Walk Proud

by Evan Hunter

Emilio, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks Chicano kid, yearns for a way out, and with the help of his girlfriend decides to start a new life.

Paperback

First published May 1, 1979

About the author

Better known by his pseudonym Ed McBain.

Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956.

Reviews

[Mark Holmes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hunter seems to want to make his characters realistic and three-dimensional and mostly succeeds, only he's a little too race-conscious with the Hispanic characters. I would have deleted Emilio's comment about the beans his mom has cooking, for example. It looks he and Sarah are trying to bridge a racial divide and there's some awkwardness as a result, which I don't see any problem with from a strictly creative standpoint; it looks believable. I don't get the ideological stuff Cesar spouts and I'm not sure you'd find it in the real world. Hunter makes mistakes about teen culture circa 1980: we didn't call drug dealers "pushers" back then, we called them "dealers"; we also didn't use the term "go steady." Andy probably would have tried to figure out how seriously Sarah took him when they talked rather than "go steady" and it's no surprise she sent him packing, given that she was still in high school and they were living on opposite sides of the country. In those days, the Internet was something for a handful of scientists to use, not the general public, making a long-distance relationship a rather heavy lift that I think most teenagers back then wouldn't have bothered to even try to take on. Hunter, in short, does his best to describe a world I suspect he wasn't all that familiar with.

Another thing: This book was written at about the same time as another novel of Hunter's called "Love, Dad" and has several things in common with it, including a young, tallish, blond, blue-eyed main female character who sort of takes a walk on the wild side (though nowhere near as extensively as Lissie in "Love, Dad"); hints of an unexpressed father-daughter incestuous attraction; a horror of heroin addiction on the part of one of the main teenage characters (Emilio this time). Which I find a bit curious.