In 2016, Hard Case Crime re-released a lost Lawrence Block novel titled “Sinner Man” that was written in the late 1950s and rejected by paperback houses until it was published in 1968 as “Savage Lover” under his Sheldon Lord pseudonym. The story behind this lost work is pretty interesting and is addressed by Block in the afterward to the recent reprint.
The paperback opens with insurance salesman Donald Barshter inadvertently killing his wife during a domestic squabble fueled by alcohol and high emotions. Instead of calling the police and rolling the dice on a likely manslaughter charge, he decides to run away. Barshter splits to Buffalo and creates a new identity for himself as “Nat Crowley,” an enigmatic wise guy from Miami.
Barshter finds it liberating to shed his skin and don a a new personality with a more brash attitude than the insurance industry would permit. As Crowley, he fights, gets laid (fairly graphically, thank heavens) and begins to attract the attention of the local mafia and the Buffalo Police. After he falls in with a crime boss, he becomes enmeshed in regional mob rivalries and makes some difficult choices along the way. Inevitably, things get increasingly murderous as Barshter goes all-in with his new persona.
Reading Block’s earliest writing is such a pleasure because it’s so recognizably him. The dialogue is crisp and realistic and the narrator’s thought process is logical and well-reasoned - even when you need to suspend disbelief that a suburban insurance man can segue so seamlessly into the Syndicate or that his desire to do so is wise under the circumstances.
Block has become a better writer over the past 60 years as you’d expect, but the guy was never a hack. Fans know he’s got real gifts, and he had them back in the day, as well. “Sinner Man” is a stand-alone winner, and you won’t regret the time spent reading this thin rediscovered paperback. Highly recommended.
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Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series about an alcoholic ex-NYPD Detective working as an unlicensed private detective started in 1976 and has been a reliably great crime fiction character arc over the past 43 years. Scudder has more-or-less aged in real time over the course of the series which is why I was so intrigued to read Block’s 2019 take on Scudder in the new 160-page novella, “A Time to Scatter Stones.”
As we join our hero narrator, he’s still sober and still married to Elaine at age seventy-something. His bad knees generally don’t stop him from walking around Manhattan, but an ice pack is needed to ease the pain when he gets home. Block does a nice job getting readers up to speed on Scudder and Elaine’s backstories. Elaine is a former prostitute who just started attending her own support-group meetings for women who were in the life - an analogous situation to Scudder’s own AA meetings that he’s been attending for 35 years.
Elaine is sponsoring a young ex-prostitute named Ellen who recently quit escorting. The problem is that she has one client who is not taking no for an answer and insists on seeing for paid sex her despite her demure protestations. She wants Scudder’s help to make the creep lay off and go away. The stakes are increased as his behavior becomes increasingly stalky.
The first problem is identifying the stalker because it turns out that johns don’t always give their prostitutes their real names. The second problem is that 2019 Scudder is not the same ass-kicker as 1989 Scudder. It’s fun to see a beloved PI who is physically past his prime engaging in old-school gumshoe work, as the story drives toward a satisfyingly violent confrontation and a sexy conclusion.
I’m pleased to report that even at age 80, Lawrence Block still has his writing chops. His knack for snappy dialogue is better than ever, and his plotting is flawless. Block is a mystery fiction grandmaster and a national treasure. If “A Time to Scatter Stones” turns out to be Scudder’s last appearance, Block can rest easy knowing the journey of this beloved character ended on a high note. Highly recommended.
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In 1959 and 1960, NBC-TV aired a private eye show called “Markham” starring Ray Milland that ran for 59 episodes before cancellation. At the time, a young Lawrence Block was hired to write an original TV tie-in novel starring Markham that was finally released in 1961 - after the show had already been canceled. The paperback was originally published as “Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos,” but has since been re-released under Block’s original submitted title, “You Can Call It Murder.”
