Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Turning 29 years old, Janet Giddings Kurland starts a journal and records her comfortably routine suburban lifestyle. But when she rolls the dice with her friend's husband, she starts down a path that will lead her to the hip streets of Greenwich Village. Amidst the sexually free, Janet blossoms and her housewife's journal turns into a sex diary filled with unexpected encounters, dangerous partners, and drug-fueled sexual escapades.

Lawrence Block remembers: I stopped writing for Nightstand Books when I stopped being a Scott Meredith client in early 1964. Bill Hamling’s publishing operation was a closed market, exclusive to the Meredith agency, so it was time for me to give up being Andrew Shaw. I had a wife, I had a mortgaged house in a Buffalo suburb, I had two young daughters—and I had no visible means of support. Well, one finds a way. I established two new writing selves, Jill Emerson and John Warren Wells. And I wrote a final Andrew Shaw type novel, though not as Andrew Shaw, as I recount in my memoir of my ...

In A Woman Must Love, Barbara, a young widow, has vowed to be true to her husband’s memory (even though he’d wished otherwise). She’s courted, and she has a couple of adventures.

When Joyce Kendall arrives in New York, fresh out of Clifton College in Iowa, she has a job and an apartment waiting for her. The job's as a first reader for Armageddon Publications. The apartment's at 21 Gay Street, and the small Federal-period house is already home to a lesbian couple, Jean Fitzgerald and Terri Leigh, and an out-of-work newspaperman, Pete Galton. The relationships of these four people under one roof add up to a fast-paced story that is not only satisfying fiction but a rare window on Bohemian life in the late 1950s.

O Rose thou art sick. /The invisible worm, /That flies in the night /In the howling storm: /Has found out thy bed /Of crimson joy: /And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy. Those eight lines constitute the complete text of “The Sick Rose,” published by William Blake in Songs of Experience in 1794. I took to Blake early on, and thought Of Crimson Joy would make a dandy title. I accordingly fastened it on this novel when I sent the manuscript to Harry Shorten at Midwood.

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.

What’s the autobiography of a prostitute doing in the Collection of Classic Erotica? I asked myself this very question while weighing its suitability for the collection. On the one hand, it’s nonfiction, specifically memoir. On the other, it was entirely an invention, a fabrication, its putative narrator no less a creation of my own mind than, say, Linda Shepard in CAMPUS TRAMP. And then I let Wikipedia wisk me back almost 300 years: “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (commonly known simply as Moll Flanders) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1722. ...

Lawrence Block remembers: “Back in the 1960s, when I was writing erotic novels for several publishers, I trauned and employed several ghostwriters. The first, William Coons, was recruited by my friend Donald Westlake; MAN FOR RENT is half his work and half mine, and here’s what wrote about it in my memoir of those early years, A Writer Prepares…” This happened fairly early in Bill’s ghosting career, when he was living with his wife and daughter in Washington Heights—but not too early, because it was after Nightstand had upped their order to two Andrew Shaw titles a month. I’d ...

Lawrence Block remembers: "Well, in point of fact, I don't remember much. SINTIME was an Andrew Shaw title for Nightstand Books. The book opens at a resort in or around Vergennes VT, a setting that was certainly inspired by a visit my then-wife and I made to friends of ours who were summering in or around Vergennes. It was a pleasant few days, as I recall, and the friends we were visiting were Hal and Marcia Dresner. Hal was a writer, writing the same sort of books as I, and for the same publishers; he moved on sooner than I did, went out to Los Angeles, had a fine career as a screenwriter,...

In seinem vierten Abenteuer nimmt sich Matthew Scudder - nun in deutscher Neuübersetzung - eines ungelösten Falles an, mit dem er schon Jahre früher als Detective beim NYPD befasst war. Louis Pinell, der vor Kurzem gefasste Eispickel-Mörder, gibt freiherzig zu, vor neun Jahren sieben junge Frauen ermordet zu haben - aber er schwört, dass ein Nachahmer für den Mord an Barbara Ettinger verantwortlich war. Scudder glaubt ihm. Die Spur zu Ettingers wirklichem Mörder ist verworren, dunkel und voller Gefahren ... und sogar noch kälter als die Leiche, der er Gerechtigkeit verschaffen will.

Ein Mann kommt in eine Bar und ab da nimmt sein Leben eine Kehrtwendung. Der Mann bringt eine Frau um, flieht vor dem Gesetz und fängt ein neues Leben an, in einer anderen Stadt, und unter einem anderen Namen. Wird ihn seine Vergangenheit irgendwann wieder einholen? Oder schafft er es, mit einem Mord davonzukommen?

