Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Karlis, Tanner's comrade in the Latvian Army in Exile, is pining for his true love, a gymnast who can't get out of the Soviet Union. So Tanner sneaks through a hole in the Iron Curtain, meets the child he unwittingly fathered on an earlier trip to Macedonia, smuggles a dissident intellectual out of Yugoslavia, adds to his retinue a six-year-old Lithuanian girl, who'd be the rightful heir to the Lithuanian throne if there ever were one, and winds up not with one Latvian gymnast but with a whole company of them.

An MWA Grand Master and a multiple winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Maltese Falcon awards, Lawrence Block’s reflections and observations come from over a half century as a writer of best-selling crime fiction. Several of his novels have been filmed, most recently A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson.

Five-time Edgar winner and MWA grand master Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column for the Writers Digest magazine for 14 years. The Liar's Bible consists of previously uncollected columns, chosen to illuminate the often dimly-lit path of the writer of fiction.

The conclusion of Hit and Run found Keller living in a big old house in post-Katrina New Orleans' Lower Garden District, with a new name (Nicholas Edwards), a new wife (Julia), a new career (rehabbing houses), and a baby on the way. It certainly looked as though he was done killing people for money. But old habits die hard, and when the economic downturn knocked out the construction business, a phone call from Dot draws him back into the old game.

Martin H. Ehrengraf, dapper and diabolical, may be Lawrence Block's darkest creation. He's the defense attorney who never sees the inside of a courtroom, because all his clients are innocent - no matter how guilty they may seem. Some even believe themselves to be guilty: They remember pulling the trigger, or wiring the dynamite to their spouse's car, or holding the bloody blade. But things have a way of working out when Martin Ehrengraf is on the case.

The Sounds of Crime is an exclusive collection of five brand new short stories by some of the best crimewriters around. Using the theme of 'audio', this unique collection features brand new stories by Lawrence Block, Peter James, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Christopher Fowler.

The Cold War's boiling over. Global tensions are near the breaking point. So, what's the perfect assignment for a super-spy who hasn't slept since the Korean conflict? A fun-filled trip to the Montreal World's Fair! The adorable little girl he's escorting - who, under different circumstances, would be sitting on the Lithuanian throne - can hardly contain her excitement, but it isn't all playtime for Evan Tanner.

So this girl walks into a bar…and when she walks out there’s a man with her. She goes to bed with him, and she likes that part. Then she kills him, and she likes that even better. On her way out, she cleans out his wallet. She keeps moving, and has a new name for each change of address. She’s been doing this for a while, and she’s good at it. And then a chance remark gets her thinking of the men who got away, the lucky ones who survived a night with her.

To escape punishment for a murder he didn't mean to commit, insurance man Don Barshter has to take on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. But can he find safety in the skin of another man...a worse man...a sinner man?

A very dangerous man. That's Paul Kavanagh, an ex-Green Beret with nothing but time on his hands--until he gets an offer to steal a shipment of tactical nuclear weapons form the US government--and finds himself a partner, George Dattner, who has the cold eyes of a trained killer. Each of these men alone is dangerous. But anyone who tries to stop them together is guaranteed not to come out of it alive!

You might as well know this going in: Lawrence Block's new novel is not for everyone. It's recounted in journal form by its protagonist, and begins when he walks into a roadhouse outside of Bakersfield, California, and walks out with a woman. And rapes and murders her. But, um, not in that order. Right. But it's what he does with the rest of his life that's really interesting.... 

Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge.

Hollywood vs. The Author is a collection of non-fiction anecdotes by authors who’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the development room firsthand - some who have successfully managed to straddle the two worlds, seeing their works morph into the kinds of feature films and TV shows that make them proud, and others who stepped blindsided into that room after selling their first or second novels. All the stories in this collection illustrate the great divide between the world of literature and the big or small screen.

In the 1980s, Lawrence Block developed an interactional seminar that adapted elements of the human potential movement specifically for writers. For several years, he and his wife, Lynne, traveled the country conducting seminars that focused on the inner game of writing and designed to enable participants to get out of their own way and put their best work on paper.

Jerry Broadfield thinks he's a good cop. But now he's been charged with extortion - and his former buddies in the NYPD would like to see him laid out on a morgue slab for squealing to a committee on police corruption. Suddenly, he's got a lot of enemies, and when a dead call girl turns up in his apartment, his troubles get even bigger. Broadfield screams "setup," but nobody believes him - except ex-policeman, now unlicensed PI Matthew Scudder. Because Broadfield turned traitor no cop is going to give Scudder any help with this investigation, so Scudder's on his own.

In Thirty, the novel pretended to be a diary. That worked fine, and the resultant narrative proved at once challenging and effortless to sustain. I enjoyed writing it, Berkley enjoyed publishing it - and they wanted something else. What they got in Threesome was a novel pretending to be a novel. The premise, as you’ll see, is that the book has been written by its three main characters, Harry and Rhoda and Priss, in the form of a lightly fictionalized chronicle of their own life as a menage a trois.

And at one point we decided it might be fun to do a novel together. Not by thinking it out and talking through it and, you know, collaborating in a serious artistic manner. Our method was simpler. One of us would write a chapter, and then the other would write a chapter to come after it, and back and forth, like that, until we had a book. It worked, and by God it was fun. The first of our efforts was A Girl Called Honey, and it started when I wrote a chapter and sent it to Don. And so on, and we stopped when we had a book and sent it to Henry Morrison.

After spending her girlhood writing gentle and thoughtful novels of the lesbian experience (Shadows, Warm and Willing, Enough of Sorrow), Jill Emerson reinvented herself in the early 1970s, just when contemporary literature was experiencing an enormous flowering of sexuality.

On the border between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide - with fatal results. This is MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block at his rawest and most visceral, a bloody, bawdy, brutal story of passion and punishment - and of lines that were never meant to be crossed - available for the first time in 50 years!

It's a jungle out there. Literally. At least for Evan Tanner, an eternally sleepless, sometime superspy, who finds himself in Africa on the trail of the AWOL ruler of tiny Modonoland. It seems the petty despot's gone missing, and he's taken the state treasury along with him. No stranger to impossible missions and international peril, Tanner's been in over his head before. This time, however, he's in imminent danger of being buried alive. And it all has to do with the CIA, white supremacists, moderate revolutionaries...and a blond jungle bombshell named (no joke!) Sheena.