Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Young David Forrester is a sex-obsessed freshman student at Upper Manhattan’s Columbia University, although the institution remains unnamed in the book. An upperclassman shepherds him through the loss his virginity, then steers him into a club of libertines. And, you know, one thing leads to another. But as far as I’m concerned, the most striking aspect of COLLEGE FOR SINNERS is that it seems to have been the occasion for some unwitting plagiarism on my part. The dramatist Moliere has a character who’s astonished, and not half-chuffed, to discover that all his life he’s been ...

Lawrence Block on Lust Weekend: “LUST WEEKEND was written in 1962 and published that same year by Nightstand Books. The title’s an obvious play on THE LOST WEEKEND, Charles Jackson’s groundbreaking novel of alcoholism. The book was a sensation, as was the film adaptation starring Ray Milland. “The people at Nightstand generally changed the titles on my manuscripts. But LUST WEEKEND made the cut, and I’m sure I came up with the title first and wrote the book to fit. ‘Lust’ was a favorite word at Nightstand, where they wanted to excite the readers withoutd alarming the censors. ...

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-...

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. ...

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.

En su cuarta aventura, Matthew Scudder reabre un caso que había investigado años antes como detective del Departamento de Policía de Nueva York. Louis Pinell, el recién aprehendido Merodeador del Picahielo, admite libremente haber matado a siete jóvenes mujeres nueve años atrás – pero jura que Bárbara Ettinger fue asesinada por algún copión. Scudder le cree. Sin embargo, la pista que podría conducir al verdadero asesino de Ettinger es torcida, oscura y peligrosa…además de estar ya más fría que el cadáver de la joven que Scudder está resuelto a vengar. Su investigación ...

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 ...

Meet the girls who fly the friendly skies: Ali: "All men seem to think that if they've had sex with a girl once they can have her any time they want. They're wrong." Beri: "I know a librarian who makes me feel positively sheltered and stews who've spent years in the air without losing their virginity." Connie: "We see men at their worst, grabby and aggressive. I've never had sex with a man." Donna: "If you're looking to get married, there's no better way--though I don't know why men want to marry stewardesses." Elaine: "I hate to open my eyes in the morning. First I have to guess whether ...

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 ...

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. ...

"You Can Call Me Lucky" first appeared in Indian Country Noir, edited by Liz "Bootsie" Martinez and Sarah Cortez, and published by Akashic Books as part of their Noir series. Bootsie is a good friend of mine, and I had a hard time saying no when she beseeched me for a story. I felt unqualified, having minimal acquaintance with American Indians and their habitat. Then I thought of Indian casinos. And I remembered my nameless girlfriend, who'd thus far brightened Hell's Kitchen and Riverdale with her presence. No reason why she had to stay in the five boroughs of New York. Suppose she turned ...

Scanning the world's literature, including the vast library of forbidden books, John Warren Wells provides a searching and comprehensive overview of human sexuality. Chapters include: The Endless Search for Eros, The Techniques of Provoking Desire, Positions for Coitus, Extracoital Copulation, Masturbation, Pluralistic Sex Practices, and more. Introduction by Benjamin Morse, M.D.

Lawrence Block reports: “THE SIN-DAMNED was one of the early Andrew Shaw titles, published by Nightstand Books in sometime in 1960. The cover, like that of many of its contemporaries, is the work of Harold W. McCauley. “While I can recognize the text as my work, I can’t claim to recall writing it. Every day the great hoard of things I don’t remember grows incrementally larger, and writing this novel has long since been a part of it. I do know, though, that someone else supplied the title, probably some editor in publisher Bill Hamling’s employ. It could have been Harlan Elison, or...

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...

Lawrence Block has this to say about Flesh Parade: “FLESH PARADE was first published in 1962 by Midnight Reader, a sister imprint of Nightstand Books. The title was supplied by an editor, and we’ll never know what my own title may have been. The publisher was fond of two-word titles, often with favorite words: Flesh, Slut, Lust. They could slip past the censors while letting the reader know what kind of book he was getting. “I’ve had a complicated relationship with my early pseudonymous books. There was a time when I rejoiced in the fact that they had not been printed on acid-free ...

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...

When Kit Tolliver met Alvin Kirkaby, he looked cute in his military uniform. He was on his way to an overseas assignment, and maybe it was an uncharacteristic attack of patriotism that led her to break her usual pattern and spare his life. But now he’s just a name on her list, and home from the wars, so all she has to do is head down to Hedgemont, North Carolina, and give her soldier boy an honorable discharge. Then she walks into his trailer and finds out things are a little more complicated than that... All of Kit’s homicidal (and increasingly erotic) adventures are collected in book ...

LAWRENCE BLOCK remembers: “Actually, the header’s mistaken. In point of fact, I remember next to nothing about Trailer Trollop. I’ve loaded it onto my Kindle in advance of republishing it, and I’ve made my way through a few of its chapters, and while there’s sufficient textual evidence to make it very clear that I wrote this book, the memory of the two or three weeks devoted to so doing has long since left me. “I can tell you where and when I wrote it. In the spring of 1960, my recently-acquired first wife and I took an apartment on West 69th Street in New York. I installed a ...

Kit Tolliver’s got a problem. Whenever she has sex with a man, she feels an irresistible urge to kill him. That’s fine, she enjoys the killing as much as the sex, but it does limit the possibilities for a satisfying long-term relationship. But she’s got a friend, a woman in Kirkland, Washington, and there’s a definite sexual undercurrent to the friendship. Is that a possibility? And would she even enjoy sex with a woman? And what would happen afterward? She’s in St. Louis, hoping a lesbian bar might hold the answer. And she’s not the bar’s only patron with a hidden agenda. ...

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 ...