Pulp Poem of the Week

Married people
always kill
one another.
Sometimes
it takes them
fifty years.

          Lawrence Block
          A Stab in the Dark
          1981

Pulp Poem of the Week

A favor’s no good
unless
you pay for it.

          Lawrence Block
          A Stab in the Dark
          1981

Pulp Poem of the Week

for too many years
the only exercise
I had got was
bending my elbow

          Lawrence Block
          Time to Murder and Create
          1976

Pulp Poem of the Week

It is is not
necessary to know
what a person is a afraid of.
It is
enough to know
the person is afraid.

          Lawrence Block
          The Sins of the Fathers
          1976

Book Review: Lawrence Block, A Stab in the Dark (1981)

Spoilers follow: I feel like a broken record, or maybe a corrupted MP3 file, waiting for the great series that I know is coming but is not quite here yet. In A Stab in the Dark, the fourth Matthew Scudder novel, Scudder takes on a cold case involving a young woman stabbed with an ice pick. Scudder forms a semi-ludicrous theory as to who and why, and when Scudder confronts the who with this theory, he obligingly confesses. Case closed. Along the way, Lawrence Block engages in one of his favorite narrative perversions: He repeatedly dangles a compelling narrative possibility before his readers—in this case, Scudder interviewing a jailed serial killer—and when the event finally occurs, the narrative skips over it. (For a jaw-dropping example of this phenomenon, see Killing Castro.) At the end of A Stab in the Dark, Scudder goes to the door of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but he does not go inside. I have a guess as to the significance of the title of the sixth novel in this series (When the Sacred Ginmill Closes), but I don’t want to stick out my neck too far. Grade C+

Book Review: Lawrence Block, In the Midst of Death (1976)

Three books into the Matthew Scudder series, I suspect that there may be some self-fulfilling prophecy at work in my reactions thus far: I have been told many times that the series begins relatively slowly before hitting its stride with book five (Eight Million Ways to Die). Is this what I am experiencing because it is what I am expecting, or is this what I am experiencing because it is true? I know that my semi-negative reaction to the first Scudder novel (The Sins of the Fathers) was sincere, as I have little patience for Freudian claptrap in any context. I liked the second novel (Time to Murder and Create) a bit better, if only for the absence of Dr. Freud, and now I like the third novel a bit better still: the plot of In the Midst of Death is less artificial than the earlier novels, and there is some significant development in Scudder’s character beyond his cycles of drinking and tithing. Nevertheless, I still feel as though I’m just killing time waiting for book five. Grade: B-

Book Review: Lawrence Block, Time to Murder and Create (1976)

In Time to Murder and Create, the second Matthew Scudder novel, a dead man leaves Scudder payment to find his killer, and our hero pursues the case because he is compulsively honorable, even if he is not particularly ethical. Scudder’s plan is to tempt the killer into attempting to kill Scudder, thereby exposing the killer’s identity. By all rights, Scudder ought to die in this novel; he is, after all, a drunk who takes no particular measures to keep himself safe. Perhaps this is a half-assed suicide attempt on Scudder’s part, though when someone tries to kill him, his reflex is to fight for his own life. After Scudder fails to get himself killed, he does his best to identify the killer with his ratiocinative powers vacillating between anemic and otherworldly as the novel’s plot requires. Quick, entertaining, not entirely satisfying. Grade: B-

Book Review: Lawrence Block, The Sins of the Fathers (1976)

Fans of the Matthew Scudder series all seem to agree on two things: (1) You must read the books in publication order, and (2) It takes four or five novels for the series to get really, really good. So I obediently begin with the first novel in the series, and, not expecting anything great, I am not too disappointed. The limited cast of characters combined with the title The Sins of the Fathers leave little doubt where this novel is headed, and that’s where it heads. I’m trusting that later novels in the series (i.e., the ones that are supposed to be really, really good) will feature more Scudder and less Freud. Grade: C-

Book Note: Lawrence Block, Afterthoughts (2011)

Afterthoughts collects the many afterwords that Lawrence Block has written mostly for his out-of-print works that have become available as ebooks. Not surprisingly, given Block’s recent popularity, these works skew toward the beginning of his career. Because Block chose not to take the time to turn Afterthoughts into a coherent memoir, he offers it for 99 cents and makes no bones about what it is: an extended advertisment for his backlist. In return for that bargain price, you are not allowed to complain that you hear certain stories over and over again, sometimes verbatim, as they are repeated in the afterwords to different novels from the same time period. Everything is informal and chatty and reads quickly, and you will be consistently entertained (if you can put up with the repetition). On top of that, the book serves Block’s stated purpose well: You will likely finish Afterthoughts with a good idea of which Block ebooks you want to buy.

