Lawrence Block - Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails

While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a sixty-year career. His instructional books for writers are leaders in the field, and his self-described pedestrian memoir, Step By Step, has found a loyal audience in the running and racewalking community.

Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linns Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives.

Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails is what hes got left over.

The title piece, originally published in American Heritage, recounts the ongoing adventure Block and his wife undertook, criss-crossing the United States and parts of Canada in their quixotic and exotic quest to find every village, hamlet, and wide place in the road named Buffalo. Other travel tales share space with a remembrance of his mother, odes to New York, a disquisition on pen names and book tours, and, well, no end of bent nails not worth straightening. Where else will you find Raymond Chandler and the Brasher Doubloon, an assessment of that compelling writer from a numismatic standpoint? Where else can you read about Blocks collection of old subway cars?

Highly recommended.

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More by Lawrence Block

NON-FICTION

NOVELS

THE MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVELS

THE BERNIE RHODENBARR MYSTERIES

KELLERS GREATEST HITS

THE ADVENTURES OF EVAN TANNER

THE AFFAIRS OF CHIP HARRISON

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

BOOKS FOR WRITERS

WRITTEN FOR PERFORMANCE

ANTHOLOGIES EDITED

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Contents

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Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails

Lawrence Block

Copyright 2019 Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Cover & Interior by QA Productions

Cover Illustration: The Last of the Buffalo, by Albert Bierstadt

A Lawrence Block Production

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For my Frequent Companion,

LYNNE,

that nicely-dressed lady in "The Whole World is Listening,"

the indispensable partner for a proper Buffalo hunt,

and for everything else...

Foreword

Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails? Really?

I started writing for publication sometime in the early 1950s. SomeoneI think it was Hallmarkaired a TV production of Macbeth, and I sent the Buffalo Evening News a letter to the editor, protesting the over-the-top violence. First they kill the king, I wrote, and went on to summarize the storys bloodier aspects. Lets all get together, I exhorted readers, and clean up television!

I signed it Allor Bryck, an anagram for Larry Block. Damned if they didnt print the thing, and damned again if some readers didnt rush, pen in hand, to the Bards defense. And at some point Steve Allen read Allor Brycks letter on the Tonight show, though whether or not he took it seriously I couldnt tell you. (Neither, come to think of it, could he. Not now.)

Never mind. Alas, Ive been writing ever since.

While most of my writing has been fiction of one sort of another, Ive produced a fairly extensive body of nonfiction. (And isnt that a curious word, defining a category of writing by stating what it is not? If its factual, if its not a pack of lies, if it hasnt been made up out of the whole tattered cloth, if its not the product of some ninnys imagination, then we call it... nonfiction.)

Some of this work, I blush to admit, is nonfiction in name only. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, I wrote quite a few books as John Warren Wells; they dealt with human sexual behavior, presented largely in case history form. While often informed by fact, they were largely invented.

Ive also written quite a bit of instructional material for writers, enough to fill seven books. Another book, Step By Step, is a memoir of my career as one of the worlds slowest racewalkers. A hobby led to a column for a philatelic publication, and the columns wound up collected in a book, Generally Speaking.

A few years ago, I realized Id somehow contrived to write quite a bit about crime fiction and its practitioners, and I gathered up various pieces thereof and made of them a book called The Crime of Our Lives.

What we have here is what was left over, and Ill hew to the example of whoever came up with the word nonfiction and define what follows by what it is not. Its not fiction, for starters, and its also not about writing, or human sexual behavior, or racewalking, or stamp collecting, or crime fiction.

So what have we got?

Some travel pieces, for starters. Early in our courtship, my wife and I decided to make up a list of places to which we hoped someday to travel. We didnt get very far in our list making, because it soon became evident that we were just writing down every country we could think of. It seemed we wanted to go everywhere.

And, over the past thirty-plus years, weve traipsed around a good deal of the world. This passionate traveling has always been an end in itself, undertaken for its own sake, and while I sometimes thought I might write about where we went and what we saw, I never bothered to make notes or take pictures. Why dilute an experience by jotting down words for it? Why diminish great scenery by squinting at it through a viewfinder?