Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  This did happen: One night I took off all my clothes and jumped overboard and swam out to sea, away from the ship. I may have meant to drown myself, but it could also have been a test, a game. If so, I proved what I had set out to prove, and thus lost or won, as you prefer. I couldn’t take black pills either. Somehow I swam back to the ship and managed to drag myself aboard.

  That must have been a turning point, or the signal of a turning point, because the next thing I did was start the engines. I set out to run the boat south, and figured that I could stay within sight of the coast and cruise all the way around Florida to my island.

  Madness has many phases. This phase was good enough to wear off before the tanks ran dry. I suddenly realized one day that I would run out of fuel and be permanently adrift in the Atlantic, and the phase instantly lost its charm.

  I docked at a private marina outside of Neptune Beach, which is a shore suburb of Jacksonville. It was the middle of the night and no one was around, and I tied up my boat like a good little sailor and walked through the grounds unchallenged. Pure dumb luck, and it got me through the most genuinely hazardous part of the whole operation. There I was with no identification, someone else’s boat, and a million dollars in a metal satchel. I didn’t even realize the danger until it was long past.

  The time on the boat established one thing. By the time I got off it I knew that all the things I had to do would have to wait until I was in shape to do them. Buying the land, stashing the money, everything. None of it was that goddamned urgent. It could wait. First I had to go home.

  I sat in a Turkish bath in Jax until the barbershops opened. I went to one and got a shave and a haircut. A Chinese laundryman pressed my suit while I waited. Then I walked over to the terminal and got on a bus.

  He didn’t recognize me. He pointed his eyes at the middle of my chest, and he put the cracker accent on hard, the way he’ll do with mainland types.

  I said, “I’ll bet you forgot the dictionary, too.”

  The eyes jumped, the mouth gaped. “Now I will be damned,” he said. “Now I will be paternally damned. Do you know I didn’t know you? By God, I don’t know as I can be blamed. No beard, next to no hair, and pale enough to pass for white.” He suddenly remembered that the radio was on and that it was against my religion. He spun around and turned it off, then turned to face me again.

  “A dozen aigs and what-all else? You know, I never thought I’d get to say that again.” His face turned serious. “Thought I’d gone and lost your trade. Thought you were dead, if I’m damned for saying it. Been how long? A month?”

  “About that.”

  “Haven’t been sick, have you?”

  “Up North.”

  “About the same, some would say.” He leaned on the counter. “Well, now.”

  I didn’t want to be too talkative, but I had to fill in a few blanks for him. “Sudden trip,” I said. “A boat came across from Little Table Key to pick me up.”

  “Business?”

  “A death.”

  “Oh, now,” he said. “I am sorry. Kin of yours?”

  “A friend,” I said. “My only really close friend.”

  “Terrible. A young fellow, I suppose.”

  “About my age.”

  “Terrible. Sudden?”

  I thought for a moment. “No,” I said finally. “No, not sudden. We knew it was coming. It was just a question of when.”

  I told him I would hold off on restocking until I had a chance to take inventory. I explained that my own row-boat was on the island and he immediately offered to run me over. I said I’d just as soon go myself, if he knew where I could borrow a boat; I’d tow it back tomorrow or the day after. He had a dinghy with an outboard on it and said I could keep it as long as I wanted.

  “And one thing you don’t walk off without, by God.” He reached under the counter, pulled out a book and slapped it down hard. It was a paperback dictionary. “That’s a bet you just lost, that I wouldn’t remember it. Oh, and there’s a story goes with it.”

  He propped himself up on his elbows, grinning at the memory. “That fellow brought the dictionary, you know, and he always just goes and sets the books in the rack and clears out the old ones. Well, the wife was here at the time and of course she didn’t even think. And a couple of days go by, see, and this nigra conies in. Suit and a tie and you just knew he walked through life waiting for someone to take his photograph. Well, what does he pick out but the dictionary.

