Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Lawrence Block reports: “THE SIN-DAMNED was one of the early Andrew Shaw titles, published by Nightstand Books in sometime in 1960. The cover, like that of many of its contemporaries, is the work of Harold W. McCauley. “While I can recognize the text as my work, I can’t claim to recall writing it. Every day the great hoard of things I don’t remember grows incrementally larger, and writing this novel has long since been a part of it. I do know, though, that someone else supplied the title, probably some editor in publisher Bill Hamling’s employ. It could have been Harlan Elison, or...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Lawrence Block remembers: “Sexpot! was my sixth book for Nightstand, my sixth as Andrew Shaw. Aside from admiring Harold W. McCauley’s cover—and isn't it a perfect example of what it is?—I can’t say I ever really looked at the book after I’d gathered the pages of typescript together, hailed a taxi, and hand-delivered them to my agent at 580 Fifth Avenue. “Or did I put them in the mail? It depends whether I wrote Sexpot! before the spring of 1960, while I was living on Starin Avenue in Buffalo, or later, after I’d married and moved to 110 West 69th Street in New York. ...

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 ...

In her fifth appearance, “Waitress Wanted,” Kit Tolliver had to leave Phoenix in a hurry. She’d had sex with her boss, and that sealed his fate; the guy had about as much survival potential as a male Black Widow spider. Now she’s in Washington State, renting a room in a comfortable suburban house, and ready to hook up with one of the men on her list. A Chicagoan, he slept with her a couple of years ago in New York, and got out of town before she could seal the deal. And now he’s right here in Kirkland, and he doesn’t know it, but he’s about to get lucky. Except the clown ...

When Kit Tolliver met Alvin Kirkaby, he looked cute in his military uniform. He was on his way to an overseas assignment, and maybe it was an uncharacteristic attack of patriotism that led her to break her usual pattern and spare his life. But now he’s just a name on her list, and home from the wars, so all she has to do is head down to Hedgemont, North Carolina, and give her soldier boy an honorable discharge. Then she walks into his trailer and finds out things are a little more complicated than that... All of Kit’s homicidal (and increasingly erotic) adventures are collected in book ...

Meet the girls who fly the friendly skies: Ali: "All men seem to think that if they've had sex with a girl once they can have her any time they want. They're wrong." Beri: "I know a librarian who makes me feel positively sheltered and stews who've spent years in the air without losing their virginity." Connie: "We see men at their worst, grabby and aggressive. I've never had sex with a man." Donna: "If you're looking to get married, there's no better way--though I don't know why men want to marry stewardesses." Elaine: "I hate to open my eyes in the morning. First I have to guess whether ...

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 ...

Some Days You Get the Bear is listed in various bibliographical sources as having first appeared in Penthouse, but I don't believe it did. The story SOLD to Penthouse, and sat in inventory forever, until my agent asked for its return. Then in 1993 It became the title story in my third collection of short fiction, published by William Morrow, and later turned up in my omnibus collection of short fiction, Enough Rope. It's not a crime story, nor is it erotic, so that makes it not what you might expect from me. If I were to categorize it—and I'd just as soon not—I'd probably call it a ...

In the wake of the great popular success of Coffee, Tea, or Me (purportedly by a pair of personable airline hostesses, but actually written by the equally personable Donald Bain), Irwin Stein of Lancer Books asked John Warren Wells to turn his attention to the same topic. Would that all requests from publishers were as pleasantly fulfilled. Here’s the blurb that appeared on the Lancer edition: “Did she serve you yesterday? “She is every man's dream mistress, pleasant and poised, cool under stress, always smiling and--because she is booked on another flight tomorrow morning--disposable...

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 ...

Sheesh. What a lousy title. Flesh Mob was published by Midnight Reader, a fellow imprint of Nightstand Books, in 1962. I can tell at a glance that it’s my work, although I don’t specifically recall writing it. And I must have put a title on it, but I an assure you that it wasn’t Flesh Mob. It could only have been the inspiration of some editor in Illinois. Several notables filled that role over the years, including Earl Kemp, A. J. Budrys, and Harlan Ellison, but it’s hard to imagine any of those three making a eureka moment of Flesh Mob. For years it struck me as merely a bad title...

Sheldon Lord began his career with CARLA (#5 in the Collection of Classic Erotica),published by Harry Shorten’s Midwood Books in 1958. Just about a year later he wrote CAMPUS TRAMP (CCL #7) for William Hamling’s Nightstand Books, for whom he’d morphed into Andrew Shaw. And young Mr. Lord’s first book for yet a third publisher, Beacon, was APRIL NORTH (CCL #4).Each publisher wanted more from the guy. Beacon’s request for a second book was remarkably specific. They had a title in mind—COMMUNITY OF WOMEN—and a theme. Their notion was that no end of interesting and attractive ...