“You’ve got blood on your knuckles,” Jodi said.
“True.”
“My poor hero,” she said. “Harvey, are you in a terrible rush to get out of Brazil?”
“Well—”
“Rhett,” she cooed, “go sit in the bathroom for a while like a good little boy. Your father and I have something to do.”
“Is he my father?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m your father, and this beautiful woman is your mother.”
“Then who was the old bastard?”
“Just an old bastard,” I said. “Now go in the bathroom like a good boy.”
He went into the bathroom like a good boy, and I went into Jodi like a good man, and the world went into a tailspin, like the good little world it was.
That night we caught a plane to Buenos Aires, and we tried Argentina for size, but there were even more old Nazis around and they depressed me. So we went to Chile next, and we found a nice city in Chile, and we’re there now.
“Suppose they come looking for us,” Jodi asked once. “Suppose they want to take us back.”
“It’ll never happen.”
“No?”
“No. Bigamy isn’t something they extradite you for, and neither is desertion.”
“How about extortion and kidnapping?”
I told her the troll would never make much fuss on either count, and this pacified her. But just to make sure we’ve applied for Chilean citizenship. A nice country, Chile. Peaceful and quiet. You have to get used to the idea of snow in June and hot weather for Christmas but if the seasons are upside-down at least the rest of life is on more of an even keel than it ever was in New York.
So here we are, in Chile. We rented a cute little bungalooloo on the outskirts of town and I’ve been planting shrubbery around it and doing other things to make it a place to live in. Rhett’s at school now and speaks Spanish like a native of modern-day Manhattan, and he’s been teaching us. He scared one teacher a little, asking her how to say bastard in Spanish, but we weathered the crisis and all is well. Life is real and life is earnest, and it’s a pleasant switch.
I won’t tell you the name of the town, because you might be something of a troublemaker. I don’t think you could make much trouble even if I did, but we Ulcer Gulch boys are a rough breed and I take no chances. It’s a town, and we like it here. That’s all you have to know.
I’m happy, Jodi’s happy, and little Rhett is happy. A splendid little group. We watch 3½ hours of television every day, we use Breeno Toothpaste, and—regular as clockwork—our washing machine clogs up from too many suds.
You don’t believe it? In Chile? Chile’s the end of the world, fer Pete’s sakes, right? Never even heard a’ electricity, correct?
You better believe it, buddy, because if you don’t believe it, maybe the way you live isn’t so hotsy-totsereeny after all, right?
So keep your nose to the old grindstone, and run yourself up the flagpole and see who salutes you. I’d say it’s been fun, but it hasn’t, and it’s fun now, and I’m happy.
And that is why I never did get back to the office.
But on Mad Ave we always did take long lunch hours.
A NEW AFTERWORD BY LAWRENCE BLOCK
In August of 1957 I answered a blind ad, took a test, and landed a job as an assistant editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where I spent my days reading amateur work and writing encouraging rejections. (Encouraging because we wanted the authors to submit more material, accompanied by more reading fees; rejections because the stuff was, by and large, terrible.) It was a great learning experience for a writer-in-training and by the time I left there the following May, I had sold a slew of short stories and articles. The first thing I did when I got home to Buffalo, New York, was write a novel, and I wrote a batch more in the months that followed. I was by then back at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and was supposed to be writing papers for my professors. Instead I was writing soft-core sex novels for Harry Shorten of Midwood Tower.
Around this time, Don Westlake answered the same ad, took the same test, and landed the same job. And he, too, began writing for Harry Shorten at Midwood; I first became aware of him when I read his first Midwood title, All My Lovers, by one Alan Marshall. I remember a scene where the brothers of a slum girl, who’s been led astray by a young executive type, go to the rotter’s luxurious apartment and beat the crap out of him. Then they leave and the scene closes with these lines: “They did not take anything. They were not thieves.”
I thought that was pretty damn good and wondered who’d written it.
