Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

For the most part, Kit Tolliver’s homicidal lifestyle suits her just fine. But her recent North Carolina reunion with a wounded veteran (“One Kind Favor I Ask of You”) has left her with her own verion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She’s found a room in a cheap hotel in the Rust Belt, she’s working a minimum-wage job, and she’s letting time take time. But a girl gets restless, you know? And one night she goes out for a walk, and a car pulls up, and a guy rolls down the window and offers her a ride. “Don’t get in the car,” a little voice says. But she gets in the car......

It is Kit Tolliver's oft-repeated role in life to hook up with a suitable male, go home with him, have richly satisfying and often inventive sex with him, and then kill him and take his money. She'd done so in three stories ("If You Can't Stand the Heat", set in Hell's Kitchen, "Rude Awakening," set in the Bronx, and "You Can Call Me Lucky," set in an Indian casino in Michigan) and, while I knew her like a sister, I still didn't know her name or her backstory or why she was doing these terrible things. Then Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin invited me to contribute a story to a cross-...

KEPT So you’re unemployed, fresh off a construction crew in Albany, and standing on a Thruway ramp trying to thumb a ride, and a babe in a Cadillac convertible stops for you. Hey, these things happen. They never happened to me, but never mind. For you it's different. You’re Mark Taggert and you’ve got the good sense to get in the car, and it changes your life. The girl’s Elaine Rice, and she’s gorgeous and sexy, and you wind up in her Park Avenue apartment, and you go to bed, and the chemistry is right, and there’s only one problem. She’s rich. Too rich for you to be ...

One of this book's six versatile ladies sums it up like this: "When we first began to get into swinging, our whole orientation was innocent, and essentially limited to the idea of mate-swapping. That was what we thought swinging was about--you met with another couple, paired off, and had sex. We never considered the possibility that homosexual relations would be involved. Well, you live and you learn. I found out today I liked making love to another woman. Today I can't envision swinging without lesbian relations. And I understand that ninety-two percent of wives who get into swinging also ...

Some Days You Get the Bear is listed in various bibliographical sources as having first appeared in Penthouse, but I don't believe it did. The story SOLD to Penthouse, and sat in inventory forever, until my agent asked for its return. Then in 1993 It became the title story in my third collection of short fiction, published by William Morrow, and later turned up in my omnibus collection of short fiction, Enough Rope. It's not a crime story, nor is it erotic, so that makes it not what you might expect from me. If I were to categorize it—and I'd just as soon not—I'd probably call it a ...

What’s the autobiography of a prostitute doing in the Collection of Classic Erotica? I asked myself this very question while weighing its suitability for the collection. On the one hand, it’s nonfiction, specifically memoir. On the other, it was entirely an invention, a fabrication, its putative narrator no less a creation of my own mind than, say, Linda Shepard in CAMPUS TRAMP. And then I let Wikipedia wisk me back almost 300 years: “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (commonly known simply as Moll Flanders) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1722. ...

Sheesh. What a lousy title. Flesh Mob was published by Midnight Reader, a fellow imprint of Nightstand Books, in 1962. I can tell at a glance that it’s my work, although I don’t specifically recall writing it. And I must have put a title on it, but I an assure you that it wasn’t Flesh Mob. It could only have been the inspiration of some editor in Illinois. Several notables filled that role over the years, including Earl Kemp, A. J. Budrys, and Harlan Ellison, but it’s hard to imagine any of those three making a eureka moment of Flesh Mob. For years it struck me as merely a bad title...

Because they were collected into a single hardcover volume published by Subterranean Press, a good number of readers are acquainted with my three collaborations with Donald E. Westlake. That's not the case with CIRCLE OF SINNERS, a similar joint effort undertaken with another longstanding (and, I'm pleased to say, still standing) friend and colleague, Hal Dresner. Unlike two of the Block/Westlake titles, CIRCLE OF SINNERS did not bear a joint byline; Nightstand issued it as "by Don Holliday," which was in fact Hal's pen name. (To increase the level of confusion, one book of mine was ...

Sheldon Lord began his career with CARLA (#5 in the Collection of Classic Erotica),published by Harry Shorten’s Midwood Books in 1958. Just about a year later he wrote CAMPUS TRAMP (CCL #7) for William Hamling’s Nightstand Books, for whom he’d morphed into Andrew Shaw. And young Mr. Lord’s first book for yet a third publisher, Beacon, was APRIL NORTH (CCL #4).Each publisher wanted more from the guy. Beacon’s request for a second book was remarkably specific. They had a title in mind—COMMUNITY OF WOMEN—and a theme. Their notion was that no end of interesting and attractive ...