Der Spitzel und Kleingauner Jake "Schnipser" Jablon macht sich eine Menge neuer Feinde, als er die Laufbahn wechselt und von Informant auf Erpresser umsattelt. Früher oder später, vermutet er, wird einer seiner neuen Kunden handgreiflich werden, und wen wird das kümmern? Er sitzt an einem Tisch mit Matthew Scudder, schnipst einen Silberdollar an und lässt ihn auf dem Tisch kreiseln. Schließlich ist das die Gewohnheit, die ihm seinen Spitznamen eingebracht hat. Dann heuert er Scudder an, einen Mord aufzuklären, der sich noch nicht ereignet hat.

Die Sünden der Väter" stellt Matthew Scudder vor, jenen New Yorker Privatdetektiv, der von Liam Neeson in "Ruhet in Frieden" auf der Leinwand verkörpert wurde. Eine junge Prostituierte wurde getötet und der mutmaßliche Mörder hat sich in seiner Gefängniszelle erhängt. Auf der Suche nach Antworten wendet sich der Vater des toten Mädchens an Scudder. Dieser erste Band der preisgekrönten Reihe wurde ursprünglich 1976 veröffentlicht, die deutsche Ausgabe ist aber bereits seit vielen Jahren vergriffen.

Sie ist ein einziger Traum - für einen Mann aber wird sie zum Albtraum. Johnny Hayden und Doug Rance wollen Immobilienunternehmer Wallace Gunderman um sein gesamtes Vermögen bringen...

Kit Tolliver’s chosen lifestyle is pretty clear-cut. She finds a guy, goes home with him, has sex with him, and kills him. What could be simpler? But way back in “Rude Awakening” (Kit Tolliver #2) she had a little too much to drink, and she fell asleep before finishing the job. During breakfast the next morning, she found a chance to put a little something in her host’s vodka bottle. Alas, it didn’t work out quite the way she’d hoped. Peter Fuhrmann was alive and well, and still a name on her list of The Ones Who GotAway. It took a lot of work to determine this, and more work to...

When Kit Tolliver met Alvin Kirkaby, he looked cute in his military uniform. He was on his way to an overseas assignment, and maybe it was an uncharacteristic attack of patriotism that led her to break her usual pattern and spare his life. But now he’s just a name on her list, and home from the wars, so all she has to do is head down to Hedgemont, North Carolina, and give her soldier boy an honorable discharge. Then she walks into his trailer and finds out things are a little more complicated than that... All of Kit’s homicidal (and increasingly erotic) adventures are collected in book ...

In 2006, the estimable S J Rozan invited me to contribute a story to Bronx Noir, an anthology she'd been commissioned to edit for Akashic Books. As she'd been obliging enough to write a story for my own Manhattan Noir, I felt honor-bound to return the favor. To do so, I enlisted the homicidal services of a young woman who'd starred in "If You Can't Stand the Heat," my Hell's Kitchen story for Manhattan Noir. Although she seemed quite capable of standing the heat, I figured it was nevertheless time for her to get out of the Kitchen, so I sent her up to the Riverdale section of the Bronx. My ...

17-year-old Johnny Wells was a very handsome young man, and you’d have called him a babe magnet, but I’m afraid they didn’t have that phrase back in 1961. He decided to capitalize on his looks and the response they earned from women, invested in a haircut and a good wardrobe, moved out of his slum apartment and into a budget hotel, and reinvented himself as a gigolo. The life transformed him. He took up reading, became devoted to it, and educated himself. His new contacts provided him with polish and sophistication. He moved to a good hotel, put money in the bank. And then an out-of-...

This was John Warren Wells' first book for Dell, consisting of a single case history explored in detail. Here's the publisher's blurb: "Meet the Gordons... "They're the very picture of a handsome, happy, healthy couple. Paul has a good job in the city, Sheila takes fine care of their pleasant suburban home, and they have three attractive young children. "Like most married couples, Paul and Sheila like a night out. But their idea of a party is to join with other like-minded couples for an evening of sexual adventure, just as their idea of an enjoyable weekend is to visit an isolated lodge ...

Lawrence Block reports: “THE SIN-DAMNED was one of the early Andrew Shaw titles, published by Nightstand Books in sometime in 1960. The cover, like that of many of its contemporaries, is the work of Harold W. McCauley. “While I can recognize the text as my work, I can’t claim to recall writing it. Every day the great hoard of things I don’t remember grows incrementally larger, and writing this novel has long since been a part of it. I do know, though, that someone else supplied the title, probably some editor in publisher Bill Hamling’s employ. It could have been Harlan Elison, or...