Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

It's a jungle out there. Literally. At least for Evan Tanner, an eternally sleepless, sometime superspy, who finds himself in Africa on the trail of the AWOL ruler of tiny Modonoland. It seems the petty despot's gone missing, and he's taken the state treasury along with him. No stranger to impossible missions and international peril, Tanner's been in over his head before. This time, however, he's in imminent danger of being buried alive. And it all has to do with the CIA, white supremacists, moderate revolutionaries...and a blond jungle bombshell named (no joke!) Sheena.

Die Sünden der Väter" stellt Matthew Scudder vor, jenen New Yorker Privatdetektiv, der von Liam Neeson in "Ruhet in Frieden" auf der Leinwand verkörpert wurde. Eine junge Prostituierte wurde getötet und der mutmaßliche Mörder hat sich in seiner Gefängniszelle erhängt. Auf der Suche nach Antworten wendet sich der Vater des toten Mädchens an Scudder. Dieser erste Band der preisgekrönten Reihe wurde ursprünglich 1976 veröffentlicht, die deutsche Ausgabe ist aber bereits seit vielen Jahren vergriffen.

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.

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.

O Rose thou art sick. /The invisible worm, /That flies in the night /In the howling storm: /Has found out thy bed /Of crimson joy: /And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy. Those eight lines constitute the complete text of “The Sick Rose,” published by William Blake in Songs of Experience in 1794. I took to Blake early on, and thought Of Crimson Joy would make a dandy title. I accordingly fastened it on this novel when I sent the manuscript to Harry Shorten at Midwood.

Lawrence Block's new collection assembles seven works of fiction produced over a period of 60 years.

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.

The Adulterers features George and Mona Sutton, a sexually incompatible couple on their way to a Mexican divorce. But they meet a helpful guide named Ernesto, and that changes everything. Ernesto took George to a live sex show, and it made an impression on the fellow. And, not too long afterward, Mona drank enough rum and Coca-Cola to float a light cruiser, and wound up as the sex slave of El Tigre.

One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: Shadows.

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.

When a man called Bill spots a sign in a restaurant window, he grabs his carry-on and gets off his bus. Within an hour he's got himself a job as a short-order cook, and a start on a whole new life in Cross Creek, Montana. Things just fall into place. He applies for a library card, and the next thing you know he's having dinner with the librarian. One thing leads to another, and he can see a whole new life stretching out before him.

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....

Hard Case Crime, die außergewöhnliche Krimi-Reihe als exklusive und ungekürzte Hörbuchproduktionen: Willkommen in einer Welt, in der die Sonne nur scheint, um tiefe Schatten zu werfen und in den Augen verkaterter, übernächtigter Männer zu brennen. Einer düsteren, brutalen Welt der Ganoven und Huren, in der die scheinbar ehrbaren Bürger moralisch verkommen sind, die Polizisten sowieso.

Sie ist ein einziger Traum - für einen Mann aber wird sie zum Albtraum. Johnny Hayden und Doug Rance wollen Immobilienunternehmer Wallace Gunderman um sein gesamtes Vermögen bringen...

Karen Winslow is starting over. But she's not sure how to move forward when her deepest secret haunts her and keeps her from enjoying her carefree youth. She's a sweet but troubled young thing, and not until she meets Rae, a confident young lesbian, does she realize what she's been missing. Meanwhile, she's also intrigued by a man and can't help but wonder if a normal life will put an end her sorrows for good.

Lawrence Block, writing as John Warren Wells, introduces you to men and women who are trying every possible kind of sexual combination to make marriage work in bold new ways. Threesomes. Open adultery. Swapping. Group marriage. And a hundred variants of every possible sexual experiment within the marital relationship, surpassing the most erotic fiction.

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.

"Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood - Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book's contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan's Inwood and Charles Ardai's Upper East Side, to Justin Scott's Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin's Greenwich Village."

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.

William Charles Croydon, a convicted murderer sentenced to death, amuses himself by exchanging correspondence with the misguided women who send him fan mail. But soon even that loses its attraction, and so he begins to write to the brother of his victim, Paul Danridge. At first, Danridge doesn’t reply, so he writes again, and again. After ignoring the letters initially, Dandridge finally can’t help himself and begins writing back.