TT 425: Catching Up With Lawrence Block

series and non-series

Lawrence Block says in his August newsletter:

Well, I would appear to have retired. I wrote two books in 2022, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown and The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder, and I was more than happy with both of them, but once they were polished and published, I realized that I was done.

yesterday in the West Village with Lawrence Block

I met Larry yesterday for a burger. It is still quite something for me to casually hang out with one of my favorite authors, someone who I can literally quote chapter and verse.

Larry has managed a unique literary feat: His two long-running characters, Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, have utterly different series finales. The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder is a nostalgic look back, while The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown is a surreal leap forward.

I also admire the Keller series, but Larry ruled out a capstone for the hit man. “Keller has found his equilibrium.” I didn’t press the topic. We talked about Ed McBain, Charles Willeford, Robert B. Parker, Michael Connelly, Lee Child… (Fans of the genre must read Block’s collection of essays, The Crime of Our Lives, which is chock of full of entertaining anecdotes about his fellow mystery writers.)

Many authors settle into a main character. “People like a series,” said Larry. “The reader gets to have the same experience every time, but just a little different.”

His close friend Donald E. Westlake also had a few series characters, “But Don always insisted to his publisher that he would write a non-series novel every other book.”

Had I read somewhere that Larry really liked his own non-series Small Town? “Well, I’m not sure. I need to look at Small Town again. But yes, both Small Town and Random Walk are non-series novels that I was particularly fond of at the time, perhaps because they didn't do all that well. But I also like my series books, although each series does seem to be one big book.”

Ed McBain was the pen name of Evan Hunter, who had a notable a career as straight novelist — The Blackboard Jungle was also famously filmed with Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier — before inventing the McBain name in order to create his long-running series of 87th Precinct novels.

While I have never been a serious devotee of Ed McBain, I am quite taken with the non-crime 1974 Evan Hunter novel Streets of Gold, which is the best “jazz piano novel” I’ve ever seen, at least in terms of astonishingly accurate musical detail.

To my surprise, Larry remembered Streets of Gold and said right away, “That’s a great book.” We discussed the plot, and also about how jazz used to be much more connected to everyday American life. (There’s quite a bit of jazz sprinkled through the Block canon, including a moment in The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown where Bernie and Carolyn namecheck the duo of Ron Carter and Ethan Iverson.)

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To say Lawrence Block has been prolific understates the matter. So much wonderful writing! Still, I’d argue that Block’s recent output includes some of his finest work. Let’s look at a roll call of a few notable titles since, oh, say, 2011, when the author was 73 (he turned 86 last month).

— two of the best Matthew Scudders, the blissfully straight-ahead A Drop of the Hard Stuff (2011) and the capstone The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder (2022)

— one of the best Kellers, Hit Me (2013), a marvelous example of existential noir

— the strange and captivating capstone to the Bernie saga, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022)

— the dark masterpiece Dead Girl Blues (2020) (I reviewed it for Amazon: “Not for the faint of heart. If you have any trigger warnings around, put them on this book. Put ’em all on.”)

— and two terrific memoirs: The Crime of Our Lives (2015) and A Writer Prepares (2021).

But, as he jokes sometimes in his newsletter, “Wait, there’s more!” Block keeps busy in “retirement” by e-publishing formerly obscure gems. Head on over to the latest to read about the 30+ titles available in the Classic Crime Library. Although the outstanding 1969 Paul Kavanagh espionage tale Such Men are Dangerous was once hard to find, it is now just a click away on Kindle….