Ariel

by Lawrence Block

  I drove from there to Greenville, South Carolina, where I knew an advertising executive from New York and an Irish songwriter from Listowel, County Kerry. They didn’t know each other, but both of them happened to know a woman who’d recently split with her husband, and one of them arranged for me to take her to dinner. We went out and had a nice time, and she seemed to like me and I seemed to like her, so when I woke up the next day I threw all my stuff in the car and drove to Charleston.

  In Charleston I got a room at Rooms. That’s all the sign said, so I always assumed that was the name of the place. Staying at a place called Rooms, I can assure you, ranks right up there with eating at a place called Mom’s and playing cards with a man named Doc. Don’t ever do it.

  My room cost twenty dollars a week. That’s not much money nowadays, and it wasn’t much money twenty years ago, either, yet no one could have claimed the place was underpriced. Rooms was on Fulton Street in downtown Charleston, and I looked for it when I returned to Charleston some six or seven years later for a visit. Now Charleston, as you may know, is the preservationist capital of America. You pitch a tent in the park, someone’ll stop you when you try to take it down. In Charleston, BHT’s the drug of choice. They preserve everything.

  They may be crazy, but they’re not stupid. They tore down Rooms.

  But not while I was there. I set up my typewriter and tried to write The Adopted. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, though. I went to a Unitarian breakfast and met a woman and had a couple of dates with her, and I called the one in Greenville and she came down for the weekend. Then I got in the car and was on my way again. I spent a week or so on Jekyll Island, Georgia. I remember there was a restaurant that had an all-you-can-eat special on boiled shrimp, and I remember there was a lunar eclipse, and that’s about all I remember. I got back in the car and drove to St. Augustine, Florida, and holed up in a motel. I stayed drunk for a couple of days, and then I drank a bottle of cough syrup, and then I went to work and wrote Ariel, which is what The Adopted turned out to want to call itself. “I am Ariel, the Adopted,” I typed, and I just stayed with it until it was done. It took a few weeks.

  I know I was done by Christmas, because I remember taking the manuscript with me to Greenville. (I flew there to spend the holiday with the lady. She read it and said she liked it, but she liked me, too, so what does that say about her judgment?) I mailed the manuscript to my agent and flew back to Jacksonville, where I’d left my car. My daughters flew down to spend a week of vacation with me, and then they went back to New York and I went to Naples, Florida. The car broke down. I got it fixed and drove to Destin, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama. In Mobile I tried to write a fourth book about Matthew Scudder, but after thirty or forty pages I tore it up and got in the car again. I drove to Sardis, Mississippi.

  On and on and on.

  In Roswell, New Mexico, I realized that all over America there were men who got up every morning, put on suits and went off to offices. I wondered how the hell they did it. I’d tried to get a job in Charleston, while I was living at Rooms. There was a shoe repairman around the corner who had a sign in his window, Apprentice Wanted. I was thirty-seven years old, I’d been writing professionally for almost twenty years, and I went in and applied for the job.

  “Here’s the situation,” he said. “I’ll spend a lot of time training someone, and then just when he starts to earn his keep, he’ll leave. So the one thing I want to know is will you stay?”

  I just couldn’t lie to the man. I told him I didn’t expect to hang around Charleston all that long.

  “Well, I appreciate your honesty,” he said, “but I have to say I’m sorry to hear that. Because I’m a pretty good judge of people, and I’d say you’ve got the makings of a damn good shoemaker.”

  I thought about this in Roswell. That was my chance, I thought, and I went and blew it.

  Meanwhile, I heard nothing about Ariel. I couldn’t get anything out of my agent, who swore he couldn’t get anything out of the publisher. I finally got to L.A., and I finally got back from L.A. and wound up in New York again. By then it was the end of ’76 and I’d written the first Bernie Rhodenbarr novel and Random House was set to publish it. By then, too, the other publisher had said no to Ariel. My agent tried it a couple of places and it didn’t stick anywhere.

  Let’s fast-forward a couple of years. I was living on Greenwich Street, still in New York, and I had a new agent, and I dug out Ariel and showed it to him. He sent it to Donald I. Fine at Arbor House, who wanted to do it if I’d rewrite it. I looked at it and agreed it was a mess and started over from the beginning. I enlarged the original version by a third or so, and I made the setting specifically Charleston. (That’s what it was in the first version, but I hadn’t come right out and said so.)

  Don Fine loved the finished version, and published it with muted fanfare in 1980. For several years after that he asked me when I was going to write another book like Ariel. I don’t know, I said.

  Never, I could have said.

  What’s remarkable, it seems to me, isn’t that I never wrote another book like Ariel but that I wrote the thing at all. It’s entirely unlike anything else I’ve done before or since. What I liked most about it was writing the scenes with Ariel and Erskine. The two of them were very vivid in my mind, and remain so. I’m not as taken with other elements of the book, including the ending. I’d have ended the book differently if I could have figured out how. Some people were bothered by the ending, finding it ambiguous, and other people liked the ending because of its ambiguity.

  Make what you will of that. (Lawrence Block, “Afterword,” Ariel, G & G Books, 1996)

  I was happy to see Ariel back in print, and in such a handsome edition. The book had been out of print since Berkley Books’ paperback edition came and went. (They paid a healthy advance for the book, but the cover was hideous and they didn’t sell many copies. The Arbor House edition didn’t sell many copies, either, but at least it had an attractive cover.) But, as I said, the book didn’t sell in its Lawrence Block Library edition, and I’m glad it has a new life as an ebook.

  Enough. If you’ve read Ariel, you don’t really need me to tell you what you just read. And if you haven’t read the book, if you actually skipped ahead and read the afterword first, well, you’re probably the sort of person who first swallows the antacid and then eats the chili.

  And who the hell am I to criticize you for it?

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com ) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he woul
d publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

  Block and his wife, Lynne.

  Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

  Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1980 by Lawrence Block

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0917-2

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR: