EVAN HUNTER was only one of the authorial names of a writer who was born Salvatore Lombino of Italian parentage in New York, and is best known to devotees of detective fiction as Ed McBain. He also wrote as Richard Marsten, Hunt Collins and Curt Cannon.

Although it was not his first novel, Evan Hunter first came before the public with his powerful account of racial tension and violence in New York schools, The Blackboard Jungle, which was published in 1954. Its unsparing realism gained it critical acclaim, and it became a bestseller of the type that translates effortlessly into a movie — which it subsequently did.

The literary world had apparently gained another major social novelist, and discerning critics sat back to see how this new talent would develop. Yet, with what seemed to be engaging perverseness, Hunter was not content simply to be “literary”. His alter ego, Ed McBain, opened his account four years later with the first of his famous 87th Precinct novels, Cop Hater. It was the precursor of a spate of novels describing the daily life and travails of a harassed American inner-city police station, that was to continue unabated for more than 40 years, achieving its 50th title, Love Dance, in 2000.

It was customary to describe these slim volumes as “police procedural novels”, and of course that was not incorrect. But such a generic description implied that there was something of the potboiler about many of them. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The great strength of McBain was that he imbued his 87th Precinct with a sense of sharply experienced life, even if much of that life was concerned with society’s underbelly.

The town, Isola, in which these novels were set, was unmistakably New York. Since it did not declare itself as the Big Apple, it was not open to McBain to rely merely on a recital of the city’s famous precincts, parks and landmarks to give his background authenticity. Isola lived, triumphantly in its own right, alongside New York but not simply mimicking it. Its very name (“Island” in Italian) suggested a microcosm — one in which the fight against crime is unceasing.

But McBain did not attempt to imbue his characters with bogus heroism. Crime might take many forms, and in one of his most ingenious stories, Blood Relatives, an account of pathological family jealousy, his protagonist Detective Steve Carella finds himself applying the talents of a literary critic to a teenage girl’s diary, as the key to unlocking a crime which at first seems open and shut.

Carella was very far from being the hardboiled cop of police procedure. He was a man of catholic sympathies and deep understanding. As if to underline these qualities, his creator gave him a gentle, deaf-mute wife, Teddy, with whom, often exhausted and at his wits end, he shared the events of every hard fought day.

The cast of characters — Detective Meyer Meyer, Bert Kling, Fat Ollie Weekes to name only a few — who peopled the 87th Precinct squadroom, each had a strongly defined individuality, which did not pall on the reader, even in the immensely long series in which they featured. In fact, to those who did not at all mind immersing themselves in these productions, it was clear that the “literary” realist Evan Hunter was actually in no way dormant in the productions of his apparently “downmarket” rival.

Besides being prolific, Hunter was extremely versatile, and he enjoyed extending his range in a multiplicity of literary forms. He wrote several books for children, collections of short stories and plays. He was an excellent screenwriter, and adapted a number of his own novels for the cinema, notably Strangers When We Meet (1960), which starred Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Walter Matthau and Ernie Kovacs, and Fuzz (1972), a farce of police incompetence, which was a case of Hunter adapting McBain. But perhaps the most distinguished of all his writing for the screen was not a reworking of a novel of his own, but of a story by Daphne du Maurier which became Alfred Hitchcock’s apocalyptic film The Birds (1963), starring Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren.

Evan Hunter was born Salvatore Lombino, the son of a postman, in New York City’s “Italian Harlem”, as he liked to put it, in 1926. He grew up in the Bronx.

At Evander Childs High School, and later at Cooper Union Art School, where he spent the year 1943-44, he showed much promise as an art student and decided to become a painter. But after service in the US Navy between 1944 and 1946 he decided to devote himself to writing. He worked as a teacher and salesman for a year after leaving the Navy and then attended Hunter College, New York, from which he took a BA in English in 1950. He then spent two years, 1951-53, as an editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.

Hunter College gave him the inspiration for his nom de plume when he decided to abandon his family name. He had become convinced that “if you’re an Italian-American you’re not supposed to be a literate person”. In 1952 he changed his name legally to Evan Hunter.

Soon the success of The Blackboard Jungle was to emancipate him from needing to do other work to support his writing. The film that was made of it in 1955, with Glenn Ford taking the part of the teacher who eventually gains the respect of a class of young hooligans, veered somewhat towards the sentimental. But with the song Rock Around the Clock playing behind its credits, it became an iconic movie of its era.

Second Ending (1956) tackled the theme of New York’s young drug addicts, after which, in tandem with the activities of Ed McBain, Hunter continued to produce what their adherents regarded as his “serious” novels. Among these were Strangers When We Meet (1958); Buddwing (1964); Last Summer (1968), a tale of insurgent teenage sexuality which translated into a striking film with highly effective characterisation; Streets of Gold (1974); and Love, Dad (1982).

Ed McBain also strayed outside the remit of the Isola 87th Precinct, in a manner that showed that his portrayal of the criminal life went far beyond merely depicting the means of controlling its effects. Thus, in the unrelentingly violent Guns (1976), McBain deeply understands the social conditioning which inexorably drags an inner-city youth into a life of crime. And he can make poignant his protagonist’s last thoughts as the police, determined to avenge the murder of a colleague, close in to shoot him dead: What would his mom have thought?

As Hunter was to acknowledge, there had come a point when Evan Hunter and Ed McBain had become one and the same writer.

Hunter suffered a heart attack in 1980, an event which caused some modification of his hectic writing schedule. Latterly he had suffered from cancer of the larynx. A 55th title in the 87th Precinct series, to be entitled Fiddlers, is scheduled for publication in the autumn.

Hunter’s first marriage, in 1949, to Anita Melnick, was dissolved. His second marriage, to Mary Vann Finley, was also dissolved. He is survived by his third wife, Dragica, whom he married in 1997, and by three sons of his first marriage.

Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), author, was born on October 15, 1926. He died of cancer on July 6, 2005, aged 78.