Gigolo Johnny Wells

by Lawrence Block

  Sometimes the memories came.

  He would remember the days when he had all that money, and he would tell himself that they had not been good days, and then he would think that they must have been better than the ones he was living his way through now.

  He would remember a girl named Linda, and he would picture all the things that might have been, and he would get sick once more.

  The wine bottle was always there.

  It was always a cure.

  He always took it.

  THE END

  A New Afterword by the Author

  MY FIRST BOOK FOR Bill Hamling’s Nightstand Books, and Andrew Shaw’s first appearance in print, was Campus Tramp. I wrote it in the summer of 1959 in my furnished room at the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-Seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. That was a fascinating block at the time, before the southward expansion of Rockefeller Center performed a sort of corporate urban renewal. In another book (also by Andrew Shaw, and published by Nightstand) I listed the restaurants and other places of business on that one block. One of the Broadway columnists designated that particular block Dream Street, and while that sobriquet may have been fastened on other parts of Times Square, I always figured the guy had it right.

  There was, God knows, nothing fancy about the Rio, but it was a decent place, family owned and operated. A lot of Greek seamen stayed there when they made port in New York as well as the usual mix of up-and-comers and down-and-outers, in and out of the arts, that you’d get in a low-rent residential hotel. I only lived there for a month or two that summer, but two years later, when I was living uptown on Central Park West, I used a room at the Rio as an office.

  Campus Tramp may have been Andrew Shaw’s first book, but not mine. A little more than a year earlier I’d written a lesbian novel that Crest Books would publish as Strange Are the Ways of Love. Then I wrote Carla for Harry Shorten’s new operation, Midwood Tower, and returned to Antioch College for what would be my final year of college, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a three month stretch when I edited the college newspaper, and I gave that my full attention, but otherwise what I mostly did was drink and smoke dope and fool around with women.

  And write. Harry Shorten was crazy about Carla and wanted more, so instead of reading Humphry Clinker and Roderick Random and Joseph Andrews, I was writing A Strange Kind of Love and 69 Barrow Street and Born to Be Bad. I’d gone off to college in the first place so that I could become a writer, and I was damned if I was going to let my education get in the way of my work.

  When the school year ended I returned to New York and took a room at the Rio, and even as I was delivering the next Midwood book to my agent, he had an assignment for me. A new publisher, Nightstand Books, wanted a book and they’d pay seven hundred fifty dollars, which was a cut above the six hundred dollars I was getting from Shorten. Thus Campus Tramp.

  And the book went over fine with Hamling, who let me know via my agent that he could use a book a month from Andrew Shaw.

  A book a month. Maybe Harry Shorten would have taken a book of month from me, were I to write them that frequently, but Bill Hamling virtually insisted on it. Did it ever occur to me that I might have trouble turning out work at that rate? I honestly don’t think it ever did. The books had to be two hundred pages long, and it wasn’t that hard to produce twenty pages a day, and to do that five or six days a week. So do the math—two weeks to fulfill my obligation to Nightstand and two weeks to write the books I cared about—which probably meant crime fiction of one sort or another.

  Piece of cake.

  Let’s not forget there was ample frosting on that piece of cake, and it was sweet frosting indeed. You didn’t get rich writing books at seven hundred fifty dollars a pop, each of which netted you six hundred seventy-five dollars after your agent’s commission. (My agent at the time got more than his ten percent, we learned many years later. He also got a hefty packaging fee from Hamling.) You didn’t get rich but you didn’t go hungry, either, and this was at a time when big corporations were hiring college graduates for five thousand dollars a year. But corporations wouldn’t have hired me—I wasn’t a college graduate—and six hundred seventy-five dollars a month was a whole lot better than what they paid you to bag groceries.

  And it left me half the month to write something else! It would be nice to report that I devoted that second half of the month to serious fiction, or at least to fiction that I was serious about, but most of the time I spent it writing the odd book for Harry Shorten, or handling some assignment my agent came up with. Psychosexual case histories under a medical pen name. A quickie ghostwriting job for the publisher of Confidential magazine, who wanted me to cut and paste a bushel full of old magazine pieces into a book. An adventure novel for Monarch Books—Fidel Castro Assassinated!

