Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

After a night out with friends, Matthew Scudder is reminded of an enigmatic case he had while still working as uniformed policeman. The case in question involves the suicide of a devout Catholic man in front of his wife and children... or was it a murder?

Matthew Scudder gets hired by a fellow bar patron to prove his innocence. Salesman Tommy Tillary is a 45-year-old philanderer with a Manhattan girlfriend and a Brooklyn wife. So when Tommy becomes a suspect in the murder of his wife, it's up to Matt to find the real killer.

Matthew Scudder reminisces of his uniformed days and of the night he bent the law to help some "friends of a friend." When a friendly game of poker turns deadly, Scudder is called upon to solve the murder…and hide the body.

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.

For almost three years, novelist and short-story writer Lawrence Block's monthly column, "Generally Speaking," was one of the most popular features in Linn's Stamp News. A general collector of pre-1940 issues, Block had the entire world of stamps as his subject, and he turned in 33 columns before he decided it was time to stop. But Keller, the author's fictional character, never lost his enthusiasm for philately. A wistful and introspective killer for hire, Keller rekindled a boyhood passion for stamps at the end of Hit Man, the first of a series of books about him. 

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.

A 25-year-old cold case of art theft and murder is re-examined when Matthew Scudder and his wife, Elaine, encounter the main suspect in Florence, Italy. Throughout the trip, Scudder comes to realize the killer’s motive and takes the steps towards proving the suspect’s guilt.

Karlis, Tanner's comrade in the Latvian Army in Exile, is pining for his true love, a gymnast who can't get out of the Soviet Union. So Tanner sneaks through a hole in the Iron Curtain, meets the child he unwittingly fathered on an earlier trip to Macedonia, smuggles a dissident intellectual out of Yugoslavia, adds to his retinue a six-year-old Lithuanian girl, who'd be the rightful heir to the Lithuanian throne if there ever were one, and winds up not with one Latvian gymnast but with a whole company of them.

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.

To escape punishment for a murder he didn't mean to commit, insurance man Don Barshter has to take on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. But can he find safety in the skin of another man...a worse man...a sinner man?

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the 1948 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, this gripping murder mystery is a much-loved classic. In 1940s Chicago, a man is killed in the midst of a night-long bender, caught between barrooms in what appears to be a mugging gone awry. The police aren’t...

Since the 1970s, Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning novels and short fiction featuring Matthew Scudder. Now, with both himself and his detective half a century older, the author found himself charged with writing a book about his protagonist. And he decided he wasn’t the right person for the job.

Keller ist ein Killer. Durch und durch Profi, cool, selbstsicher, kompetent, zuverlässig. Aber er ist auch eine vielschichtige Persönlichkeit: in sich gekehrt und zurückgezogen, eiskalt und gnadenlos effizient, aber zugleich anfällig für Selbstzweifel und Einsamkeit, Albträume und Zukunftssorgen. Seinem Therapeuten gegenüber gibt er sich als "Troubleshooter" eines großen Unternehmens aus, aber sein eigentliches Metier ist Mord.

While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a 60-year career. Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linn's Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives. Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails is what he's got left over.

Here's the book that started it all: A Girl Called Honey - and if listening to the saga of Honor Mercy Bane brings you a small fraction of the fun we had writing it, you'll be back right away to scoop up So Willing and Sin Hellcat.

What leads one person to collect stamps and another coins, one fine art and another butterflies? Who can say? But one thing is certain: those who've got the collecting bug care passionately - sometimes violently - about the objects of their obsession. 

In seinem vierten Abenteuer nimmt sich Matthew Scudder - nun in deutscher Neuübersetzung - eines ungelösten Falles an, mit dem er schon Jahre früher als Detective beim NYPD befasst war. Louis Pinell, der vor Kurzem gefasste Eispickel-Mörder, gibt freiherzig zu, vor neun Jahren sieben junge Frauen ermordet zu haben - aber er schwört, dass ein Nachahmer für den Mord an Barbara Ettinger verantwortlich war. Scudder glaubt ihm. Die Spur zu Ettingers wirklichem Mörder ist verworren, dunkel und voller Gefahren ... und sogar noch kälter als die Leiche, der er Gerechtigkeit verschaffen will.

I can trace the origin of A Week as Andrea Benstock to two distinct sources. The first inspired my attempting the book, while the second inspired its form. Let me consider the second first. In 1949, the Belgian author Georges Simenon published a novel called - well, who knows what he called it, but the English translation bore the title - Four Days in a Lifetime. I must have read it sometime in the late 1950s, because what I recall of the experience is that I was in my parents’ house on Starin Avenue at the time.

Broadway Can Be Murder started out to be a novel based on Johnny Midnight, a TV series which everyone has long since forgotten. Except, of course, that nothing manages to be forgotten in the Internet Age. I, whose job it was to knock out 50,000 words of Johnny Midnightish prose and dialogue, had forgotten when it ran and who was in it, but Google took no time at all to remind me that the title role was played by Edmund O’Brien, and that the series ran during the first nine months of 1960. I was in New York, newly married, living at 110 West 69th Street.

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