Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Martin H. Ehrengraf, dapper and diabolical, may be Lawrence Block's darkest creation. He's the defense attorney who never sees the inside of a courtroom, because all his clients are innocent - no matter how guilty they may seem. Some even believe themselves to be guilty: They remember pulling the trigger, or wiring the dynamite to their spouse's car, or holding the bloody blade. But things have a way of working out when Martin Ehrengraf is on the case.

TRAMP was first published in 1961 by Nightstand Books, under the pen name of Andrew Shaw. Here's a taste of the text: "IT WAS PRECISELY ten o’clock when the alarm went off. The clock, purchased years ago at a drugstore for not much money, made up in volume what it lacked in melody. It did not ring, exactly; it jangled. Schoenberg would have been delighted with the twelve-tone discordance of the clock. "For perhaps ten seconds the clock rang without eliciting any response whatsoever. Then, dreamily, a hand worked its way out from under the bedcovers. The hand pawed its way through warm and...

Here's the book that started it all: A Girl Called Honey - and if listening to the saga of Honor Mercy Bane brings you a small fraction of the fun we had writing it, you'll be back right away to scoop up So Willing and Sin Hellcat.

Lawrence Block, writing as John Warren Wells, introduces you to men and women who are trying every possible kind of sexual combination to make marriage work in bold new ways. Threesomes. Open adultery. Swapping. Group marriage. And a hundred variants of every possible sexual experiment within the marital relationship, surpassing the most erotic fiction.

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.

Lawrence Block writes: “As a prelude to the process of republishing The Wife-Swappers, I Googled my way to a textual analysis of Andrew Shaw titles by Lynn Munroe, perhaps the leading scholar of Midcentury Erotica. He says of this particular novel, ‘Perhaps the worst-written of the early Shaws (which is saying it's almost unreadable)…’ “I’m not sure it’s terribly wise of me to quote this observation as a way of introducing a book I’d presumably like you to buy. I have a feeling Lynn’s judgment may have been a little harsh, but maybe not. “Regardless, the literary merit ...

What leads one person to collect stamps and another coins, one fine art and another butterflies? Who can say? But one thing is certain: those who've got the collecting bug care passionately - sometimes violently - about the objects of their obsession.

The Sexual Revolution is Here! From the introduction by Benjamin Morse, MD: "As John Warren Wells points out, the past decade has witnessed the triumph of the sexual revolution. With the bedroom as the battlefield, and with scarcely a shot fired in anger, we have in uncountable ways revised our manners of thinking and acting about intercourse (premarital and plain marital), homosexuality (male and female), and those forms of behavior which in turn have been called perversion, deviations, and preferences... "In an extreme example of reportorial honesty, Wells manages to convey more ...

The Adulterers features George and Mona Sutton, a sexually incompatible couple on their way to a Mexican divorce. But they meet a helpful guide named Ernesto, and that changes everything. Ernesto took George to a live sex show, and it made an impression on the fellow. And, not too long afterward, Mona drank enough rum and Coca-Cola to float a light cruiser, and wound up as the sex slave of El Tigre.

Matthew Scudder and his wife, Elaine, talk of the night they met while listening to music in various places around their part of New York.

Chip Harrison has finally secured himself a job, acting as the man-about-town for the corpulent detective Leo Haig. And it's on the dangerous streets of New York that Chip brings home his first case, one in which five beautiful sisters are being systematically murdered by a killer with a diabolical design. Three of the Trelawney women have already been bumped off, and now Chip is cozying up to the remaining two, and investigating a couple of other nefarious relatives with motive on their minds.

Albert Platt is a rotten man. Bred in the rough parts of Brooklyn, he made his name as a killer and has built a fortune from gambling, loan sharking, and the other pastimes of a standard thug. His latest gambit? Buying banks, robbing them, and collecting the insurance. He's a hard man, and no one ever stood in his way until he brushed up against Eddie Manso. Manso is no ordinary veteran.

A 25-year-old cold case of art theft and murder is re-examined when Matthew Scudder and his wife, Elaine, encounter the main suspect in Florence, Italy. Throughout the trip, Scudder comes to realize the killer’s motive and takes the steps towards proving the suspect’s guilt.

The author of dozens of acclaimed novels including those in the Scudder and Keller series, Lawrence Block has long been recognized as one of the premier crime writers of our time. Now, the breathtaking skill, power, and versatility of this Grand Master are brilliantly displayed once again in a mesmerizing new thriller set on the streets of the city he knows and loves so well.

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 a piece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro. This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis (under a pen name by Lawrence Block), is the rarest of Block's books - and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later, with Castro and Cuba once again commanding headlines.

All proceeds from sales of The 27th Mile go to charity in memory of the victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The 27th Mile includes a mix of fiction and non-fiction contributed by a wide range of talented writers who run. They're marathon champions and weekend warriors, ultramarathon racers and fitness joggers, running magazine pros and bloggers, best-selling novelists and indie publishing standouts, people like Amby Burfoot, Lawrence Block, Kathrine Switzer, and Ben Tanzer. Within the book, you'll find stories that extol the spirit that first got us out on the roads to run, that ...

After a night out with friends, Matthew Scudder is reminded of an enigmatic case he had while still working as uniformed policeman. The case in question involves the suicide of a devout Catholic man in front of his wife and children... or was it a murder?

A Writer Prepares, an examination of the first quarter century of one writer's life, is arguably the work of two writers. There's the middle-aged fellow who wrote about half of it at a blistering pace in 1994, and there's the octogenarian who finished the job another quarter century later. The older fellow brought less raw energy to the task, and his memory is a long way from infallible, but one can only hope he's offset these losses with a slight edge in judgment, in perspective, in maturity.

From the notebook of a female sex therapist: "The "patient" calls me this morning to confirm his appointment, arrived precisely at 11 a.m. He's 28, tax lawyer, divorced. Sex problems: periodic impotence, periodic premature ejaculation, occasional inability to reach climax. Diagnosis: general sexual insecurity. "We sit on couch, drink coffee. Neck a little. He has soft hands, a nice touch. Very breast-oriented. We get undressed, sit around naked, then go to bed and play with each other. He gets erection almost immediately but loses it early, then unable to get it back. "I tell him we'll cure...

For 15 years, Janet has been married to her devoted and boring husband, Trevor. But their marriage was not as simple as it seemed. Now Janet is on the road, hurtling towards another man, and another life. Has she found freedom, and the strength to escape Trevor’s dominating fetishes? Or is there something far more sinister waiting for her at the crematorium?