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The Telegraph (17/May/2005) - Ed McBain: Almost lost for words

(c) Telegraph (17/May/2005)

Almost lost for words

Ed McBain, with 72 novels to his name, has had three heart attacks, a triple bypass operation and throat cancer that has left him unable to speak properly. His response - what else? - is to write a book about it, says Elizabeth Day

Ed McBain has a hole in his neck. Not a scab or a birthmark, but a large, dark hole about the size of a penny piece. It looks out of place, sitting there in the middle of his throat, as if someone had forgotten to put the cover back on a manhole. If you look into it, you can see the soft pink lining of his oesophagus and feel the hot air rising and falling from his lungs.

In order to speak, McBain must cover the hole with his left thumb to channel the air through his prosthetic voice box and into his mouth. The sound that emerges is a cross between a gurgle and a growl, but not at all unfriendly. It is a bit like listening to Barry White speaking over an intercom with a heavy cold.

"My friend's three-year-old son asked me the other day, 'Why do you speak like that?' " he says, pressing his thumb into the fleshy dip just below where his Adam's apple should be. "I said, 'I have a hole in my throat.' 'How did you get that?' he asked. So I said, 'I had cancer.' I showed him, and he came up close and looked into the hole. Then he said, 'Who's in there?' "

It is not a bad question, given that Ed McBain seems to have just as many aliases as the hardened criminals he delights in writing about. He was born Salvatore Lombino to Italian-American parents in New York in 1926, but calls himself Evan Hunter ("It wasn't Ed McBain who got throat cancer. It was me").

Over the past five decades, McBain has written 72 novels and invented a new genre - the "police procedural", which centres on the work of cops in a big-city precinct. McBain's books have given rise to myriad television series, including CSI: Miami, NYPD Blue and Murder One. The first long-running drama of this kind, Hill Street Blues, bore such a close resemblance to the McBain novels that he consulted a lawyer.

As Evan Hunter, he has written a further 22 novels, including his debut, The Blackboard Jungle, published when he was just 28. He is now 78 and still writing under both names - the latest McBain novel, The Frumious Bandersnatch, appeared in October 2004. In between, he also worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the script of the classic 1963 film, The Birds, which is soon to be remade.

"I can't imagine why," he says, scoffing at the prospect. "It's a ridiculous idea. They say they want to make it closer to the Daphne du Maurier story it was based on. Well, Hitch and I spent months trying to get it further away from her!"

This prolific output is all the more remarkable when one considers that McBain - a survivor of three heart attacks and a triple bypass - was diagnosed with throat cancer three years ago. It came after 10 years of shuttling from doctor to mystified doctor with a persistent "sore throat". None of them spotted the malignant growth, caused by years of smoking 40 cigarettes a day, until July 2002. Later that month, he underwent an operation to have his larynx removed. It was a traumatic process.

To begin with, McBain was unable to communicate except through a child's blackboard. He was fed through a tube stitched into his nose ("agonising - like being punched repeatedly"), coughing up mucus through the raw wound on an hourly basis. At first, he had to speak with a mechanical electro-larynx pressed up against his neck ("I sounded like Darth Vader"), then, after being fitted with the prosthesis, he had to get used to the constant cleansing of the wound with saline solution in order to avoid infection. The build-up of mucus must still be painstakingly removed every day with tweezers.

'There's mucus all the time," he says. "Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I'm so clogged up that I don't know if I can speak. So I practise on my own, saying 'hello, hello', and it either comes out as 'hello', or as..." and he produces a sound akin to ferocious underwater wheezing that makes me jump out of my seat.

It is, then, no surprise that when I meet McBain at his Connecticut home, he looks incredibly frail. He shuffles across the floor in a voluminous brown cardigan and slippers to greet me. As his right thumb covers the stoma (to give the hole its scientific name), he shakes my hand with his left. His beard is grey and sparse - the radiation treatment he has undergone means that it grows patchily - and his hair is as wispy as a newborn's.

"I say, if you have a choice between having a larynx and not having your larynx, then keep it," he says, drily. "I truly miss not having my voice."

McBain's reaction to losing his voice was - what else? - to write a book about it. Let's Talk, written with his Yugoslavian-born third wife, Dragica, is published next week. It is frank and moving, with the occasional disarming flash of humour.

"There are blessings," reads one typical passage. "I don't have to wear a tie any more. Even at formal gatherings, I can play the 'cancer card' and show them the hole in my throat."

As time goes on, Ed has slowly discovered that there are other advantages too. "Oh yeah," he says, with a perfectly straight face. "I can kiss my wife all night if I want to because I don't have to breathe through my mouth."

