century ago and who is virtually unreadable now. Even the powerful

police novels of Joseph Wambaugh are rarely mentioned today. Tastes

change: Martin Cruz Smith’s Moscow detective, Arkady Renko, is a far

cry from the detectives of the 87th, and James Ellroy’s intense, dark

stories of Los Angeles have nothing in common with the formulaic Ed

McBain stories.

But there you are in the airport, and your

flight has been delayed. You’ve read the papers and had a drink.

Luckily, there on the newsstand shelf are half a dozen Ed McBains.

Relax: Detective Carella will take good care of you for the next three

hours.

Well golly gee, just wave your nose in the air a bit more, buddy.

Maybe the problem that some folks have is that McBain’s work, while almost never pedestrian, was hardly ever flashy. He just produced good book after good book at a pace that most writers can only hope to dream about. And while I’m sure that history will have its say in due course, can’t we wait till the guy’s actually buried?