Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Matthew Scudder, his wife, Elaine, Mick Ballou, and Mick's new wife sit around a table in Mick's Hell's Kitchen saloon for one last night of stories before the building is transferred to its new owners.

Matthew Scudder and his wife Elaine visit their good friend, Mick Ballou, at his bar, Grogan’s, where Mick muses on about the final scene of the Sopranos.

LAWRENCE BLOCK observes: “SIN BUM was published sometime in 1963 as Midnight Reader #472. (Midnight Reader was a sister imprint of Nightstand Books.) “It may have been the final book I wrote as Andrew Shaw, the last title of mine brought out by publisher William Hamling. Or not—it’s impossible to tell. There were other titles by other hands than mine that would be published under my Andrew Shaw pen name, and there would be a stream of retitled books reissued in the 1970s with their prose slightly tweaked to reflect relaxed taboos, but it was sometime in 1963 that I stopped writing ...

You might as well know this going in: Lawrence Block's new novel is not for everyone. It's recounted in journal form by its protagonist, and begins when he walks into a roadhouse outside of Bakersfield, California, and walks out with a woman. And rapes and murders her. But, um, not in that order. Right. But it's what he does with the rest of his life that's really interesting....

THOSE BOYS AND THEIR CARS… Danny Duncan drives his father’s Oldsmobile. It's a nice respectable family sedan, and April North is every bit as respectable as the car. Until he manages to get her into the back seat. Now she's no longer a good girl, but only Danny know it, and he can keep a secret, can’t he? Well, no. He tells half the town of Antrim, Ohio—the male half, and they all come sniffing around, led by Bill Piersall, driving a homemade hot rod cobbled together from spare parts and held together with spit and baling wire. She gives Bill what he wants, but he turns out to be ...

When young, broke, and single Chip Harrison finds a bus ticket to Bordentown, South Carolina, he knows it was sent by the hand of fate. It’s his way out of wintry New York City, Bordentown’s sheriff provides a very warm welcome! Before long, Chip charms his way into the sheriff’s good graces and into the arms of Lucille, the preacher’s daughter. Even Chip should see he is headed for trouble with a capital T, in another furiously funny caper by Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block.

It is a mystery why a street-smart young man like Chip Harrison has to resort to elaborate plans to attract a young woman like Francine. But someone turns Chip’s dream into a nightmare of danger. Chip has to act fast and furiously in a sizzling and suspenseful adventure that only Edgar Award-winning Lawrence Block could have written. In this barrel of fun, Chip Harrison rightfully takes his place beside Block’s best-known characters.

LAWRENCE BLOCK remembers: “Actually, the header’s mistaken. In point of fact, I remember next to nothing about Trailer Trollop. I’ve loaded it onto my Kindle in advance of republishing it, and I’ve made my way through a few of its chapters, and while there’s sufficient textual evidence to make it very clear that I wrote this book, the memory of the two or three weeks devoted to so doing has long since left me. “I can tell you where and when I wrote it. In the spring of 1960, my recently-acquired first wife and I took an apartment on West 69th Street in New York. I installed a ...

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Born to Be Bad and experience the compelling world of erotica.

Keller ist ein Killer. Durch und durch Profi, cool, selbstsicher, kompetent, zuverlässig. Aber er ist auch eine vielschichtige Persönlichkeit: in sich gekehrt und zurückgezogen, eiskalt und gnadenlos effizient, aber zugleich anfällig für Selbstzweifel und Einsamkeit, Albträume und Zukunftssorgen. Seinem Therapeuten gegenüber gibt er sich als "Troubleshooter" eines großen Unternehmens aus, aber sein eigentliches Metier ist Mord.

Jimmie John Hall wasn't anything until he was a killer, and Betty Dienhardt wasn't anything until she met Jimmie John Hall. When they get together, sparks fly and bullets follow. The first to go are Betty's parents, but Betty isn't bothered. She only wants to be with her man - the first person to ever make her feel special. They set off on a cross-country spree, killing for gas money and food, killing to swap their car for one the police aren't looking for. As the dragnet draws tighter they only grow closer, riding a road that leads to death because death has surrounded them all the time.

