The Crime of Our Lives

232 Pages·2015·1.11 MB·English

by  Lawrence Block

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 Brown’s hero
took a drink, I had a snort myself. This is a hazardous
undertaking when in the company of Brown’s characters, and,
I’ve 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 ain’t Shakespeare.”
Raymond Chandler: “You have to wonder how he got it so
right. He spent a lot of time in the house—working, 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
wouldn’t find him walking the mean streets. La Jolla, it must be
noted, was never much for mean streets.”
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: “Throughout, he
alienates powerful people with his trademark wisecracks for no
apparent reason, turns down fees whenever they’re offered to
him, and goes through abrupt mood swings that make you
wonder if he shouldn’t 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. Don’t you love it?
Here’s a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a
banana peel, and he’s 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 don’t 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; it’d be like taking over a series written by somebody
else. Which happens often enough, but it’s 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 he’d prefer an
olive or an onion with that. ‘We’ll eat later,’ Ross announced.”
Donald E. Westlake’s Memory: “Here’s the point: Don’s
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, who’d 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
B W B . . .
EFORE E EGIN
M L C
Y IFE IN RIME
Anthony Boucher (1911-68)
Fredric Brown (1906-72)
James M. Cain (1892-1977)
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Stanley Ellin (1916-86)
Erie Stanley Gardner (1889-1970)
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)
Chester Himes (1909-84)
John D. MacDonald (1916-1986)
Ross Macdonald (1915-83)
Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay, 1905-82, and
Manfred B. Lee, 1905-71)
Jack Ritchie (1922-83)
Rex Stout (1886-1975)
Jim Thompson (1906-76)
Charles Willeford (1919-88)
Cornell Woolrich (1903-68)
E A
DWARD NDERSON
F B
REDRIC ROWN
R C
AYMOND HANDLER
M H C
ARY IGGINS LARK
J C
OSEPH ONRAD
I E G
NTRODUCING D ORMAN
D H
ASHIELL AMMETT
G H
AR AYWOOD
E H
VAN UNTER
Evan Hunter Was My Hero
H K
ENRY ANE
T S M D
HOSE COTT EREDITH AYS
R A N
EMEMBERING L USSBAUM
R B. P
OBERT ARKER
“They Like the Way It Sounds”
E A P
DGAR LLAN OE
“It All Started With Poe”
The Curse of Amontillado
The Edgar and I
S R
PIDER OBINSON
M S
ICKEY PILLANE
R T
OSS HOMAS
Remembering Ross Thomas
J T
IM HOMPSON
D E. W
ONALD ESTLAKE
Remembering Memory
Butcher’s Moon
Comeback
Backflash
C W
HARLES ILLEFORD
A C . . .
ND IN ONCLUSION
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 . . .
F — , , ’
OR OVER HALF A CENTURY AND INDEED IT S CLOSER TO SIXTY YEARS
than fifty—I’ve been spending much of my time and earning
most of my sustenance writing crime fiction. Over the years
I’ve had occasion to write some nonfiction as well, and a fair
amount of it has been about the genre—about my experiences
in it, and, rather more interestingly, about some of my fellow
crime writers.
For the most part, I’ve 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 Perry’s Metzger’s
Dog and William Murray’s 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
didn’t work for me. I knew very well what it takes to write a
book, and didn’t see it as a proper calling for me to fling mud
at someone else’s work. I remember trying to read one book,
hating it, and realizing that that fault was not necessarily the
author’s. 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 don’t want to be in a position that compels me
to either hide my feelings or say something uncomplimentary
about a living writer.
When they’re dead it’s different. De mortuis nihil nisi
bonum? No, screw that. The dead can stand a little criticism.
One has to assume they’re past caring. And if there is an
afterlife, and some sensitive souls spend it paying attention to
what’s said about them back on earth? Well, you know what?
They can go to hell.

I 1992, R S A H
N ICHARD NOW OF MERICAN ERITAGE COMMISSIONED ME
to write an overview of American crime fiction. The result was
“My Life in Crime,” which the magazine published the
following year. In it I discussed the field and my own
experiences in it, leading up to a Top Ten list, which in fact ran
to sixteen favorite writers.
I made sure all of them were safely dead. Not so that I could
say bad things about them—I had only very nice things to say
about them all—but 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.

T I I’
HE ONE EXCEPTION MAKE IS WHEN M INVITED TO WRITE AN
introduction to another writer’s work, or an appreciation for a
magazine. I’ve done quite a few of those over the years, and
here they are, collected for your perusal. For a while I
contributed a column to Mystery Scene Magazine, which I
called “The Murders in Memory Lane.” It constituted personal
recollections of a number of writers—all gone, alas, at the time
of writing, and I miss them.
When I stopped writing the column, a few people asked me
why. I told them I’d run out of dead friends.
Of course one never runs out of dead friends, because
people keep on dying. Ed Hoch, Stuart Kaminsky, Joe Gores,
Jerry Healy—I miss them, and regret their loss, but I don’t
seem to have a couple thousand words worth of reminiscence
to share about them.

I ’ , . A
T S ODD THIS TASK AT HAND N INTRODUCTION TO A BOOK FULL OF
introductions, a reminiscence as prelude to a book of
recollections. Sometimes over the years I’ve begun an
introduction to someone’s book of stories by advising the
reader to skip my remarks and get on with the more rewarding