New York P.I. Roy Markham is engaged to find a missing 20 year-old girl named Barb who cleaned out her bank account and disappeared from her New Hampshire college. Her wealthy father is worried and wants Markham’s help to find his little girl. Barb runs with a fast crowd and loves to spend her daddy’s money, so its really just a question of what bad decision she’s made this time.
As always, Block’s writing is superb and Markam’s first-person narration recalls his early Matthew Scudder novels. Clear thinking, logic, and good detecting bring the P.I. closer to the novel’s solution. Markham isn’t a hardboiled detective cracking skulls along the way, but the underlying mystery takes him into the seamy underbelly of society giving the short novel enough gritty reality to keep the pages turning.
Although it was inconsequential upon its release, the original 1961 Markham paperback is now a collector’s item and will cost you a small fortune to buy. The paperback has been reprinted several times as “You Could Call It Murder” with rather generic covers that are readily available. Moreover, Block has been generous with his back-catalog and made the book available on Kindle for five bucks. Whatever the medium, this highly-enjoyable early novel is definitely worth your time. Recommended.
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“The Girl with the Long Green Heart” was a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original novel by Lawrence Block released in 1965 that was brought back as a Hard Case Crime reprint in 2005 with a new cover by the great Robert McGinnis (although the original cover art was quite fetching). It’s a con-man story in the same vein as “The Sting” and it’s an absolutely terrific read.
Johnny Hayden is a master of the long con with a specialty in land and stock scams. After a stretch in the joint, he’s working in a bowling alley futilely saving his pennies so he can one day break into the hotel business. Johnny receives a visit from a younger, less-experienced fellow grifter named Doug Rance who comes with a proposition for a job. Rance has identified a mark named Wallace Gunderson who is ripe for the picking, but he needs Johnny’s help to make it happen.
Johnny is a great first-person narrator, but it wouldn’t have been much of a story if he declined Rance’s offer and went back to polishing his balls at the bowling alley. Instead, he’s back in the game honing and tweaking Rance’s plan to engage in a little theft by deception. After the initial setup and planning, it’s off to upstate New York to meet the mooch. A good bit of the action also takes place in Toronto, an underused setting in classic crime fiction.
I won’t give too much of the con away here other to say it involves land in Canada that may or may not be of interest to speculators interested in uranium mining. Gunderson is a jackass and a blowhard, so you don’t feel a bit sorry for him as Johnny and Rance work their magic. Rance enlists the help of Gunderson’s secretary, Evelyn, who has her own score to settle with her boss. Evelyn is a scorned woman with larceny in her long green heart and a real looker to boot. She needs to work closely with Johnny to make this scam happen, and, well, you can probably see where this is going.
If you like con-man novels, “The Girl With the Long Green Heart” will be right up your alley. The story’s big twist wasn’t a huge surprise and the conclusion was a bit anti-climactic, but it was a blast to read from beginning to end. It’s another early-career winner from Lawrence Block. Recommended.
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The intersection of gambling and crime is fertile ground for fiction writers and serves as the theme for “High Stakes,” a 2003 anthology of eight short stories edited by Robert Randisi. Three of my favorite authors are among the contributors, so I decided to read and review the stories by Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, and Randisi himself.
“Let’s Get Lost” by Lawrence Block
Block’s contribution features his popular NYC private eye Matt Scudder, the hero of Block’s most acclaimed series of novels. This particular story originally appeared in the September/October 2000 issue of “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”
“Let’s Get Lost” is a throwback to a time when Nixon was president, and Scudder was a married NYPD detective who drank too much. One night watching a baseball game at home, Matt is summoned to the apartment of a prostitute with whom he has a personal relationship (Elaine becomes a significant character in later books of the series). As a favor to a client, she needs Matt to clean up a mess at a home poker game in a Manhattan brownstone.
The mess in question involves one of the poker players who winds up with a switchblade buried in his chest - dead by the time Matt arrives. The unusual circumstances of the murder cause Matt to advocate staging the crime scene along with the poker guys to create a more coherent story for the soon-to-be-responding officers. Is Matt being a crooked cop or does he have an ulterior motive?
