Lawrence Block

Page Updated: 14/11/2006

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Lawrence Block - Page 2

Hit List

The Collected Mystery Stories

The Burglar in the Rye

Tanner on Ice

Everybody Dies

First British Edition Orion (2000)

Hit List
Lawrence Block, a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, reunites us with the compelling anti?hero of Hit Man.
Keller is a cool, competent, consummate professional. A killer.
But who would know? He leads a tranquil personal life, working diligently on his stamp collection. Now and then a call from the breezily efficient Dot sends him off on a job. He takes a plane, rents a car, finds a hotel room, and comes back when the job is done.
But then Dot books him for a job in New York, his home base. And then he meets a kooky artist who tells him he's got a murderer's thumb. Next thing you know he's listening to an astrologer telling him his moon's in Taurus.
And the jobs start to go wrong. Targets die before he can get to them. The realization is slow coming, but there's no getting around it. Keller, God help him, has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.
Sharp, thought?provoking and blacker than Keller's conscience, Hit List shows Lawrence Block at his stylish best.
Praise for Lawrence Block
'Deceptively rambling plot construction which, when you least expect, snaps shut like a pair of cuffs. As much about alcoholism as it is about crime, dark and fearful passages both, down which Block treads a nimble measure' Literary Review

First British Edition Orion (1999)

The Collected Mystery Stories
From Grandmaster and Edgar award-winning author Lawrence Block 71 stories, including three collections previously unpublished in the UK, along with 14 new stories, all gathered together in one omnibus volume for the first time
In Block's dark vision the beast is out there, prowling in many different guises. He could be a murderous madman feigning insanity; a beautiful woman, dangerous to look at and lethal to touch; a shy boy quietly testing his new-found power to destroy; a midnight trucker using the highways as his personal hunting ground; an intense young passenger experimenting in terror...
Ranging from dark to light, from the urban noir of Matt Scudder to the urban effervescence of Bernie Rhodenbarr, Lawrence Block shows himself to be a master of the contemporary short story. His other series characters are represented here too: Martin Ehrengraf, the lawyer who never loses a case; Chip Harrison, assistant to a road company version of Nero Wolfe; and Keller, the Urban Lonely Guy of professional assassins.

First British Edition No Exit Press (1999)

The Burglar in the Rye
Literary agent Anthea Landau, legendary resident of the Paddington Hotel, is auctioning off her personal correspondence from enigmatic writer Gulliver Fairborn. Her famous ex-client, who guards his private life so jealously that he has never been photographed or interviewed, is reportedly outraged by Landau's betrayal yet can't afford to outbid the collectors who are fighting to get their hands on the letters.
Bernie Rhodenbarr's at the Paddington Hotel to make sure they never do. Gully Fairborn is Bernie's literary idol, so when Fairborn's ex-lover asks the bookseller-burglar to help her return the letters to their rightful author, Bernie doesn't hesitate. He breaks into Anthea Landau's suite. And finds her... dead!
The police burst in, and Bernie takes a fire escape down to an empty room, where he quietly pockets some nice ruby jewellery. Minutes later, he is under arrest. By the time Bernie is bailed out, his bookstore is visited by a host of mysterious folks, all demanding the letters he doesn't have. That's when he learns that the gems he does have were heisted the night before he stole them.
Now, to clear his name and right some terrible wrongs, Bernie must solve a murder or two, track down a rival jewel thief, retrieve the missing letters, find the rubies' rightful owner, and still manage to protect the elusive Gulliver Fairborn ... without getting caught!
'Fast! Funny! Terrific!' Ed McBain
'Lawrence Block is absolutely fantastic… a consistently winning storyteller and a gifted writer. His work overflows with confidence and energy. He is always concise, always clear. His prose is clean, sharp and beautifully edgy, with an intimacy that stems from the fact that hero and narrator are one. He has the edge over every other crime writer I have read' Mary Loudon, The Times

First British Edition No Exit Press (1998)

Tanner on Ice
'America's absolute number one writer of mystery fiction' Philip Friedman
Evan Tanner is a globetrotting adventurer to put Indiana Jones in the shade. Not only has he had his sleep centre destroyed in the Korean War but now he has been on extended vacation ... in the deep freeze for over 25 years!
Thawed but not shaken, Tanner has a lot of catching up to do. No sooner than he's reacquainted himself with Minna, his 'adopted daughter' and now a beautiful woman and mastered the Internet, than he is recruited for another covert assignment - to destabilise the government of Burma (or should that be Myanmar?) and he finds himself in Rangoon (or is that Yangon?).
Mix in exotic surroundings, an exiled Russian beauty, foreign intrigue, cross and double cross, a mysterious dead man and you have an edgy and entertaining puzzle that only Lawrence Block could have created.

First British Edition Orion (1998)

Paperback - Orion (1999)

Everybody Dies
Ex-cop Matt Scudder is well and truly off the booze, but he still spends time with some of his old drinking buddies - including Mick Ballou. Mick is an Irish-American entrepreneur who operates more often than not on the wrong side of the law. Their friendship was always frowned upon by Scudder's superiors in the NYPD, but as Scudder knows there is honour among some thieves and within his own world Mick Ballou is an honourable man.
Mick is also a worried man - two of his henchmen have met violent deaths during a raid on one of his bourbon warehouses.
It looks very like someone is muscling in on his patch and he wants Scudder on the case. Matt isn't keen - working for your friends can be a tricky business. On his way home he is jumped, but does more damage than he takes. Somebody wants him off the job.
When a friend is shot dead, while Scudder is in the men's room of the restaurant where they're eating dinner, he knows he was the real target. No matter that he is warned off by his ex-colleagues, and his wife, Elaine, this is one case Scudder is going to see out to the end.
'One of the most harrowing yet most rewarding chapters in the education of a hero' New York Times
'Scudder is on mellow form, in a vintage, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later narrative' Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday
'Sees Block at the height of his considerable powers… a tensely plotted, ironically convoluted tale' City Life
The Matt Scudder Mysteries
'The Matt Scudder series of private eye novels goes on getting better and better as Block penetrates the deeper reaches of the human heart and deals with the big issues' Val McDermid
"But what is most impressive here, as usual in this series, is how far the plot can stray from suspensefulness without losing the reader's interest ... (the novel) absorbs a New York city bar life so atmospheric that you can almost smell the beer in the woodwork" New York Times
'Deceptively rambling plot construction which, when you least expect it, snaps shut like a pair of cuffs' Literary Review
'Block is a master at misdirection, and so we end up with two mysteries for the price of one… It's effortless reading prose as good as this. Even in the darkest passages of his books Block's writing has a lightness that communicates itself to the reader' Crime Time