Lawrence Block - The Crime of Our Lives

The Crime of Our Lives

Fredric Brown: When I read Murder Can Be Fun, I had a bottle of bourbon on the table and every time Browns hero took a drink, I had a snort myself. This is a hazardous undertaking when in the company of Browns characters, and, Ive been given to understand, would have been just as dangerous around the author himself. By the time the book was finished, so was I.

Dashiell Hammett: Both his literary style and his artistic vision cast an unsparing light on Prohibition-era America. In sentences that were flat and uninflected and remarkably nonjudgmental, he did much the same thing Hemingway did. I would argue that he did it better.

John D. MacDonald: His sensibilities were always Middle American, and his characters approached difficult situations with the problem-solver attitude of an engineer. But there is a darkness to MacDonald, evident in his unparalleled ability to limn a sociopath, present too in that neglected late work One More Sunday. It is not the knee-jerk darkness of the noir world view but the somehow bleaker darkness of a light that has failed.

Ross Macdonald: It is one of the singular properties of his fiction that ten minutes after you have turned the last page, every detail of the plot vanishes forever from your mind.

Jim Thompson: He is surely an important writer and very much worth reading, but it helps to keep it in mind that the stuff aint Shakespeare.

Raymond Chandler: You have to wonder how he got it so right. He spent a lot of time in the houseworking, reading, writing letters. He saw to his wife, who required a lot of attention in her later years. And when he did get out, you wouldnt find him walking the mean streets. La Jolla, it must be noted, was never much for mean streets.

Raymond Chandlers Philip Marlowe: Throughout, he alienates powerful people with his trademark wisecracks for no apparent reason, turns down fees whenever theyre offered to him, and goes through abrupt mood swings that make you wonder if he shouldnt be on lithium.

Evan Hunter: In his mid-seventies, after a couple of heart attacks, an aneurysm, and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his larynx, Evan wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on Becca in Jeopardy, with every intention of working his way through the alphabet. Dont you love it? Heres a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and hes perfectly comfortable launching a twenty-six book series.

Al Nussbaum: He got out of Leavenworth, and spent the rest of his life as a free-lance writer, consorting not with fellow criminals but with writers and editors. I dont suppose everyone would consider this a step up, but it worked for him.

Dan Marlowe: Dan never did write more about Earl Drake after his memory loss, and I can see how that would have been daunting; itd be like taking over a series written by somebody else. Which happens often enough, but its never quite the same, is it?

Ross Thomas: Ross said he wanted a triple vodka martini, straight up and extra dry. The waiter asked if hed prefer an olive or an onion with that. Well eat later, Ross announced.

Donald E. Westlakes Memory: Heres the point: Dons manuscript arrived, and we had dinner and put the kid to bed, and I started reading. And my wife went to bed, and I stayed up reading, and after a while I forgot I was having a heart attack, and just kept reading until I finished the book around dawn. And somewhere along the way I became aware that my friend Don, whod written a couple of mysteries and some science fiction and his fair share of soft-core erotica, had just produced a great novel.

Charles Willeford: Can a self-diagnosed sociopath be at the same time an intensely moral person? Can one be a sociopath, virtually unaware of socially prescribed morality, and yet be consumed with the desire to do the right thing? That strikes me as a spot-on description of just about every character Willeford ever wrote. How could he come up with characters like that? My God, how could he help it?

Table of Contents

The Crime of Our Lives

Lawrence Block

Copyright 2015, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the author.

Ebook Production: QA Productions

A Lawrence Block Production

lawrenceblock.com

For BARRY MALZBERG

Before We Begin...

For the most part, Ive avoided writing book reviews. In the early 1980s I did occasional reviewing for Washington Post Book World, and that was congenial enough (if spectacularly unremunerative) as long as the books sent to me were ones I liked. Two books that came my way, Thomas Perrys Metzgers Dog and William Murrays Tip on a Dead Crab, were just wonderful, and it was a pleasure to share my enthusiasm with the world, or at least that part of it exposed to the Washington Post.

But I found it agonizing when presented with something that didnt work for me. I knew very well what it takes to write a book, and didnt see it as a proper calling for me to fling mud at someone elses work. I remember trying to read one book, hating it, and realizing that that fault was not necessarily the authors. The right reader would very likely love the book, but I was not that reader, and it seemed only fair to return the book and let someone else review it.

Shortly thereafter I made it a policy to turn down reviewing assignments. I dont want to be in a position that compels me to either hide my feelings or say something uncomplimentary about a living writer.

When theyre dead its different. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? No, screw that. The dead can stand a little criticism. One has to assume theyre past caring. And if there is an afterlife, and some sensitive souls spend it paying attention to whats said about them back on earth? Well, you know what? They can go to hell.

I made sure all of them were safely dead. Not so that I could say bad things about themI had only very nice things to say about them allbut because to include living writers was to invite the wrath of any friend I left off the list.

And, in fact, I generally try to avoid saying anything about a fellow writer so long as he has a pulse, and turn aside questions at public appearances.