Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

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?

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 ...

Lawrence Block remembers: “I wrote Campus Tramp in July of 1959. By then I had written four or five erotic novels for Midwood Tower Books, Harry Shorten’s new paperback publishing venture, all of them published under the pen name of Sheldon Lord. Campus Tramp was written for another publisher, William Hamling’s Nightstand Books, and I chose a new pen name for it—Andrew Shaw. “Before long young mister Shaw was writing a book a month for Nightstand. At one point I brought in a ghostwriter, a friend of my friend Don Westlake, taught him how to write erotic novels, and took a sliver ...

"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 ...

Lawrence Block on AFTERTHOUGHTS 2.0: AFTERTHOUGHTS began in 2011, when I first began self-publishing titles from my voluminous backlist. I packed it with forewords and afterwords and essays and articles about the work, and arranged for its distribution as an ebook. Here's wwhat the publisher had to day about it at the time: "In a career spanning more than fifty years, Lawrence Block has produced more than one hundred books, ranging in genre from hard-boiled detective stories to pseudonymous erotica. Collected here for the first time are more than forty-five afterwords from the works that ...

When we first met Kit Tolliver, in “If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” we didn’t know her name. She walked into a bar in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, where a slightly sinister gentleman picked her up, took her home, and took her to bed. She had a good time. Then she killed him, took his money, and went on her way. In her fourth appearance, “Clean Slate,” we found out more about Kit. Her name, and how she got this way. And she in turn finds her mission in life. There were five men who slept with her and lived to tell the tale, and she’s determined to hunt them down and wipe them ...

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......

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...

In 2006, the estimable S J Rozan invited me to contribute a story to Bronx Noir, an anthology she'd been commissioned to edit for Akashic Books. As she'd been obliging enough to write a story for my own Manhattan Noir, I felt honor-bound to return the favor. To do so, I enlisted the homicidal services of a young woman who'd starred in "If You Can't Stand the Heat," my Hell's Kitchen story for Manhattan Noir. Although she seemed quite capable of standing the heat, I figured it was nevertheless time for her to get out of the Kitchen, so I sent her up to the Riverdale section of the Bronx. My ...

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. ...

LAWRENCE BLOCK observes: “SIN BUM was published sometime in 1963 as Midnight Reader #472. (Midnight Reader was a sister imprint of Nightstand Books.) “It may have been the final book I wrote as Andrew Shaw, the last title of mine brought out by publisher William Hamling. Or not—it’s impossible to tell. There were other titles by other hands than mine that would be published under my Andrew Shaw pen name, and there would be a stream of retitled books reissued in the 1970s with their prose slightly tweaked to reflect relaxed taboos, but it was sometime in 1963 that I stopped writing ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 remembers: "Well, in point of fact, I don't remember much. SINTIME was an Andrew Shaw title for Nightstand Books. The book opens at a resort in or around Vergennes VT, a setting that was certainly inspired by a visit my then-wife and I made to friends of ours who were summering in or around Vergennes. It was a pleasant few days, as I recall, and the friends we were visiting were Hal and Marcia Dresner. Hal was a writer, writing the same sort of books as I, and for the same publishers; he moved on sooner than I did, went out to Los Angeles, had a fine career as a screenwriter,...

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...