Mostrando resultados por autor "Lawrence Block" en Todas las categorías

Because they were collected into a single hardcover volume published by Subterranean Press, a good number of readers are acquainted with my three collaborations with Donald E. Westlake. That's not the case with CIRCLE OF SINNERS, a similar joint effort undertaken with another longstanding (and, I'm pleased to say, still standing) friend and colleague, Hal Dresner. Unlike two of the Block/Westlake titles, CIRCLE OF SINNERS did not bear a joint byline; Nightstand issued it as "by Don Holliday," which was in fact Hal's pen name. (To increase the level of confusion, one book of mine was ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

Is he an out-and-out mincing homosexual? Or a closet queen? A transvestite masquerading in full make-up and dress as a woman? A muscle-bound stud? Or is he just your normal American boy who happens to be in the business for himself, selling desirable merchandise--his body--at prices the market will bear? In THE MALE HUSTLER John Warren Wells talks frankly and at length to seven male prostitutes. They tell exactly what they do for a living; how they find their clients, what they think about their clients--and themselves; they talk about money, about men, about women. This book is a ...

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...

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...

One of this book's six versatile ladies sums it up like this: "When we first began to get into swinging, our whole orientation was innocent, and essentially limited to the idea of mate-swapping. That was what we thought swinging was about--you met with another couple, paired off, and had sex. We never considered the possibility that homosexual relations would be involved. Well, you live and you learn. I found out today I liked making love to another woman. Today I can't envision swinging without lesbian relations. And I understand that ninety-two percent of wives who get into swinging also ...

Lawrence Block remembers: “Well, maybe that’s not the best way to kick things off, because the fact of the matter is that Lawrence Block remembers virtually nothing about writing BUTCH. I have no difficulty recognizing it as my own work, and I remember hanging the title Butch on one of my monthly titles for Bill Hamling’s Nightstand Books—and, wonder of wonders, noting its appearance on the printed volume. “It’s not a bad title, but I don’t know that this was the right book for it. In Her Brogues Oxford-Style, who uploaded Harold McCauley’s reasonably fetching artwork to ...

For the most part, Kit Tolliver’s homicidal lifestyle suits her just fine. But her recent North Carolina reunion with a wounded veteran (“One Kind Favor I Ask of You”) has left her with her own verion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She’s found a room in a cheap hotel in the Rust Belt, she’s working a minimum-wage job, and she’s letting time take time. But a girl gets restless, you know? And one night she goes out for a walk, and a car pulls up, and a guy rolls down the window and offers her a ride. “Don’t get in the car,” a little voice says. But she gets in the car......

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 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-...

One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: Shadows.

KEPT So you’re unemployed, fresh off a construction crew in Albany, and standing on a Thruway ramp trying to thumb a ride, and a babe in a Cadillac convertible stops for you. Hey, these things happen. They never happened to me, but never mind. For you it's different. You’re Mark Taggert and you’ve got the good sense to get in the car, and it changes your life. The girl’s Elaine Rice, and she’s gorgeous and sexy, and you wind up in her Park Avenue apartment, and you go to bed, and the chemistry is right, and there’s only one problem. She’s rich. Too rich for you to be ...