Matt Scudder stories - long or short - are always fantastic, and this one is no exception. The Scudder P.I. novels contain many references to his days on the NYPD, but it’s interesting to actually read a story where Scudder is on the job as a cop and Elaine was just his favorite hooker.
“Breathe Deep” by Donald E Westlake
Westlake’s entry in the anthology first appeared in the July 1985 issue of Playboy where you also could have seen Grace Jones naked if you had $3.50 burning a hole in your pocket.
Chuck is a Las Vegas blackjack dealer standing at attention behind a $10 table with no players at 3:30 in the morning. Out of nowhere, he is approached by an old man that Chuck suspects is a derelict who wandered into the upscale casino on the Strip.
The conversation veers toward the urban legend (which may be true, for all I know) that casinos pump oxygen onto the gaming floor to keep the gamblers energized and awake. The story poses the question: what if someone wanted to use that knowledge as a weapon?
Westlake is always a good author, but at seven pages, this story was too short to really build up any momentum or tension. And without spoiling the ending, I’m not sure that the violent plan being executed would have actually worked in real life.
“Henry and the Idiots” by Robert J. Randisi
As the creator of several highly-regarded mystery series characters (Miles Jacoby, Nick Delvecchio, and Joe Meough, to name a few) Robert Randisi knows his way around a good crime story. “Henry and the Idiots” appears for the first time in the “High Stakes” anthology and has also found a second life as a $2 Kindle eBook.
While playing Caribbean stud poker on board a Mississippi riverboat casino, Henry Simon wins $257,000 in one hand and plans his escape from his miserable nag of a wife and her idiot brothers who all share the same trailer. Instead of going home with the money. Henry takes the cash and splits on a tour of casinos west of the Mississippi en route to Reno.
Meanwhile, back at the trailer, Henry’s wife dispatches the idiots to find Henry and figure out why he didn’t come home from the casino the night before. When she catches wind of Henry’s big gambling win, she’s ever more motivated to find her husband - and the money. Things come to a head in Reno once the idiots catch up with Henry and the security of the money falls into serious jeopardy.
The lighthearted story ends up with some fun twists and was a nice way to kill a half-hour.
The other five stories in “High Stakes” were written by Leslie Glass, Jeff Abbott, Judith Van Gleason, and Elaine Viets, and I’m sure they are all solid mystery tales. Based on the three stories I read, this fun anthology is an easy recommendation. Nothing revelatory, but some enjoyable short stories from a handful of the genre’s modern titans.
Buy a copy of "High Stakes" HERE
In 1961 - around the beginning of his crime fiction career - Lawrence Block submitted a hardboiled private eye novel to Fawcett Gold Medal called “Coward’s Kiss.” When it was finally published, someone at Fawcett changed the title to “Death Pulls a Doublecross.” Decades later when Block began reprinting his early works, he changed the title back to “Coward’s Kiss” where it remains available today as a Kindle eBook and a well-performed audiobook.
Ed London is a stereotypical hardboiled private-eye and when we meet him, he is working on an unusual assignment. He is tasked with quietly removing the corpse of a sexy female murder victim from a Manhattan apartment and then dumping the body in Central Park for later discovery by authorities.
We quickly learn exactly why an otherwise good and ethical PI would do something so uncharacteristically evil. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s a satisfying enough reason that drives the rest of the story. The other big driving storyline is a missing briefcase with unknown contents that good guys and bad guys are both trying to locate - giving the paperback the feel of a NYC treasure hunt inside a standard whodunnit.
It’s fun to read Lawrence Block’s early work with the knowledge that he went on to be a grandmaster of the mystery genre. No one would classify this book as one of his greatest hits, but you can see the greatness in its infancy. The book was never boring and had plenty of violence, gunplay, blood, and death. A nice romantic sub-plot develops and our hero gets laid a couple times. There really is something for everyone in this short paperback.