A few months later Don got his first look at me, although it might have been through a one-way mirror for all I saw of him. I was in New York City on Christmas break and had gone to the Scott Meredith office, where I was now a client—though not the sort whose picture they put on the wall for all to see. There was a sliding window in the antechamber where they hadn’t put my picture, and my agent Henry Morrison and I talked through a book project. And Don was in the bullpen office on the other side of that window and saw me, although I did not see him.
And this was the conversation he overheard:
“That last book I delivered.”
“A Strange Kind of Love. What about it?”
“Is it too late to change the dedication?”
“I’m afraid so. Why?”
“I’m not seeing that girl anymore.”
Well, I went back to Yellow Springs and the academic year finally ended, and in June I came back to New York and got a room at the Hotel Rio on West Forty-Seventh Street. I turned up at Scott Meredith one afternoon to pick up a check or drop off a manuscript, and I ran into a young fellow on a similar errand. It was Don, of course, who had quit editing and was freelancing, and who lived nearby himself, in a railroad flat on a very nasty block in the West Forties between Ninth and Tenth avenues.
We introduced ourselves, and walked out of that office and into a friendship that lasted for fifty years. And that is why A Girl Called Honey, the first book in this triple volume and itself our initial collaborative effort, bears this dedication: “For Don Westlake and Larry Block, who introduced us.”
I had one year to go at Antioch College, but it was not to be. Sometime that summer I got a letter from the school saying they’d come to the conclusion that I’d be happier elsewhere. And I knew they were right. I was already doing what I wanted to do, and I figured I’d keep on doing it.
But by the end of the summer I’d decided against doing it in New York, at least for the time being. I moved back to my parents’ house in Buffalo, and I went on writing books for Bill Hamling of Nightstand Books and Harry Shorten and writing crime fiction for magazines. Don was doing much the same in New York. He and his wife and infant son were living in an awful block in Hell’s Kitchen when we met and moved to the upper flat in a two-family house in Canarsie, Brooklyn, a ten minute walk from the Rockaway Parkway stop at the end of the Canarsie Line.
We stayed very much in touch. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us to pick up the phone; long-distance calls were for emergencies, or when somebody died. We wrote letters and probably put more creativity into that correspondence than into our work.
And somewhere along the way we discussed the possibility of collaborating. I wrote the first chapter of A Girl Called Honey. I sent a carbon copy to Don, and he wrote chapter two and sent it to me, and we continued in that vein until the book was done. We never discussed the plot or the characters. At one point I tired of a character he’d introduced and killed him off, whereupon Don retaliated by getting my character arrested for murder.
Damn, that was fun.
The lead’s name was Honour Mercy Bane, and Don thought we should call the thing Piece without Honour, and maybe we did. Who knows? We sent the manuscript to Henry, who sent it to Harry Shorten, who published it with the title it bears now. We split the money and decided we’d have to do it again sometime.
And did, before too long.
The second book turned out to be So Willing, and Shorten published that one, too. I don’t know what we called it, but it may have been The Virgin Hunt, or something like that. This time Don wrote the first chapter, and we tossed it back and forth until we had a book. I may have moved back to New York by then. Or not.
One of Don’s chapters began, “Oh well, what the hell, there was always Adele.” But when the book appeared some idiot at Midwood changed Adele’s name to Della. God knows why. My best guess is that his mother’s name was Adele, and he took umbrage.
If he were here, I’d tell him what he could do with his umbrage. And one of the first things that occurred to me when Bill Schafer proposed reprinting these books was that good old Adele could have her name back. She wasn’t even my character, it wasn’t even my line, but I’ll tell you, it’s very satisfying to have it the way it was supposed to be.
The third book was Sin Hellcat, and it was brought out by our other mutual publisher, Bill Hamling at Nightstand Books. The first two books we wrote together were published “by Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall,” and that’s the byline we tacked on Hellcat. But Hamling was having none of it. The book was published “by Andrew Shaw.” I’ve no idea what our title may have been, but I’m sure it wasn’t Sin Hellcat—not that there’s anything wrong with it . . .
I blush to admit it, but I’m uncommonly proud of Sin Hellcat. If one writer had produced it, it would qualify as a tour de force; as the work of two pairs of hands, you could call it a tour de force majeure. As you’ll see, it’s a first-person narrative telling one story in sequential order, with other episodes of the narrator’s prior life recounted one per chapter along the way.