  “Now you can imagine. First time in the store, and he brings this book over to the counter, and what do I have to say? ‘Oh, can’t sell you that, it’s reserved on special order.’ Which is exactly the truth, and I’d of had a better chance of convincing this nigra that I’m a bleached Chinaman myself, see? And the more I talk the madder he gets, and I just keep on explaining and explaining. Take another book, take a dozen.’ I tell him. ‘Have a Coke, free, my compliments, drink it right here in the store, hell, I’ll get you my own damn glass.’ And out he goes with his nose scraping the ceiling.”

  He cackled. “So of course for the next three days I sat and worried about it. Every morning I woke up looking to see a picket line around the house with Martin Luther Coon himself at the head of it. You wouldn’t believe the thoughts went through my mind, and of course I never heard anymore about it, or saw that particular son of a bitch again, and doubtless never will. But that’s your dictionary, and it’s been in back of this counter ever since, and it’s marked sixty cents and cost me thirty-six, and it is yours free like the Coke the nigra wouldn’t take, because if I didn’t get thirty-six dollars worth of excitement out of it I don’t know what.”

  And out back, when he showed me the boat, he said. “I hate to tell you this but I’d hate worse to go without. About two weeks ago I took a liberty. I went out to your island.” He turned his face away. “I thought it over and thought it over, and the wife said either you were dead and couldn’t be helped or alive and wouldn’t welcome company, but all I could think of is what if you were sick? So I took the boat around just for a look and saw your boat on the beach, and I thought, well, he isn’t gone anywhere, and then I saw all this weed and such on the beach, and called to you and couldn’t raise you, and that’s when I worried.

  “I went ashore and just checked to see if you were about. 1 went close enough to the shack to see inside, but I swear 1 never set foot in the door or touched nothing. Then I thought, well, he must of drowned, and came back.”

  I didn’t say anything. He turned to look at me. “It was a liberty, and it won’t happen again.”

  “Oh, now. You were doing me a kindness.”

  “I hope you’ll think so.” He snapped quickly out of the mood. “Well, now, you keep that dinghy long as you like, hear? And next time you come I’ll have that dozen aigs—”

  The beach was a mess. I started to pick things up but there was too much debris and too many things to do first.

  I got out of my clothes. They had been comfortable all along, but as soon as I set foot on my island they felt as though they were strangling me. Eventually I would decide whether any of them was worth keeping.

  I carried the metal satchel half the length of the island. I dug a hole alongside a sick-looking palm tree and buried the box under three feet of sand.

  I went to my other burying place and dug up the aluminum-foil packet. I opened it, and to the bills inside it I added my money belt and the large bills from my wallet. I kept the smaller bills and change handy for trips to Mushroom Key, and I carried my Do Nothing list back to the shack. I read it aloud and tacked it in place on the inside of the door. Then I read it through a second time, and only then did I go back to cover up my money belt and smooth the sand over it.

  I ran one lap around the island. Ritual, perhaps; the animal staking out his territory. My wind was bad but it wouldn’t take long to improve it. I caught my breath, and then I ran out into the sea and swam around. I stayed in the water for quite a while. Then I came out and sprawled face d
own in the sand with the hot sun on my back.

  Vacations are fun, but they’re right. The best part is getting home again.

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  “This will sock you right between the eyes. It’s terrific!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Goes through you like a dose of salts and stings like iodine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Hmmm. I rather hope the experience of reading Such Men Are Dangerous isn’t quite the exercise in masochism these two reviewers make it out to be. I need all the readers I can get, and wouldn’t want to leave them all punched out, purged, and stung to a fare-thee-well.

  Still, it’s nice to think the book might have an impact.

  The book came about at a curious time in my own life, and one I’ve never been inclined to write about. But the afterwords I’ve been dashing off, designed to accompany my early work into an extended life in the cyberworld of epublishing, have sent me careening down memory lane, bouncing from pothole to pothole, and I might as well keep at it. And if I am indeed writing an extended inchoate memoir on the installment plan, well, so be it.

  “A curious time in my own life.” Yes, I guess we can call it that.