Pulp Poem of the Week

Burglary, I thought,

and the more I thought

the more I liked it.

It seemed somehow akin

to writing—

you set your own hours,

you avoided human contact,

and, if you were successful,

you managed to touch the lives

of people you never even met.

Lawrence Block

Introduction to The Burglar Who Quoted Kipling

1999

Pulp Poem of the Week

A guy does what he has to do
and no more.
You've got an out now.
You can stay in Cuba now
and enjoy yourself.
Without that out
you'd be braver than hell.
If you've got a guy cornered
then he's brave.

Lawrence Block
Fidel Castro Assassinated (a.k.a. Killing Castro)
1961

Book Review: Lawrence Block, Killing Castro (1961)

This book is a strange hybrid. In the main, it is the story of five men hired to assassinate Fidel Castro for a pot of $100,000. It does not matter who kills Castro or how; if Castro is killed, whichever of the assassins make it back to Miami will split the money. Their story is intercut with a narrative of Fidel Castro's rise to power, though this primer of Cuban history is more or less irrelevant to the main plot of the book--Castro's story contributes to the word count more than anything else. The book's biggest failing, however, comes in its last few pages. Until the end, the story of the five assassins is told with competence. At the end, however, Lawrence Block makes a choice in narrative perspective that seems designed to dampen the drama of the novel's climax as much as possible. Originally published as Fidel Castro Assassinated by Lee Duncan. Grade: C-

Book Review: Lawrence Block, A Diet of Treacle (1961)

This is the fourth Lawrence Block novel that Hard Case Crime has rescued from oblivion, and the second that they have pulled from the morass of sleaze paperback publisher Beacon Books. The first three titles, Grifter's Game (1961; originally Mona), The Girl with the Long Green Heart (1965), and Lucky at Cards (1964; originally The Sex Shuffle) were well worth saving. Unforunately, A Diet of Treacle (1961; originally Pads Are for Passion) is a much inferior work. The early stages of the novel, which deal largely with beat ennui, are predictably tedious; the character arc of good girl Anita Carbone is not particularly believable; and the book's quick ending all but screams, "Hey, I've almost made my word count! Time to wrap this one up!" Memo to Hard Case Crime: This well appears to have run dry. Is it too late for you to un-publish Killing Castro and give some other writer a chance? Grade: D

Pulp Poem of the Week

The Good Humor man passed,

his wagon full of ice cream.

Maybe an ice cream

would taste good,

Joe mused.

Then again

maybe it wouldn't.

Go to hell,

Good Humor Man.

Lawrence Block

Pads Are for Passion

1961

Book Review: William Knoles, Jade Brothel (1961)

Background: I became interested in William Knoles (a.k.a. Clyde Allison) as a result of reading Feral House's Sin-a-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties. Earl Kemp, famed editor of sex paperbacks, claims that Knoles "was the best writer I ever worked with" (putting him above Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block) and that Greenleaf house editors took turns with him because "everyone wanted to be Clyde Allison's editor." But total trash is total trash, right? We'll see. I bought a random Clyde Allison novel for a song on eBay to see what it is like.

Review: Jade Brothel is the story of Dave Owens, a thoroughly loathesome American living in Thailand. Owens will do anything, legal or not, to earn a buck, and in his spare time, if he is otherwise unable to find a sex partner, his visits the brothel that he owns. But this book is not about the brothel, its title be damned. Rather, the main plot centers around Owens getting into the movie business with a Hollywood refugee named Jaybee, whom Owens plans eventually to kill in the name of more money. If Knoles had written this novel for Gold Medal, it might have been pretty good, but the requirements of the sleaze paperback formula make that almost impossible. And it's not just that the sex scenes are too many or too long or too forumulaic--it's also the repulsive pride that Dave Owens takes in narrating his conquests, which makes the sex scenes repulsive, too. But at least ***SPOILER ALERT*** it was nice at the end of the book when he got chewed up by crocodiles. Grade: D

Book Review: Lawrence Block, Lucky at Cards (1964)

With reprints like this one, Hard Case Crime fulfills its mission in the universe. Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block was originally published in 1964 as The Sex Shuffle by Sheldon Lord. The original title was terrible, and the pseudonym was not even to specific to Block--it was a name used by several house writers at sleaze publisher Beacon Books. In sum, this book might easily have fallen forever out of print, which would have been a shame. Lucky at Cards mines familiar territory with a great deal of skill: The book's narrator is a cardsharp who plots a score that could allow him to retire, and Block does a fine job of humanizing a character who, in other hands, might have seemed despicable and nothing more. Park some of your Hard Case Crime dollars here. Grade: B