Astonishing, isn’t it, that the marriage didn’t last?
Years later, Don collaborated with Brian Garfield on Gangway!, a comic western. That inspired Don’s definition of collaboration as a process consisting of twice the work for half the money.
And then, years after that, some reader turned up at a signing and told me he thought Don and I should collaborate on a Bernie Rhodenbarr / John Dortmunder adventure. Readers are always making suggestions and I always hate them, but this one struck me as brilliant. Two professional criminals, both featured in lighthearted crime fiction—what could be a more natural combination?
But I could never get Don to go for it. At one point I wrote a first chapter, hoping it would get him into the spirit of things, but it didn’t. He wasn’t interested.
His initial objection was simple enough. The Bernie Rhodenbarr books were first person, the Dortmunder books third. A combination first- /third-person novel would read as if it had been designed by a Congressional committee.
I thought it would work just fine, but he wouldn’t hear of it. A few years passed, and it struck me that nowhere was it carved in stone that Bernie had to narrate his stories. I could write about him in the third person.
Don allowed that might work, then, and he’d give it some real thought when he had finished his current projects. And he may have meant it, or he may have been polite, but in any case nothing ever came of it. I don’t know that the world’s any the poorer for the book we might have written, but I’ll bet we’d have had fun with it.
As I write these lines, Don’s been gone a year and a week. And our three joint novels are now available in this handsome hardcover edition. I’m happy about this, and I can only hope that Don would be pleased as well.
I can’t be sure of that, as he hasn’t had any say in the matter. I do know that, in recent years, he became increasingly open about pseudonymous work that he’d previously kept in the dark. Part of this may have stemmed from a recognition of the inevitability of it all. There are people out there practicing a weird form of scholarship on the crap we wrote—we, who thought of it so little. A quick Internet search can unearth no end of information about our early work, some of which may even be true. The genie, alas, is out of the bottle and the toothpaste is out of the tube. And, really, what difference does it make?
When Don agreed to have Hard Case Crime reissue some of his early books—crime novels, I should point out, that had nothing to apologize for—a mutual friend asked him why he thought this a good idea. The money didn’t amount to much, after all, and the work was not as good as what he’d produced since then, and—
“The difference between being in print and out of print,” Don told him, “is the same as the difference between being alive and being dead.”
So I don’t think it’s too great an abuse of our friendship that I’ve shepherded these three books back into print, and am now sending them on their way into a new life as ebooks.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) 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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2010 by Lawrence Block and the Estate of Donald E. Westlake
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0979-0
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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So Willing Page 15
