Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Four Lives at the Crossroads is the latest addition to the Collection of Classic Erotica. But it came very close to being shoehorned instead into the Classic Crime Library. Back in the late 1950s and early '60s, when I was finding myself as a writer and producing a great quantity of books under pen names, some of the books I wrote were as much crime fiction as they were erotica.

The Sounds of Crime is an exclusive collection of five brand new short stories by some of the best crimewriters around. Using the theme of 'audio', this unique collection features brand new stories by Lawrence Block, Peter James, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Christopher Fowler.

Step into the shoes of Matthew Scudder, one of the titular Batman’s Helpers. And how does he help Batman? He’s part of a group of people hired by Warner Brothers to confiscate pirated Batman products from vendors selling them on the streets of New York.

Struggling folksinger Ellen Cameron can't believe her luck. Not only is the State Department sponsoring her trip to West Berlin, but her agent has arranged for her to tour Ireland. It's just the break she needs. And better yet, she's meeting the friendliest and most interesting people on her trip, from a kind priest on the plane to a handsome American studying abroad.

Rhoda’s divorce has her thinking that romance is not for her. But maybe she just needs to look in a new direction. Megan is an attractive blonde who instantly sees what Rhoda’s love life has been missing: a woman’s touch. As Megan guides Rhoda into the sensuous - but hidden - world of women who love women, the two unlock a passion that may be too hot to contain. There are a lot of beautiful women in the Village, and Rhoda’s just begun her adventure as a freewheeling lesbian.

Anita Carbone was a good girl - and it bored her. That's why she took the long subway ride down to Greenwich Village, home of the Beats and the stoners, home to every kind of misfit and dropout and free spirit you could imagine. It was where she met Joe Milani, the troubled young war veteran with the gentle touch. But it was also where she met his drug-dealing roommate - a man whose unnatural appetites led to murder....

Well past retirement age and feeling his years - but still staying sober one day at a time - Matthew Scudder learns that alcoholics aren't the only ones who count the days since their last slip. Matt's longtime partner, Elaine, tells him of a group of former sex workers who do something similar, helping each other stay out of the life. But when one young woman describes an abusive client who's refusing to let her quit, Elaine encourages her to get help of a different sort. The sort only Scudder can deliver.

For 14 years, five-time Edgar winner and MWA grandmaster Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column on fiction for Writers Digest magazine. These columns yielded four books regarded as classics: Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Spider Spin Me a Web, The Liar's Bible, and now, The Liar's Companion. Listen to The Liar's Companion and gain inspiration to create outstanding fiction.

One of the most highly acclaimed novelists in the crime genre, Lawrence Block is also a master of the short story. The sixteen stories (and one stage play!) collected here feature appearances by some of Block's most famous characters, including burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr and private detective Matt Scudder, as well as glimpses into the minds of a rogue's gallery of killers, sociopaths, and crooked cops.

When Don Westlake and I were starting out as writers, we both served an apprenticeship writing erotic novels for Harry Shorten at Midwood Books and Bill Hamling at Nightstand. (I was Sheldon Lord for Midwood and Andrew Shaw for Nightstand, while Don was Alan Marshall for both publishers. Note though that the presence of either name upon a book is no guarantee that one of us wrote it. Both of us made arrangements whereby lesser writers would submit works under our names—and I know it's hard to believe that any writers were less than we were back then, but it's true.) Well. We'd become ...

The story I wrote, set in the same Hell's Kitchen neighborhood that's home to my detective hero, Matthew Scudder, was "If You Can't Stand the Heat". (And in fact the bar where the story begins bears a definite resemblance to Grogan's Open House, where Matt's friend Mick Ballou holds court.) I didn't know very much about the young woman who stars in "If You Can't Stand the Heat", not even her name. I learned more as I found myself moved to record further adventures for her.

And at one point we decided it might be fun to do a novel together. Not by thinking it out and talking through it and, you know, collaborating in a serious artistic manner. Our method was simpler. One of us would write a chapter, and then the other would write a chapter to come after it, and back and forth, like that, until we had a book. It worked, and by God it was fun. The first of our efforts was A Girl Called Honey, and it started when I wrote a chapter and sent it to Don. And so on, and we stopped when we had a book and sent it to Henry Morrison.

During the 1970’s, John Warren Wells chronicled the seismic shift in human behavior which has come to be known as the Sexual Revolution. His monthly column in Swank Magazine brought no end of letters; he replied to everyone who wrote, and ihterviewed many of his correspondents by mail or, often, in person. All of the letters were interesting. Some were extraordinary. The most outrageous found their way into Beyond Group Sex. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “They all do their own thing! “Katherine, a beautiful woman who finds release in watching other couples...Grant, a minister who ...

Broadway Can Be Murder started out to be a novel based on Johnny Midnight, a TV series which everyone has long since forgotten. Except, of course, that nothing manages to be forgotten in the Internet Age. I, whose job it was to knock out 50,000 words of Johnny Midnightish prose and dialogue, had forgotten when it ran and who was in it, but Google took no time at all to remind me that the title role was played by Edmund O’Brien, and that the series ran during the first nine months of 1960. I was in New York, newly married, living at 110 West 69th Street.

The Cold War's boiling over. Global tensions are near the breaking point. So, what's the perfect assignment for a super-spy who hasn't slept since the Korean conflict? A fun-filled trip to the Montreal World's Fair! The adorable little girl he's escorting - who, under different circumstances, would be sitting on the Lithuanian throne - can hardly contain her excitement, but it isn't all playtime for Evan Tanner.

Twelve-year-old Ariel is a strange, solitary girl. Recently, Ariel and her mother have seen a ghostly figure in their house. As a result, they are both having dreams that are becoming stranger, yet more and more real. What is the link between this frightening manifestation and the house? Lawrence Block carefully blurs the boundaries between fear and obsession as he steadily increases the suspense. As Ariel's family moves toward tragedy, so does the reader's certainty that a terrible force is at work.

Jeff Flanders has a perfectly good life. Until Candace Cain sashays into it, and turns it upside-down. Jeff’s got a good-looking wife; he loves her, and she loves him. He’s got a job, swinging a desk at a semi-shady finance company, signing off on usurious loans to losers; he doesn’t love it and it doesn’t love him, but it’s easy work and it pays the bills. Until a girl called Candy applies for a $1000 loan - with no job, no bank account, no security.

The craft of writing is a lot like spinning a web: You take threads and weave them skillfully together, and only you know where this intricate network of twists and turns begin and how it will end. Now, with Lawrence Block's expert advice, you can learn this art of entrapping your reader in a maze of fascinating fiction. Spider, Spin Me a Web is the perfect companion volume to Block's previous book on writing, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which Sue Grafton noted "should be a permanent part of every writer's library".

MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block presents 23 stories, all of them on the dark side, and all of them set in the city that never sleeps.

Dave and Jill Wade come to Pennsylvania, the ink still wet on their marriage license, expecting three weeks of lakeside honeymooning bliss. All is lovely until gunshots shatter their first night together. Killers have come for the man in the next cabin, and afterward they decide to silence the happy couple, battering Dave and dragging his virgin bride into the dead man's bedroom. The Wades say nothing to the police, but afterward take a second set of vows: death for the men who ruined their honeymoon.