Lawrence BlockLawrence Block
Newsletter 12th July 1997
(reproduced by kind permission of the author)
Bernie Rhodenbarr & Evan Tanner Series & Bibliographies
Matt Scudder Series & Bibliography
About the Author
February Newsletter

Well, hello there.  Here it is, Bastille Day already, and time for another of these exercises in shameless self-promotion.  Isn't it amazing how the months zip by faster and faster every passing year?  My Mother The Car reruns, on the other hand, take The Burglar in the Librarylonger than ever.  I'm sure there's an explanation, but I don't want to know it. The big news this time around is The Burglar in the Library.  It is, as you've very likely surmised, Bernie Rhodenbarr's latest adventure.  The early returns seem to confirm what the folks at Dutton have been assuring me--- i.e., that it's the strongest book in the series.   (I can never tell, and sometimes tend to regard each book in a series as a sort of chapter in a maxi-novel, and thus not to be compared to its fellows.)
The titular library is in an English-style country house out of Agatha Christie.  It was not without a pang that I saw Bernie and Carolyn (and Raffles the cat) take leave of New York.  Would Bernie prove the sort of local wine that does not travel well?  Aside from a visit to Memphis ("The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis") he's always stayed close to home.  Cuttleford House proves a good venue for him, as it turns out, especially when the snow starts falling and the phones go out and the bridge falls into the ravine and people begin dying off.
In a matter of weeks, Bernie will be showing up at another sort of library altogether---and you're all invited.  I'm referring, of course, to the New York Public Library, which backs up on Bryant Park.  As most of you will recall, there's been a campaign underway to buy Bernie a park bench all his own, complete with a brass plaque.  This will not only make the lad immortal in his home town, but it's a great way to further the work of the folks who have transformed that erstwhile eyesore into an absolute gem of a midtown oasis.
Here's the good news---you guys raised the money, and it's time to party!  Bernie's bench will be formally dedicated on Wednesday, July 30, starting at 6 pm in the park at Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets.  I don't know exactly what form the festivities will take, but I'm hoping the park will positively overflow with Bernie's fans.  Partners & Crime, the mystery bookshop in Greenwich Village, will be on hand with first-edition copies of The Burglar in the Library.  (If the weather's good and the turnout's large, they may not have enough copies to go around; if you want to reserve one, call them at 212/243.0440.)
Admission's free, of course, and you're invited, and so is anyone you know who might enjoy it.  As George Bernard Shaw wrote to Winston Churchill, bring a friend, if you have one.  (That was on an invitation to an opening, and Churchill's reply wasn't bad, either:  "I regret I shall be unable to attend your first night.  I'll come on the second night, if you have one.")
The bench party and the publication of The Burglar in the Library have both snuck up on me, as it happens, because I've been out of the country for over two months.  I flew to Ireland in mid-April and holed up in a hotel in Kerry to write a book.  I got the book written, then flew to England for the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border.  (Contrary to what you might think, Hay-on-Wye is not Elmer Fudd's idea of a tewwible sandwich.  It's an utterly charming village, and the used book capital of the world.)  Then back to Listowel (another utterly charming village) for Writers' Week, where Lynne joined me, and over to England for two weeks of book promotion.  And then a week's vacation in Iceland with a side trip to Greenland.
But the point of this, really, is to let you know that I did get a book written in Listowel.  I wrote it in longhand, a newfangled technique I stumbled on last fall, and I must say it was liberating.  Nothing to tote aside from yellow pads and a pen.  Nothing to plug in.  Nothing to crash.  Nothing to break.  What'll they think of next?
Even more remarkable than how I wrote it, however, is what I wrote.  The new book, you see, stars an old friend whose adventures I haven't chronicled in over a quarter of a century.  His name is Evan Tanner, and I wrote seven books about him in the late sixties.  Tanner, as some of you will recall, has lived in a state of unremitting insomnia ever since his sleep center was destroyed by a shard of shrapnel in the Korean War.  He has since earned a living writing term papers and theses for college students and has learned dozens of languages and championed innumerable lost causes and irredentist movements.
He's a hell of a guy, but I swear I thought we'd heard the last of him.  Then I found myself thinking about Tanner a few months back, knowing that Signet is going to be reissuing the early books in paperback starting in the fall of '98. I picked one up and thumbed through it, and I remembered how much fun I'd had with the character.   Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if I could write another book about Tanner.  But he'd be in his mid-sixties by now, a little long in the tooth for a border-jumping action-adventure hero.  And I didn't want to make him fictionally ageless, nor did I want to write a period piece.  I wanted the book set in present time, and I wanted Tanner to be in his late thirties or early forties, and realistically so.  Impossible, right?
