The Men from the Boys

New York: Harper & Brothers. Near Fine in Very Good dj. (c.1956). First Edition. Hardcover. [nice copy with light shelfwear only, a touch of dust-soiling to top of text block; the jacket is a little edgeworn, with some crinkling at the base of the spine and shallow paper loss at the top of the spine (no effect on spine text)]. Hard-boiled novel about a corrupt ex-cop who's working as the house dick at a small NYC hotel, but brought back into action when his ex-stepson comes to him with a problem related to his own ambitions for a career in law enforcement. "Ed Lacy" was the better-known of two pseudonyms (the other was "Steve April") used by Zinberg, whose early fiction (much of which appeared in leftish publications) reflected his liberal/Jewish intellectual background and revealed his concerns with social justice, particularly with regard to racial issues. (Although white, he was a longtime resident of Harlem and was married to an African-American woman.) He adopted the Lacy pseudonym, primarily for his detective genre fiction, in the early 1950s -- in part, it seems, to achieve a McCarthy-era distance from his left-wing political associations -- and became so well-known under that name that even his Wikipedia entry uses it. He turned out nearly thirty novels as Ed Lacy (as opposed to a mere three as Zinberg), the majority of them paperback originals; today, alas, most of his work is out of print. .