Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

From the revered The New York Times best-selling author comes a touching, insightful, and humorous memoir of an unlikely racewalker and world traveler. Lawrence Block is the author of bestselling novels featuring unforgettable characters such as the hit man Keller, private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and time traveler Evan Tanner. But much before he became an author, he was a walker.

The Greatest Mysteries of All Time, Volume 4 is the fourth in a series featuring the finest short story mystery fiction by the most acclaimed writers, past and present. From Lawrence Block, Sara Paretsky, Georges Simenon, Edward D. Hoch and everyone in between, this unique collection, edited by multi-award-winning mystery connoisseur Otto Penzler, is a delightful mixture of mystery and suspense.

Florida private eye Doak Miller agreed to help the local cops by posing as a hit man to catch a woman looking to get rid of her husband. But then he met the wife - and fell, hard. Now he's plotting with her to commit a murder that could net them millions of dollars and the chance to be together. But to pull it off under the watchful eyes of the police, it'll have to be the perfect crime....

The story I wrote, set in the same Hell's Kitchen neighborhood that's home to my detective hero, Matthew Scudder, was "If You Can't Stand the Heat". (And in fact the bar where the story begins bears a definite resemblance to Grogan's Open House, where Matt's friend Mick Ballou holds court.) I didn't know very much about the young woman who stars in "If You Can't Stand the Heat", not even her name. I learned more as I found myself moved to record further adventures for her.

Assassinations, political upheaval, student riots, and conservative rage. In the thick of the Cold War it was the perfect recipe for revolution, and it only took a gentle push to send a nation toppling into dictatorship. But what if it happened in the United States? Miles Dorn can make it so. A hired killer with no past and no future, he steps out of retirement and sets his sights on the political leaders holding America back from the brink.

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.

The craft of writing is a lot like spinning a web: You take threads and weave them skillfully together, and only you know where this intricate network of twists and turns begin and how it will end. Now, with Lawrence Block's expert advice, you can learn this art of entrapping your reader in a maze of fascinating fiction. Spider, Spin Me a Web is the perfect companion volume to Block's previous book on writing, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which Sue Grafton noted "should be a permanent part of every writer's library".

Hollywood vs. The Author is a collection of non-fiction anecdotes by authors who’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the development room firsthand - some who have successfully managed to straddle the two worlds, seeing their works morph into the kinds of feature films and TV shows that make them proud, and others who stepped blindsided into that room after selling their first or second novels. All the stories in this collection illustrate the great divide between the world of literature and the big or small screen.

I wrote three paperback original novels for Berkley under the pen name Jill Emerson, two of them in diary form, the third a presumed collaborative novel written in concert by the three viewpoint characters. These were fun to do and worked out well, and they led to Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. I riffed on the experience of my friend George Dickerson, who, like the novel's protagonist, had the magazine he was editing folded out from under him.

When Don Westlake and I were starting out as writers, we both served an apprenticeship writing erotic novels for Harry Shorten at Midwood Books and Bill Hamling at Nightstand. (I was Sheldon Lord for Midwood and Andrew Shaw for Nightstand, while Don was Alan Marshall for both publishers. Note though that the presence of either name upon a book is no guarantee that one of us wrote it. Both of us made arrangements whereby lesser writers would submit works under our names—and I know it's hard to believe that any writers were less than we were back then, but it's true.) Well. We'd become ...

Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge. And, most important, time to do his dreaming while he's wide awake.

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.

From Ian Rankin to Joe Lansdale, Seanan McGuire to David Morrell, each author reveals the dark truths and buried secrets that make institutions of higher learning such a hotbed of controversy. You'll encounter plagiarism, sexual misconduct, and brutal competition - not to mention secret societies, cover-ups of murder, and one near-future course of study that makes The Handmaid's Tale look like Mother Goose. So: collect your supplies, plan your schedule, and prepare to pull an all-nighter, because The Darkling Halls of Ivy is required listening.

An MWA Grand Master and a multiple winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Maltese Falcon awards, Lawrence Block’s reflections and observations come from over a half century as a writer of best-selling crime fiction. Several of his novels have been filmed, most recently A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson.

And at one point we decided it might be fun to do a novel together. Not by thinking it out and talking through it and, you know, collaborating in a serious artistic manner. Our method was simpler. One of us would write a chapter, and then the other would write a chapter to come after it, and back and forth, like that, until we had a book. It worked, and by God it was fun. The first of our efforts was A Girl Called Honey, and it started when I wrote a chapter and sent it to Don. And so on, and we stopped when we had a book and sent it to Henry Morrison.

When Joyce Kendall arrives in New York, fresh out of Clifton College in Iowa, she has a job and an apartment waiting for her. The job's as a first reader for Armageddon Publications. The apartment's at 21 Gay Street, and the small Federal-period house is already home to a lesbian couple, Jean Fitzgerald and Terri Leigh, and an out-of-work newspaperman, Pete Galton. The relationships of these four people under one roof add up to a fast-paced story that is not only satisfying fiction but a rare window on Bohemian life in the late 1950s.

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!

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.

Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge.

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.