17-year-old Johnny Wells was a very handsome young man, and you’d have called him a babe magnet, but I’m afraid they didn’t have that phrase back in 1961. He decided to capitalize on his looks and the response they earned from women, invested in a haircut and a good wardrobe, moved out of his slum apartment and into a budget hotel, and reinvented himself as a gigolo. The life transformed him. He took up reading, became devoted to it, and educated himself. His new contacts provided him with polish and sophistication. He moved to a good hotel, put money in the bank. And then an out-of-...

While my first visit to New York was with my father in 1948, it wasn’t until the summer of 1956 that I actually lived in the city. I’d completed my first year at Antioch College and was to spend August through October in the mailroom at Pines Publications on East 40th Street. (They had a paperback line—Popular Library—and a string of magazines, ranging from surviving pulps like Ranch Romances to movie magazines and a Readers Digest imitation.) I’d arranged to room with two other Antiochians, Paul Grillo and Fred Anliot, and we spent the first week on the top floor at 147 W 14th, ...

Well, here’s what the blurb for the audiobook says: “Carla is a beautiful girl. She was plucked from the obscurity of a Polish slum to be the wife of a wealthy man—a man who seemingly gives her everything a wife could want. Except the one thing that she needs most: the pleasure she burns for while he snores beside her, the passion that only a lover can give. “But adultery seems impossible until, suddenly, it happens. When she seduces a filling-station attendant, ruining her clothes in the grease of a mechanic’s floor, she starts to spin out of control. He is the first but not the ...

I’d no sooner finished CARLA, my first book for Midwood Tower, than Harry Shorten asked for another. I’d just returned to Antioch College, where after two years as an undistinguished student I’d dropped out for a year to hang on to a summer job at Scott Meredith’s literary agency and bucket shop. It was wonderful training, but after a year there I decided I should go back to school, where I had a chance to assume the editorship of the school newspaper. So there I was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taking a batch of English courses, and I had a publisher who wanted me to write a book. ...

An intense and gripping short story audiobook that delves into the unsettling psyche of a twisted individual, "A Fire at Night" by Lawrence Block narrated by Mike Vendetti is a chilling exploration of the mind of a deranged arsonist.

Imagine being on a date, and your date announces they will turn into a werewolf in half an hour. And as the night unfolds, you find yourself facing the true test of love and acceptance. Or could it be a joke?

In her fifth appearance, “Waitress Wanted,” Kit Tolliver had to leave Phoenix in a hurry. She’d had sex with her boss, and that sealed his fate; the guy had about as much survival potential as a male Black Widow spider. Now she’s in Washington State, renting a room in a comfortable suburban house, and ready to hook up with one of the men on her list. A Chicagoan, he slept with her a couple of years ago in New York, and got out of town before she could seal the deal. And now he’s right here in Kirkland, and he doesn’t know it, but he’s about to get lucky. Except the clown ...

In “Clean Slate” (Kit Tolliver #4) Kit found her mission in life. There were five men who once slept with her and lived to tell the tale, and she’s determined to hunt them down and wipe them off the board of life. So far, so good. But what do you do when all you know about a guy is the name he gave you? She’d met him in Philadelphia, but he was in town on business, so all she really knew was that he was from someplace else. Good old Sid from Philadelphia, except he wasn’t from Philadelphia, and his name wasn’t Sid. Want to give that a whirl out on Google? Then Rita told her ...

Can a one-woman crime wave settle down and find contentment and happiness in the arms of a nice surburban lady in Kirkland, Washington? That’s what Kit Tolliver’s going to have to find out for herself. She’s become closer to Rita than she’s ever been to another human being, and the phone conversations the two women have are more exciting than the times she spends in bed with men. But there’s a lot Rita doesn’t know about her. Like what she’s done to every man shes been with, starting with her own father. What’ll happen if she tells her? What’ll happen if she doesn’t? All...

Kit Tolliver’s chosen lifestyle is pretty clear-cut. She finds a guy, goes home with him, has sex with him, and kills him. What could be simpler? But way back in “Rude Awakening” (Kit Tolliver #2) she had a little too much to drink, and she fell asleep before finishing the job. During breakfast the next morning, she found a chance to put a little something in her host’s vodka bottle. Alas, it didn’t work out quite the way she’d hoped. Peter Fuhrmann was alive and well, and still a name on her list of The Ones Who GotAway. It took a lot of work to determine this, and more work to...

A partir de su debut en 1977, Bernie Rhodenbarr se ha ganado la entusiasta admiración de un público internacional cada vez más numeroso. Este caballero, con su corazón ligero y sus dedos más ligeros aún, cuyos talentos detectivescos lo sacan de los apuros en que lo meten sus habilidades de ladrón, se roba de paso los corazones y las mentes de los lectores. «Los ladrones no pueden escoger» es su primera aparición.