Of course, there is a darker side. "The first time I realised what it meant to have no voice was when, after my operation, a nurse at the hospital took me down to have an X-ray in a wheelchair," he says, taking long gulping pauses to summon the strength required for the next sentence. "She put me facing a blank wall in this busy corridor. She just left me there and I had no way of getting angry. It was the first time I had been taken out of my room into the big, wide world. I felt angry at first and then I felt sad. I felt helpless and vulnerable not knowing what I could do if I couldn't say anything.

"A lot of these sort of things happen. You can't... you have no control of the situation, um, you just can't..." he trails off, lets his hand fall down to his side and thinks for a moment. He takes a rattling breath. Then the hand goes back up, the thumb covers the stoma and he resumes the effort.

"Something happened to me just today when I didn't have a hand free to use on my prosthesis. I was going from the car into the hospital and somebody asked me something and I couldn't answer. It took me several moments before I fumbled around and could get my hand in the right place. So it looked like I was being rude. I had to call Dragica and ask, 'Honey, what does this man want?' "

Dragica, his wife of 11 years, is a steadfast support. The two of them direct most of their answers to each other, completing their sentences and maintaining almost constant physical contact - one moment, Ed strokes her arm, the next, Dragica is smoothing his hair. Sitting opposite them, I feel like I've gate-crashed their honeymoon. "I don't think I've ever been closer to anyone in my life, ever ever ever," Ed says. "I just feel so incredibly... intimate with her. I just feel that I know her better than I have known anyone in my life."

They met in a bookshop in 1996, when McBain was doing a signing. Dragica, who is 23 years younger, mistook him for an employee and asked him where to find "the maps and charts". Although McBain was married at the time, with three adult sons, he was in no doubt that Dragica was "The One".

Their house, a large converted barn surrounded by trees, is filled with evidence of their closeness. On a filing cabinet next to Dragica's desk upstairs, there is a note written in spidery capitals that reads: "I will love you forever and ever and ever. Love, your husband".

"It sounds silly because I'm so old," he says, "but I just knew this was the woman I wanted to spend all my days with, all my life with."

For a sociable couple who thrived on the closeness of their communication, the loss of McBain's voice was especially cruel. "It was hard coming home from the hospital because Evan had been such a chatterbox and now the house was so silent," says Dragica, in a soft Serbo-Croat accent. In the book, she recalls that just after McBain came back from hospital in summer 2002 - as yet without the prosthesis and unable to speak - she was one day surprised by the sound of her husband's voice, booming from the library.

'There was no question about it. I walked round and opened the door and I looked in and Evan was sitting there just like this." She bends her head over and holds it in her hands, her long brown hair falling over her face. "I realised that he was listening to a tape of an interview he once gave." Dragica's voice slips into a whisper and she starts to cry. "It was just so painful, so painful. I had a glimpse of how much Evan was grieving for his voice. He had never been able to tell me, but he never had to because I knew how much pain he was going through just by looking at him.

'My husband is extraordinarily smart but also witty and funny. He was always the light of the party, everybody wanted him at their table because he was so alive and funny. Now, when we go to dinner, Evan often remains quiet because his speech isn't quick enough any more. I see his thumb go up when he wants to say something, but the moment moves on and he stays silent. That is very painful to watch."

"Occasionally," McBain adds, "when the speech falters, when I don't speak as clearly as I would like, I feel, 'Dammit, come on'. When a conversation is going on, you want to jump in and yet you can't. And I miss my sense of smell. I've got my taste back, which is wonderful, but I miss smelling strawberries and chocolate."

Is he angry? He looks at me levelly. There is no change in his demeanour, but his blue eyes widen slightly as he speaks. "I think so. I think anything that comes upon you suddenly and unexpectedly and is so damaging all at once... you get angry. I'm mostly angry at cancer itself. You know, I don't want to get political, but it seems to me, with all the money we're spending on wars, surely we could find a cure for cancer? Sometimes, it takes a lot not to get depressed."

The five-year survival rate for larynx cancer is 68 per cent. In January, the cancer returned briefly and McBain had to undergo another session of chemotherapy. "Cancer is a loaded gun," he writes in Let's Talk. "I may not have cancer just now, right at this minute, but I'll be a cancer patient for the next four years. You can never turn your back on cancer. We all die, and I'm getting there."

For all his fatalism, McBain seems to take great pleasure in facing down the inevitable. He is still writing, typing out four or five pages a day of his new crime novel, Becca in Jeopardy. He gestures towards the six-inch pile of manuscript with a dismissive shrug. "I love writing, I really do. I spend all day doing it - with a break for lunch."

Hanging from a large, blue desk lamp in one corner of the study is a sheet of typed paper that reads: "It's too much damn jeopardy, stupid!" "I put that there because there was too much danger in the book," he explains. "I had to take some out."

I can hardly blame him. Ed McBain has quite enough danger to contend with already.

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