Happy New Year, Herbie & other stories by Evan Hunter

Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles, takes place in a summer camp for kids. The focus is on a 19 year NYC man who has a job as a camp counselor. There is a lockdown at the camp. They can’t leave and become deeply involved with playing marbles. The story is a commentary on humanity’s obsession on unimportant things like the accumulation of symbolic  wealth. It’s a comic story. Good. 

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The Tourists, is set in Jamaica with a NYC middle class couple on vacation. They encounter a shopkeeper. They are tourists and acquire knowledge as to who they are. Interesting story. 

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On the Sidewalk, Bleeding, is set in an alley in NYC. 

A stabbed young gang member contemplates his life as his life runs down the gutter. The story about getting caught as a symbol of something stupid and frivolous when other things are more important. 

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The Fallen Angel is a story set in a low budget circus. It is in the voice of the circus owner. The content is supernatural which is not the type of thing Hunter usually came up with. It’s kind of getting into Bradbury turf. Not the best of the lot. 

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Alive Again

This one is set in midtown NYC. 

Former lovers meet on the street and go for a drink. 

He wants to start back up again with their affair. She was married and still is. 

Good little story. Deeper than the circus thing above. 

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The Prisoner 

Here we have a cop story. Probably not one that would satisfy the McBain fans, but I don’t know. I never read Ed. 

In this a hard boiled, and corrupted, NYC detective gets a bit of a lesson from a young woman he brings in on a prostitution charge. 

Patriarchal and cop entitlement content. 

Pretty good story. 

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S.P.Q.R

This one feels to be from actual experience or an appearance of that because it involves two writers hired by a Hollywood producer to write a script based of Julius Caesar. This in in first person again, the voice of one of the writers whose only book was a novel Slum Boy (= Blackboard Jungle?) 

It’s an amusing story that pokes fun at Hollywood and it’s ideas of what would be popular while commenting on the hired hack side of the writing business. 

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The Final Yes

This story of to-be-or-not with PTSD content is so far the most powerful of the collection. 

It is sort of the inverse of Melville’s “I prefer not to” in. Bartelby. The man in this story says yes and loses, or so he thinks, and this has become a sort of obsession that is destroying him. 

This one gave me goosebumps. 

Great. 

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The Innocent One 

With a setting amongst Hispanic bean field workers, this one is a bit more of a stretch into the unknown by the author. Not that he doesn’t have any working class experience

At any rate, the setting is for a quick story about suspicion and misunderstandings as one worker mentions the other’s wife in casual conversation setting off an afternoon of jealousy with no basis whatsoever in any evidence or accusations. 

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Pretty Eyes

Many of the Hunter stories and books I have read are about NYC people on vacation. 

This is one of those. A woman who is single is on vacation in Florida. 

She doesn’t think she is attractive and doesn’t believe the men who come on to her by telling her how attractive she is. This is a rather sad story about miscommunication after a series of lies. 

How can we know if someone is being truthful if we think they want something from us?

I liked this one

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Million Dollar Maybe 

This is an early comic story that has to do with a trip to the moon. Early, meaning copywriter 1953, like 16 years before people got to the moon. 

A magazine publisher finds he is trapped by a promotion a previous owner had published in 1926. 

Interesting story as preposterous as it is. 

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Happy New Year, Herbie. 

This is a story about class, regional differences and bullying. It is set on an island in the East River in NYC. Hunter spends an unusual amount of time with the details of this setting. After WWII students are housed on an island called South Brother. The young narrator and his wife are living there with other students. They have a young child although only 19 and 21. The woman is distressed that she is a mother younger than she really wanted to be derailing plans for a bohemian artist/study life in Paris after school. 

But the story, the longest in the book, shifts to a new couple who arrive. They are not like the others, older, he is 38 she 36 and from the Midwest with accents that are said to be grating to these NYCers. 

The tone shifts to the narrator seeing that a local young mover and shaker is bullying Herbie the new man who is learning to be a TV repairman. He is also open and kindly, but different which leaves him vulnerable to the bullying. The narrator sees the injustice and attempts to set it right 

Anti-bullying in a theme in the writings of Evan Hunter. It is what both Last Summer and Come Winter. The major theme of those novels.

Interesting and elaborate story that ultimately left me with a warm feeling. 

Side note on the material about the 19 year old mother in the story who would rather have waited. My mother was 19 was I was born. I don’t think that was a good thing for her, my father or me.

Children of the Streets By Harlan Ellison

Children of the Streets
By Harlan Ellison

This is a collection of juvenile delinquency stories from the 1950s.They are all set in NYC where Ellison grew up.

High school didn’t work then for many teens and still doesn’t work, 60 years later. That’s my opinion because I’m generally anti-school. It’s just basically a place to put people, to condition them to be productive and obedient workers in a complicated society that separates people into categories of age when they might be better off intermixing more organically. I don’t think children should be separated from adults all the time as schools do. Some of us, even when very young, can feel that it is not right, and certainly not nurturing. Most find ways to more or less cope. The ways some find to get through it are not helpful to the community at large. In school the education comes primarily from one's peers.

There is a lot of gang stuff in the stories. Much of it rather extreme with deaths occurring at “rumbles”, even a principal assassinated with a zip gun. That stuff gives the book a feeling of melodramatic unbelievability, but who knows maybe things like that actually happened. After all Tony did get killed in a rumble in West Side Story.

Anyway, the book provides a view of a system that doesn’t work.
I don’t think high school is much better now. Since there was no legal abortion when the kids in these stories were born, many of them were likely unwanted which is not a good position to start life from.
The book has stories of bullying of a gang type and the feeling that high school is almost like prison.

But that’s OK. If school doesn’t work, just bring in more cops, or, as I have been hearing in the news, just arm teachers and other school workers.
Great, good luck, but I’m telling you that isn’t going to work either.

This is the first Ellison I have read. It’s a good read with action and conflict filled pulp fiction type stories. The 1950s gang jargon is fun to decode.