Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

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.

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 ...

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 on GIRLS ON THE PROWL: “GIRLS ON THE PROWL was first published by Nightstand Books in 1961, with Andrew Shaw credited as author. Harold W. McCauley provided the cover art. The principal characters—one hesitates to characterize them as titular—are Saundra, Marilyn, and Joan. (Joan is the lesbian.) “A mere forty-three years later, THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL was first published by William Morrow in 2004, with Lawrence Block credited as author. Amy King provided the jacket design, Paul Oakley the jacket illustration, while the author photograph was the work of Athena ...

Ed London is the type of private investigator that you call to clean up the mess when your mistress turns up dead. But after he dumps a body in Central Park, it appears this case is still alive and kicking. Seems that the dead girl was in possession of something special that some very shady characters want back. Now Ed, along with his pretty actress friend Maddy, will have to crack the case before he ends up dead himself. But there's more than a murder here; there's missing jewels, Israeli intelligence, Nazi spies, and a host of double-dealing, backstabbing thieves.

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.

In Thirty, the novel pretended to be a diary. That worked fine, and the resultant narrative proved at once challenging and effortless to sustain. I enjoyed writing it, Berkley enjoyed publishing it - and they wanted something else. What they got in Threesome was a novel pretending to be a novel. The premise, as you’ll see, is that the book has been written by its three main characters, Harry and Rhoda and Priss, in the form of a lightly fictionalized chronicle of their own life as a menage a trois.

In “Clean Slate” (Kit Tolliver #4) Kit found her mission in life. There were five men who once slept with her and lived to tell the tale, and she’s determined to hunt them down and wipe them off the board of life. So far, so good. But what do you do when all you know about a guy is the name he gave you? She’d met him in Philadelphia, but he was in town on business, so all she really knew was that he was from someplace else. Good old Sid from Philadelphia, except he wasn’t from Philadelphia, and his name wasn’t Sid. Want to give that a whirl out on Google? Then Rita told her ...

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 ...

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.

You might be surprised to learn that back in 1961 Nightstand Books published an inquiry into the heartbreak of scoliosis, but—oh, hang on a minute. You say the title refers to characters who are not spinally but psychosexually bent?Oh.Well, never mind.Dave and Nancy Grantland look for all the world like happy couple leading a comfortable suburban lifestyle. And Lucy King, the regular babysitter for the Gavilans next door, looks for all the world like a normal teenager.But Dave’s lost interest in sex with his wife, as he increasingly becomes obsessed with the desire for a much younger ...

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.

“She was just a little freshman / Victim of Admission’s whim / Then she met an upperclassman—we won’t name him— / And she had a child by him. / Now he’s off in New York City / Rescued by the co-op plan. / While she walks the streets of Yellow Springs, Ohio, / Looking for another man.” Ah, they don’t write ‘em like that anymore, and it’s not hard to see why. And the sad story recounted in the song is not entirely unlike that of Linda Shepard, titular (so to speak) heroine of Campus Tramp.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Young David Forrester is a sex-obsessed freshman student at Upper Manhattan’s Columbia University, although the institution remains unnamed in the book. An upperclassman shepherds him through the loss his virginity, then steers him into a club of libertines. And, you know, one thing leads to another. But as far as I’m concerned, the most striking aspect of COLLEGE FOR SINNERS is that it seems to have been the occasion for some unwitting plagiarism on my part. The dramatist Moliere has a character who’s astonished, and not half-chuffed, to discover that all his life he’s been ...

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...

Lawrence Block remembers: “I wrote Campus Tramp in July of 1959. By then I had written four or five erotic novels for Midwood Tower Books, Harry Shorten’s new paperback publishing venture, all of them published under the pen name of Sheldon Lord. Campus Tramp was written for another publisher, William Hamling’s Nightstand Books, and I chose a new pen name for it—Andrew Shaw. “Before long young mister Shaw was writing a book a month for Nightstand. At one point I brought in a ghostwriter, a friend of my friend Don Westlake, taught him how to write erotic novels, and took a sliver ...