Lacy, Ed

Crime writer Ed Lacy, pseudonym for journalist Leonard ‘Len’ S. Zinberg, was born in New York. When he was little, his parents got divorced and he moved with his mother to her new husband, also in New York. Little is known about their son’s childhood and private life, but during the 1920s he studied at the College of the City of New York. In the 1930s, he led a wandering life, travelled around in the USA and had temporary jobs (for example, as a butcher) but also wrote articles and short stories for various newspapers. He managed to sell quite a lot of them to both pulp magazines and prestigious periodicals.