Even before Lawrence Block could rest on his laurels from "In Sunlight or In Shadow", a question arose. What would he do for an encore Suppose each author was invited to select a painting from the whole panoply of visual art - from the cave drawings at Lascaux to a contemporary abstract canvas on which the paint has barely dried. And what a dazzling response!

In the third installment of his acclaimed anthology series, master of crime fiction Lawrence Block has gathered together the best talent from popular fiction to produce an anthology of short stories based on masterpieces of American art. Among the star-studded lineup of writers you'll find Jerome Charyn, Jane Hamilton, Christa Faust, John Sandford, Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Charles Ardai, Barry Malzberg, and Janice Eidus.

Well, here’s what the blurb for the audiobook says: “Carla is a beautiful girl. She was plucked from the obscurity of a Polish slum to be the wife of a wealthy man—a man who seemingly gives her everything a wife could want. Except the one thing that she needs most: the pleasure she burns for while he snores beside her, the passion that only a lover can give. “But adultery seems impossible until, suddenly, it happens. When she seduces a filling-station attendant, ruining her clothes in the grease of a mechanic’s floor, she starts to spin out of control. He is the first but not the ...

I can trace the origin of A Week as Andrea Benstock to two distinct sources. The first inspired my attempting the book, while the second inspired its form. Let me consider the second first. In 1949, the Belgian author Georges Simenon published a novel called - well, who knows what he called it, but the English translation bore the title - Four Days in a Lifetime. I must have read it sometime in the late 1950s, because what I recall of the experience is that I was in my parents’ house on Starin Avenue at the time.

It's a crime that Times Square dives aren't private investigator Chip Harrison's usual hangouts. Tulip Willing is the star attraction at the Treasure Chest, and also Chip's newest client. It seems she wants cover for a mysterious stranger who's been scaring her out of her clothes. Cherry Bounce, another dancer at the Treasure Chest, is shot dead in the act. Chip finds himself on the trail of a killer who's eager to trap the street-wise detective and strip him of his livelihood forever...

Scanning the world's literature, including the vast library of forbidden books, John Warren Wells provides a searching and comprehensive overview of human sexuality. Chapters include: The Endless Search for Eros, The Techniques of Provoking Desire, Positions for Coitus, Extracoital Copulation, Masturbation, Pluralistic Sex Practices, and more. Introduction by Benjamin Morse, M.D.

The sexual upheaval of the 1970s was a remarkable turning point in the evolution of contemporary sexual behavior. As much as anyone, John Warren Wells stalked the barricades of this social revolution. He met the players, and let them pour their stories into his sympathetic ear. From the original publisher's edition:" The Taboo Breakers is a penetrating, unbiased study of these modern "swingers." Just what do they do, and with whom, and why? Are they fools and sinners, the shock troops of a new sexual revolution, hell-bent hedonists piling one thrill upon another? Or are they merely ...

Lawrence Block on PASSION NIGHTMARE: “In July of 1959 I left Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I had just put in a third year at Antioch College. I’d spent one trimester editing the school’s weekly newspaper, with mixed results, and the other two largely neglecting some academic courses. “It did not go well. I’d dropped out of school a year previously, to keep and extend a summer job at a New York literary agency. By the time I got back to Antioch I’d written and sold a dozen stories and a couple of novels, and that’s what I was interested in, along with strong drink and illegal ...

Lawrence Block on AFTERTHOUGHTS 2.0: AFTERTHOUGHTS began in 2011, when I first began self-publishing titles from my voluminous backlist. I packed it with forewords and afterwords and essays and articles about the work, and arranged for its distribution as an ebook. Here's wwhat the publisher had to day about it at the time: "In a career spanning more than fifty years, Lawrence Block has produced more than one hundred books, ranging in genre from hard-boiled detective stories to pseudonymous erotica. Collected here for the first time are more than forty-five afterwords from the works that ...