If you’ve ever read a mystery novel before, you won’t have much difficulty solving this one. However, the joy of a Lawrence Block book isn’t the destination, it’s the ride. This one is a fun journey. Recommended.
Postscripts
“Death Pulls a Doublecross” (or “Coward’s Kiss” if you prefer) was originally written as a TV tie-in novel based on “Markham,” a private-eye series starring Ray Milland that aired for one season in 1959–1960. Block liked the finished product so much, he never submitted the TV tie-in version and edited it as a stand-alone mystery novel for Fawcett Gold Medal.
The character of Ed London would have been a natural for a series of hardboiled mystery novels. Block never brought the character back for any more paperbacks, but London starred in three novellas published in Men’s Adventure Magazines in the 1960s. All three novellas have been compiled in Block’s collection of his early short fiction, “One Night Stands and Lost Weekends.”
The other Ed London stories are:
“The Naked and the Deadly” from “Man’s Magazine,” October 1962, reprinted in “Guy, December 1963.
“Stag Party Girl” from “Man’s Magazine,” February 1963, reprinted in “Guy,” February 1965.
“Twin Call Girls” from “Man’s Magazine,” August 1963, reprinted in “Guy,” August 1965.
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During the heyday of paperback originals of the 1950s and 1960s, a prolific author could compound his income by selling books to multiple publishers under a variety of pseudonyms. It’s become the hobby of many modern fans to serve as detectives and pulp anthropologists to uncover the real authors of the genre novels of the era. Sometimes, a reprint publisher does the work for you. Hard Case Crime acquired the rights to reprint Lawrence Block’s sexy 1964 con-man caper novel, “The Sex Shuffle”, written under Block’s Sheldon Lord moniker. Hard Case Crime gave the book a new title, “Lucky at Cards”, and commissioned some new cover art for the re-release under the author’s own name.
Our narrator and anti-hero Bill Maynard is a former magician and professional poker cheat known to his fellow con artists as Wizard. When we meet Maynard, he is recovering from a beating in Chicago when he receives an invitation to a friendly game from his dentist. After practicing his fake shuffles and tricky deals in the mirror for awhile, he’s ready to thicken his wallet with his card manipulation skills.
The reader is given a fascinating tour through the tricks and nomenclature of a professional card mechanic. At the game, Maynard brings in some good money dealing from the bottom of the deck (“a subway deal”) and bypassing the top card (“dealing seconds”) while the middle-class pigeons are none-the-wiser. The short con gets complicated when the host’s trophy wife catches him and let’s Maynard know in con-man parlance that he’s been made without alerting the game’s other players. In a private conversation later, we learn that sexy femme fatale Joyce has a colorful past, and she’s grown sick of playing the role of a dutiful bride to her boring lawyer husband.
After some fairly hot (by 1964 standards) forbidden coupling, Maynard and Joyce hatch a plot to make an end-run around the husband’s less-than-generous will to get his money and run away together. Complications - including a love triangle - arise along the way peppered by more lusty sex scenes. The con runs into problems and the reader is treated to plenty of twists and turns along the way. It’s a helluva good ride. Without spoiling anything, the final climactic scene of the novel was a contrived and corny let-down followed by a more satisfying and redeeming epilogue.
Even early in his career, Lawrence Block had a knack for first-person narrative readability. The dialogue is snappy, and the conversational style makes this an easy and fun story. The action is all cerebral - more like The Sting or The Cincinnati Kid - than the violent crime novels of the era. The sex scenes are erotic without being graphic - a delicate needle to thread.
There are probably better paperbacks to serve as an introduction to Block’s vast body of work, but The Sex Shuffle/Lucky at Cards is a worthwhile read for hardcore Lawrence Block fans. It’s a quick and easy read with lots of cool moments and vivid characters.