As soon as I figured out how to do it, I pretty much had to write the book.  And did, and had a good time with it.  I don't have a title yet, but I can tell you that it's set in Burma, and that it will most likely be published a year from September.
And will there be more new Tanners?  Hey, why ask me?  It's becoming increasingly clear that I never know what to expect, least of all from myself.  Maybe there'll be a new Chip Harrison novel one of these days.  (The second volume, Chip Harrison Scores Again, came out a few months ago, and #3, Make Out With Murder, is due in September.)  I don't think I'm going to write more Chips, but how do I know?  I can't even swear I won't write a sequel to The Specialists, my only one-book series.  I am to be regarded, I've come to realize, as a sort of loose cannon on the deck of the HMS Literature.  There is, alas, no way to know what I'm going to do next.
Meanwhile, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes is back in print as an Avon paperback.  It was the sixth Matthew Scudder novel, written after Eight Million Ways to Die and before Out on the Cutting Edge, and is a sort of prequel, a flashback volume in which a sober Scudder in the mid-eighties recounts events that took place ten years earlier.  It's more a novel of character than the other books in the series, and many readers cite it as their favorite.  I tend to recommend it as an ideal place to start the series---but that's been hard to do with the book out of print.  So I'm delighted to have it available again.  Nice cover, too. . . .Later this year Bernie will get a little more shelf space, with The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling coming in paperback from Signet, along with Dutton's hardcover reissue of The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza.
If you've read a short story of mine called "Answers to Soldier" in Some Days You Get the Bear, you've already made the acquaintance of Keller, a sort of wistful hit man, the Urban Lonely Guy of assassins.  I wrote several short stories about Keller before it became clear to me that what I was doing was writing a novel on the installment plan.  The novel's complete, I'm pleased to report, and Morrow will publish it in February.  The title is Hit Man.  (Don't ask.)
I finished up Hit Man last summer and fall, and devoted much of those seasons (and the winter as well) to short fiction. Interestingly enough, the decision to spend some time writing short stories seemed somehow to summon up invitations to produce them.  In some instances, I no sooner wrote a story than I heard from an anthology whose theme it happened to fit.  "Three in the Corner Pocket" struck me as a little too nastily erotic for most magazines, and I was wondering what to do with it.  Then came an invitation, and it'll be in the new Hot Blood anthology, Crimes of Passion. . . I wrote a Scudder short with a particularly unusual murder motive, and was wondering where to send it when I heard from Martin Edwards, who'd been selected to edit Whydunit?, a Crime Writers Association (UK) anthology of stories with, yes, curious motives for murder.  "Looking for David" turned out to be just up their street, and will appear as well over here in Ellery Queen.
Several stories were created specifically in response to invitations.  "Headaches and Bad Dreams" was written especially for The Best of the Best, Signet's anthology celebrating the paperback publisher's first fifty years.  "In For a Penny" was commissioned for reading on BBC Radio Four.  And The Plot Thickens, an anthology to benefit adult literacy and edited by Mary Higgins Clark, had a very specific theme:  every story had to include a thick steak, a thick book, and a thick fog.  I figured a gimmick like that would make decent stories highly unlikely, and I've always had trouble writing stories to order, but not nearly as much trouble as I'd have saying no to Mary.  So I agreed, and surprised myself; I can't remember when I've been as pleased with a story of mine as I am with "How Far It Could Go". . . .Speaking of Mary Higgins Clark, she's one of a dozen members of the Adams Round Table, a monthly dinner-cum-shoptalk group to which I belong, along with Stanley Cohen, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Mickey Friedman, Joyce Harrington, Judith Kelman, Warren Murphy, Justin Scott, Peter Straub, and Whitley Strieber.  You'll find all our names on the cover of Murder On the Run, an anthology of which we are uncommonly proud.  I have a new Keller story in the collection.
A while ago Jill Morgan invited me to write a story in collaboration with my wife, Lynne, for a collection of spousal joint efforts to be called Till Death Do Us Part.  Lynne thought that was a neat idea, and I said okay, but she'd have to come up with an idea.  So she did.  Not bad, I said grudgingly, but that didn't get her off the hook.  She still had to do the research.  So she did.  That left me with no choice but to write the story, so I did.  It features our old friend Bernie Rhodenbarr---he's a busy boy these days---and you can see how the venture turned out in "The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke."
We're just back in New York, and already planning the next trip.  We'll be spending September in Central Europe, taking trains hither and yon and crossing borders like, well, like Evan Tanner.  I'm not sure where we'll get to, but Vienna, Prague, Cracow, Ljubljana, Venice and Barcelona are on our wish list at the moment.  Meanwhile, however, I've got some other traveling to do.  Here's my schedule for the next few months, and do call the numbers indicated to confirm times and dates:

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