  In 1966, after an eighteen-month foray into the corporate world at Western Printing in Racine, Wisconsin, my wife and two daughters and I relocated to New Brunswick, New Jersey. My career had taken a turn for the better in Wisconsin; I’d written several books while I was there, most recently the first Tanner adventure, to be published as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, and now had Henry Morrison as my agent. (Henry and I had worked side by side at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in 1957–8, and he handled my work until Scott and I parted company. A year or two after that, he left Scott’s employ and set up on his own shop. In due course he got in touch with me, and it was he who placed Tanner with Gold Medal Books.)

  Within a year, however, everything had pretty much gone to hell.

  How to put it? Bluntly, I suppose, and at the same time obliquely. A very close friend and colleague was having an affair with the widow of another friend and colleague. And, sometime late in 1966, my friend’s girlfriend and I discovered, to our considerable excitement, that we were right up there with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, if not Dante and Beatrice. We had an affair that could not have been less decorous had our liaisons been staged in Macy’s window. My friend and I both separated from our wives, and there were some appalling scenes, public and private. And I went back to my wife and back to the other woman, and so on, until I felt as though I were the battered shuttlecock in a drunken game of badminton.

  So I went to Ireland to regroup. I finished a Tanner book—Tanner’s Twelve Swingers, begun in New Jersey and completed in Dublin and set, of course, in Latvia. I was in Ireland for two months, and thinking of living there permanently, until I woke up one day in West Cork with a hangover that impressed even the locals. I flew home from Shannon and moved back in with my wife, and I hadn’t been home an hour before I knew it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t, though we were together another six years or so.

  Meanwhile, my friend and his wife got a divorce, and he married the girlfriend. That didn’t work, either.

  In West Cork, before the hangover, I’d felt about as hopeless as it was possible to feel, and in my inn’s library I came upon Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, which seemed then to have been written with me in mind. What I got from it was the insight that when one can’t go on, what one does is go on. So on I went, living again in New Brunswick, and trying to get something written. I’d started another Tanner book in Ireland—The Scoreless Thai—and I finished that, and then I sat around for a couple of months doing nothing much. We had a big round mahogany table in the dining room, American Empire in style, and I would sit there all day playing solitaire. Some nights I’d drink. Some nights I wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to make much difference.

  I didn’t write anything because I couldn’t see the point. I just got through the days—playing solitaire, reading, drinking. Time passed. It always does.

  Then one day I went upstairs and started writing the book that turned out to be Such Men Are Dangerous. I wrote all day every day for a week, went to New York for two days, then came back and wrote for two more days, and that was that. The book was done.

  Well, it’s not hard to guess where the protagonist came from. Paul Kavanagh and I didn’t have a lot of life experience in common, but somehow we’d reached the same internal place.

  That’s probably as much as you need to know about the writing of Such Men Are Dangerous, and as much as I need to tell you. But I probably ought to say something about the frame device; the book purports to be a true story written by the person who lived it. (Although I began putting my own name on the book years ago, it was initially published “by Paul Kavanagh”.) I’m not entirely sure why I chose to do it that way. It was a book I was pleased with, and it would have certainly done my career no harm to have it appear under my own name, but the gamesmanship of it probably appealed to me. I don’t know, and after all these years I don’t suppose it matters.

  I don’t know that I really thought anyone would buy the premise, but I actually received a letter, sent to my publisher and dutifully forwarded to me, from a chap who ran some sort of charity in the UK. He’d noted that all royalties from the book were to be given to charity, and he respectfully proposed his worthy organization to be the recipient of some if not all of the funds.

  One more story. Sometime in the mid-eighties, a good fifteen years after the novel was published, I was married again and living in the West Village. My wife Lynne had some people over to the house, and one of them, a former CIA employee, spotted a copy of Such Men on a table.

  “Oh, I know about that book,” the guy said. “A Company guy wrote it.”

  “No,” Lynne said. “That’s one of my husband’s books.”

  “Yeah, right,” the fellow said. “Look, everybody at the Company knew about that guy. Wandered off the reservation, pulled some weird shit. That’s the book he wrote.”

  —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 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 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 Co
uldn’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.