Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Born to Be Bad and experience the compelling world of erotica.

Jeff Flanders has a perfectly good life. Until Candace Cain sashays into it, and turns it upside-down. Jeff’s got a good-looking wife; he loves her, and she loves him. He’s got a job, swinging a desk at a semi-shady finance company, signing off on usurious loans to losers; he doesn’t love it and it doesn’t love him, but it’s easy work and it pays the bills. Until a girl called Candy applies for a $1000 loan - with no job, no bank account, no security.

In A Woman Must Love, Barbara, a young widow, has vowed to be true to her husband’s memory (even though he’d wished otherwise). She’s courted, and she has a couple of adventures.

After spending her girlhood writing gentle and thoughtful novels of the lesbian experience (Shadows, Warm and Willing, Enough of Sorrow), Jill Emerson reinvented herself in the early 1970s, just when contemporary literature was experiencing an enormous flowering of sexuality.

O Rose thou art sick. /The invisible worm, /That flies in the night /In the howling storm: /Has found out thy bed /Of crimson joy: /And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy. Those eight lines constitute the complete text of “The Sick Rose,” published by William Blake in Songs of Experience in 1794. I took to Blake early on, and thought Of Crimson Joy would make a dandy title. I accordingly fastened it on this novel when I sent the manuscript to Harry Shorten at Midwood.

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.

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.

Lawrence Block, writing as John Warren Wells, introduces you to men and women who are trying every possible kind of sexual combination to make marriage work in bold new ways. Threesomes. Open adultery. Swapping. Group marriage. And a hundred variants of every possible sexual experiment within the marital relationship, surpassing the most erotic fiction.

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.

After a night out with friends, Matthew Scudder is reminded of an enigmatic case he had while still working as uniformed policeman. The case in question involves the suicide of a devout Catholic man in front of his wife and children... or was it a murder?

A Writer Prepares, an examination of the first quarter century of one writer's life, is arguably the work of two writers. There's the middle-aged fellow who wrote about half of it at a blistering pace in 1994, and there's the octogenarian who finished the job another quarter century later. The older fellow brought less raw energy to the task, and his memory is a long way from infallible, but one can only hope he's offset these losses with a slight edge in judgment, in perspective, in maturity.

Chip Harrison has finally secured himself a job, acting as the man-about-town for the corpulent detective Leo Haig. And it's on the dangerous streets of New York that Chip brings home his first case, one in which five beautiful sisters are being systematically murdered by a killer with a diabolical design. Three of the Trelawney women have already been bumped off, and now Chip is cozying up to the remaining two, and investigating a couple of other nefarious relatives with motive on their minds.

When young, broke, and single Chip Harrison finds a bus ticket to Bordentown, South Carolina, he knows it was sent by the hand of fate. It’s his way out of wintry New York City, Bordentown’s sheriff provides a very warm welcome! Before long, Chip charms his way into the sheriff’s good graces and into the arms of Lucille, the preacher’s daughter. Even Chip should see he is headed for trouble with a capital T, in another furiously funny caper by Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block.

In Thirty, the novel pretended to be a diary. That worked fine, and the resultant narrative proved at once challenging and effortless to sustain. I enjoyed writing it, Berkley enjoyed publishing it - and they wanted something else. What they got in Threesome was a novel pretending to be a novel. The premise, as you’ll see, is that the book has been written by its three main characters, Harry and Rhoda and Priss, in the form of a lightly fictionalized chronicle of their own life as a menage a trois.

Four old friends, a policeman, a solider, a doctor and a priest, play cards and trade stories....The Daily Telegraph recently proclaimed Lawrence Block as one of the 50 great crime writers of all time. Find out why in this spicy brew or lust, deception, double crosses, violence and forbidden desire.

A truly unprecedented literary achievement by author and editor Lawrence Block, this newly-commissioned anthology of 17 superbly-crafted stories, each inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Contributors include Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, Craig Ferguson, Nicholas Christopher, Jill D. Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Justin Scott, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Warren Moore, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, and Lawrence Block himself.

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.

In seinem vierten Abenteuer nimmt sich Matthew Scudder - nun in deutscher Neuübersetzung - eines ungelösten Falles an, mit dem er schon Jahre früher als Detective beim NYPD befasst war. Louis Pinell, der vor Kurzem gefasste Eispickel-Mörder, gibt freiherzig zu, vor neun Jahren sieben junge Frauen ermordet zu haben - aber er schwört, dass ein Nachahmer für den Mord an Barbara Ettinger verantwortlich war. Scudder glaubt ihm. Die Spur zu Ettingers wirklichem Mörder ist verworren, dunkel und voller Gefahren ... und sogar noch kälter als die Leiche, der er Gerechtigkeit verschaffen will.

Ein Mann kommt in eine Bar und ab da nimmt sein Leben eine Kehrtwendung. Der Mann bringt eine Frau um, flieht vor dem Gesetz und fängt ein neues Leben an, in einer anderen Stadt, und unter einem anderen Namen. Wird ihn seine Vergangenheit irgendwann wieder einholen? Oder schafft er es, mit einem Mord davonzukommen?

The ménage a trois in its many forms has fascinated both observers and participants throughout history. John Warren Wells provides in-depth interviews with all the participants in a manner designed to make the dynamics of these relationships readily comprehensible - but no less intriguing.