The big bust

August 25, 1911 – January 7, 1968

"Ed Lacy" is a pseudonym of author Leonard "Len" S. Zinberg, an American writer of crime and detective fiction. Leonard S. Zinberg, known as Len, was born in 1911 in upstate New York to Max and Elizabeth Zinberg, attended City College of New York, and in the early 1930s traveled across the country. He was a working-class Jewish Communist from Manhattan. Zinberg published only three novels under his own name, but after his death in 1968, the New York Times reported that the detective action he wrote under the name Ed Lacy had sold 28 million copies. The firrst Ed Lacy novel, The Woman Aroused, appeared in 1951.