  Nothing to make John Steinbeck eat his heart out.

  No matter. It wasn’t long before Hamling raised his boys to one thousand dollars a book. That was too good to turn down, and it all served another important function as well. It kept me from having to figure out what I really wanted to write.

  And what has any of this to do with Gigolo Johnny Wells?

  Well, I’m not sure. But thinking about the book has brought those Nightstand days into focus for me. It’s hard to see the picture when you’re standing inside the frame, and it’s easier to have some perspective on the time now that half a century (half a century!) has slipped by.

  I’ve often said that I don’t regret the books I wrote early on, or the time I spent writing them. I’ve always regarded those days as a paid apprenticeship. You learn how to write by writing, and that’s what I did and how I did it.

  At the same time, it seems to me that I stayed too long at the fair. Under the aegis of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where they always took the cash and let the credit go, I accepted the assignments and went for the sure money.

  The Nightstand books became part of my monthly routine, and in time the writing of them became itself routine. Each book was the work of ten writing days—or, if I buckled down and wrote forty pages a day instead of twenty, just five days work. They were spun, I’m sure, out of some unconscious synthesis of experience and imagination. I developed no end of tricks to fill pages rapidly, stacking up one-sentence paragraphs, ending chapters at the top rather than the bottom of a typed page, and letting conversations go on as long as the characters felt like nattering away at each other.

  My second daughter was born in May of 1963, and I had the obstetrician’s bill to pay. That month I did an extra book for Nightstand. I wrote eighty-five pages the first day, eighty the second, and finished the book early in the afternoon of the third day. I have no idea which book it was; two days later, the names of the characters and every detail of the plot had vanished from my memory. I don’t think the book ever imprinted there in the first place. I just channeled it onto the page, put it in the mail, and that was the end of it.

  Still, some of the books were better than others. Once in a while a character or situation resonated sufficiently with me that I did better work and produced a better book. I didn’t think anyone would notice, and barely noticed myself. But Gigolo Johnny Wells (which was published as Lover) was a cut above the rest, and I knew it at the time. I wasn’t tempted to try it somewhere else because it was still quite clearly a Nightstand book, but I sent it off feeling good about it, and whoever read it at Nightstand felt the same way. (Harlan Ellison, I believe. Harlan was Hamling’s anonymous editor for a stretch, before Algis Budrys took over. Gigolo Johnny Wells was published in 1961, so it would have been written that year or the year before, which would probably put it in Harlan’s time.)

  The editor read it, and liked it. And how did he reward me for my superior performance?

  He requested a sequel.

  You know, the last thing I wanted to do was write a second book about Johnny Wells. I’d already told the world all I had to say about him, and then some. But I had to write something, and this i
s what they wanted me to write, so I did it.

  And I wish I could figure out what became of it. All I remember about it is that Johnny went downhill. His life turned on him and I think either drink or drugs got hold of him; it wasn’t a pretty picture. At the end of the book, I made damn certain I’d never be asked to write further about the poor son of a bitch. By the time I typed The End, it had all ended forever for Gigolo Johnny. He no longer had a pulse, and I was spared turning him into a series character.

  But I can’t find the book. I wrote it, and Hamling published it, but I’ve no idea what he might have called it or where I might find a copy. If you run across it, let me know, will you? I won’t claim you’ll be performing a great service to American letters, but you’ll be doing me a favor.

  About the name.

  As the new title alone would suggest, the hero’s name is Johnny Wells. A couple of years after I wrote this book I began using the pseudonym John Warren Wells on psychosexual nonfiction books, mainly collections of fabricated case histories.

  There was no conscious connection between the character and the pen name. Three or four years separated the death of one and the emergence of the other, and I doubt I could have told you the character’s surname by the time I selected the pen name.

  During those years, I was writing eighteen or twenty books a year—a dozen for Nightstand, plus a batch for other houses. Each of those books had a slew of characters and all of those characters had names, and I’m sure I repeated names from time to time. I must have chosen both names, Johnny Wells and John Warren Wells, the way I picked most character names. I liked the way they sounded.

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

  Block and his wife, Lynne.

  Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

  Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.