Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

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 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 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.

Matthew Scudder and his wife, Elaine, talk of the night they met while listening to music in various places around their part of New York.

Anita Carbone was a good girl - and it bored her. That's why she took the long subway ride down to Greenwich Village, home of the Beats and the stoners, home to every kind of misfit and dropout and free spirit you could imagine. It was where she met Joe Milani, the troubled young war veteran with the gentle touch. But it was also where she met his drug-dealing roommate - a man whose unnatural appetites led to murder....

Four Lives at the Crossroads is the latest addition to the Collection of Classic Erotica. But it came very close to being shoehorned instead into the Classic Crime Library. Back in the late 1950s and early '60s, when I was finding myself as a writer and producing a great quantity of books under pen names, some of the books I wrote were as much crime fiction as they were erotica.

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.

An intense and gripping short story audiobook that delves into the unsettling psyche of a twisted individual, "A Fire at Night" by Lawrence Block narrated by Mike Vendetti is a chilling exploration of the mind of a deranged arsonist.

A missing person case brings private eye Roy Markham to the remote winter-bound college town of Cliff's End, New Hampshire. But what began as a routine investigation quickly becomes dark and dangerous. Six pornographic photos and a tidy little blackmail scheme result in a brutal and baffling murder, and no one is safe - especially Markham himself.

After spending her girlhood writing gentle and thoughtful novels of the lesbian experience (Shadows, Warm and Willing, Enough of Sorrow), Jill Emerson reinvented herself in the early 1970s, just when contemporary literature was experiencing an enormous flowering of sexuality.

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.

Lawrence Block on Lust Weekend: “LUST WEEKEND was written in 1962 and published that same year by Nightstand Books. The title’s an obvious play on THE LOST WEEKEND, Charles Jackson’s groundbreaking novel of alcoholism. The book was a sensation, as was the film adaptation starring Ray Milland. “The people at Nightstand generally changed the titles on my manuscripts. But LUST WEEKEND made the cut, and I’m sure I came up with the title first and wrote the book to fit. ‘Lust’ was a favorite word at Nightstand, where they wanted to excite the readers withoutd alarming the censors. ...

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.

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 ...

Kit Tolliver’s got a problem. Whenever she has sex with a man, she feels an irresistible urge to kill him. That’s fine, she enjoys the killing as much as the sex, but it does limit the possibilities for a satisfying long-term relationship. But she’s got a friend, a woman in Kirkland, Washington, and there’s a definite sexual undercurrent to the friendship. Is that a possibility? And would she even enjoy sex with a woman? And what would happen afterward? She’s in St. Louis, hoping a lesbian bar might hold the answer. And she’s not the bar’s only patron with a hidden agenda. ...

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 ...

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.

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-...

From the notebook of a female sex therapist: "The "patient" calls me this morning to confirm his appointment, arrived precisely at 11 a.m. He's 28, tax lawyer, divorced. Sex problems: periodic impotence, periodic premature ejaculation, occasional inability to reach climax. Diagnosis: general sexual insecurity. "We sit on couch, drink coffee. Neck a little. He has soft hands, a nice touch. Very breast-oriented. We get undressed, sit around naked, then go to bed and play with each other. He gets erection almost immediately but loses it early, then unable to get it back. "I tell him we'll cure...

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