Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Albert Platt is a rotten man. Bred in the rough parts of Brooklyn, he made his name as a killer and has built a fortune from gambling, loan sharking, and the other pastimes of a standard thug. His latest gambit? Buying banks, robbing them, and collecting the insurance. He's a hard man, and no one ever stood in his way until he brushed up against Eddie Manso. Manso is no ordinary veteran.

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.

Ed London is the type of private investigator that you call to clean up the mess when your mistress turns up dead. But after he dumps a body in Central Park, it appears this case is still alive and kicking. Seems that the dead girl was in possession of something special that some very shady characters want back. Now Ed, along with his pretty actress friend Maddy, will have to crack the case before he ends up dead himself. But there's more than a murder here; there's missing jewels, Israeli intelligence, Nazi spies, and a host of double-dealing, backstabbing thieves.

Being single no longer means being alone! Today all America is turning into a Singles Society. Men and women alike are discovering that traditional marriage no longer satisfies their need to live a full life--especially in regard to sex. Never before have so many people been so open to seeking sensual fulfillment without legal entanglements or extraneous emotional trappings. This is what this book is all about. In it you will discover how different men and women crossed the line from being married to being single, from being square to swinging all the way, and have never life or love more ...

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.

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 ...

THOSE BOYS AND THEIR CARS… Danny Duncan drives his father’s Oldsmobile. It's a nice respectable family sedan, and April North is every bit as respectable as the car. Until he manages to get her into the back seat. Now she's no longer a good girl, but only Danny know it, and he can keep a secret, can’t he? Well, no. He tells half the town of Antrim, Ohio—the male half, and they all come sniffing around, led by Bill Piersall, driving a homemade hot rod cobbled together from spare parts and held together with spit and baling wire. She gives Bill what he wants, but he turns out to be ...

Keller ist ein Killer. Durch und durch Profi, cool, selbstsicher, kompetent, zuverlässig. Aber er ist auch eine vielschichtige Persönlichkeit: in sich gekehrt und zurückgezogen, eiskalt und gnadenlos effizient, aber zugleich anfällig für Selbstzweifel und Einsamkeit, Albträume und Zukunftssorgen. Seinem Therapeuten gegenüber gibt er sich als "Troubleshooter" eines großen Unternehmens aus, aber sein eigentliches Metier ist Mord.

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 ...

From the notebook of a female sex therapist: "The "patient" calls me this morning to confirm his appointment, arrived precisely at 11 a.m. He's 28, tax lawyer, divorced. Sex problems: periodic impotence, periodic premature ejaculation, occasional inability to reach climax. Diagnosis: general sexual insecurity. "We sit on couch, drink coffee. Neck a little. He has soft hands, a nice touch. Very breast-oriented. We get undressed, sit around naked, then go to bed and play with each other. He gets erection almost immediately but loses it early, then unable to get it back. "I tell him we'll cure...

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. ...

Lawrence Block writes: “As a prelude to the process of republishing The Wife-Swappers, I Googled my way to a textual analysis of Andrew Shaw titles by Lynn Munroe, perhaps the leading scholar of Midcentury Erotica. He says of this particular novel, ‘Perhaps the worst-written of the early Shaws (which is saying it's almost unreadable)…’ “I’m not sure it’s terribly wise of me to quote this observation as a way of introducing a book I’d presumably like you to buy. I have a feeling Lynn’s judgment may have been a little harsh, but maybe not. “Regardless, the literary merit ...

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, ...

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 ...

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. ...

A missing person case brings private eye Roy Markham to the remote winter-bound college town of Cliff's End, New Hampshire. But what began as a routine investigation quickly becomes dark and dangerous. Six pornographic photos and a tidy little blackmail scheme result in a brutal and baffling murder, and no one is safe - especially Markham himself.

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.

It's a crime that Times Square dives aren't private investigator Chip Harrison's usual hangouts. Tulip Willing is the star attraction at the Treasure Chest, and also Chip's newest client. It seems she wants cover for a mysterious stranger who's been scaring her out of her clothes. Cherry Bounce, another dancer at the Treasure Chest, is shot dead in the act. Chip finds himself on the trail of a killer who's eager to trap the street-wise detective and strip him of his livelihood forever...

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 a piece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro. This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis (under a pen name by Lawrence Block), is the rarest of Block's books - and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later, with Castro and Cuba once again commanding headlines.

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.