What I like most about it is that it’s no mean trick to tell which of us wrote a particular chapter. If I flip the book open and start reading, I can’t necessarily tell myself. Somehow, without ever talking at all about the book during its writing, we matched our styles to a remarkable degree.
Oh, I could tell you now who wrote which chapters. But then I’d have to kill you.
Don and I never collaborated again after Sin Hellcat. Hal Dresner and I wrote a book called Circle of Sinners with a structure inspired by the film La Ronde: the viewpoint character in the first chapter has it off with someone, who becomes the viewpoint character in chapter two—and so on. Hamling published the book by either Andrew Shaw or Don Holliday, Hal’s pen name. And I think we may have done a second book as well, but if so I can’t recall anything about it.
Somewhere along the way, I collaborated with Bill Coons, a college friend of Don’s who moved from Syracuse to New York to write Andrew Shaw novels. (He used my pen name and I vetted the books and took a cut.) At one point I started a book of my own, wrote three chapters, and hated it, so I took it around to Bill. “I can’t stand what I’ve written here,” I said, “so would you like to make it a collab? Write three chapters, and then we’ll write alternate chapters until we have enough for a book, and we’ll split what we get for it.”
Bill agreed and tossed the manuscript on a table, and we went out for a drink. When he got home his wife had read the three chapters, the ones I said I couldn’t stomach and assumed logically enough that Bill had written them. “I think you’re really getting better,” she told him. “This is far and away the best thing you’ve ever done.”
Astonishing, isn’t it, that the marriage didn’t last?
Years later, Don collaborated with Brian Garfield on Gangway!, a comic western. That inspired Don’s definition of collaboration as a process consisting of twice the work for half the money.
And then, years after that, some reader turned up at a signing and told me he thought Don and I should collaborate on a Bernie Rhodenbarr / John Dortmunder adventure. Readers are always making suggestions and I always hate them, but this one struck me as brilliant. Two professional criminals, both featured in lighthearted crime fiction—what could be a more natural combination?
But I could never get Don to go for it. At one point I wrote a first chapter, hoping it would get him into the spirit of things, but it didn’t. He wasn’t interested.
His initial objection was simple enough. The Bernie Rhodenbarr books were first person, the Dortmunder books third. A combination first- /third-person novel would read as if it had been designed by a Congressional committee.
I thought it would work just fine, but he wouldn’t hear of it. A few years passed, and it struck me that nowhere was it carved in stone that Bernie had to narrate his stories. I could write about him in the third person.
Don allowed that might work, then, and he’d give it some real thought when he had finished his current projects. And he may have meant it, or he may have been polite, but in any case nothing ever came of it. I don’t know that the world’s any the poorer for the book we might have written, but I’ll bet we’d have had fun with it.
As I write these lines, Don’s been gone a year and a week. And our three joint novels are now available in this handsome hardcover edition. I’m happy about this, and I can only hope that Don would be pleased as well.
I can’t be sure of that, as he hasn’t had any say in the matter. I do know that, in recent years, he became increasingly open about pseudonymous work that he’d previously kept in the dark. Part of this may have stemmed from a recognition of the inevitability of it all. There are people out there practicing a weird form of scholarship on the crap we wrote—we, who thought of it so little. A quick Internet search can unearth no end of information about our early work, some of which may even be true. The genie, alas, is out of the bottle and the toothpaste is out of the tube. And, really, what difference does it make?
When Don agreed to have Hard Case Crime reissue some of his early books—crime novels, I should point out, that had nothing to apologize for—a mutual friend asked him why he thought this a good idea. The money didn’t amount to much, after all, and the work was not as good as what he’d produced since then, and—
“The difference between being in print and out of print,” Don told him, “is the same as the difference between being alive and being dead.”
So I don’t think it’s too great an abuse of our friendship that I’ve shepherded these three books back into print, and am now sending them on their way into a new life as ebooks.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) 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 would 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 reprinte
d 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.
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