Review: Weasels Ripped My Flesh!: The Illustrated Men's Adventure Anthology - Robert Deis, Wyatt Doyle, and Josh Alan Friedman, eds.

When Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle published the original edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! TWO-FISTED STORIES FROM MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES back in 2013, it was the first book reprinting such stories in decades. There were paperback collections of stories from the men’s adventure magazines back in the Fifties and Sixties, but nothing since then as far as I know. The original edition of this book was successful enough that it launched an entire line of such reprints known as the Men’s Adventure Library, as well as the fantastic MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY.

Now, Deis and Doyle have published an updated deluxe edition of this landmark volume that started it all. It’s one of the most beautifully produced books I’ve ever seen, with more cover reproductions and interior illustrations, better printing, full color, and updated and expanded articles and story introductions.

In addition to that, you have the stories themselves, of course, which are hugely entertaining. I’ll be honest with you, I was just going to skim through this new edition and read the updated material, but time and again, I found myself stopping to reread and enjoy all over again some of the stories. It was great fun revisiting these wild yarns by such authors as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, Walter Wager, and Harlan Ellison. I found myself appreciating even more the talents of the legendary Walter Kaylin, who has two stories in this book. And it brought back fond memories of another author with a pair of stories included, Robert F. Dorr, who I was fortunate enough to correspond with, talk to on the phone, and consider a friend before he passed away.

If I had to pick one story that knocked me out even more this time, it would be “I Was a Slave of the Savage Blonde” by Emile C. Schurmacher, from the Summer 1956 issue of HUNTING ADVENTURES. This tale of a two-fisted botanist lost in the jungles of Paraguay, captured by fierce natives, and enslaved by the beautiful blond Spanish anthropologist who has become the tribe’s queen is well-written and moves at a breakneck pace. I remember enjoying it the first time I read it, but I really got swept up in it this time, to the point that I ordered several paperback collections of Schurmacher’s stories from the men’s adventure magazines.

As I’ve mentioned before, I would see these magazines on the stands when I was a kid and really wanted to buy some of them, but I never did. Now, thanks to the efforts of Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle, I can read some of the best stories from them, and I really appreciate that. The new edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!: THE ILLUSTRATED MEN’S ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY is available in hardback and trade paperback editions from Amazon or directly from the publisher here or here. If you’re a fan of great art and wild, over-the-top storytelling like I am, I give it my highest recommendation.

The Naked and the Deadly - Lawrence Block

As I’ve mentioned many times before, Lawrence Block is one of my favorite authors, and I’m glad that so much of the work from early in his career is available again. The latest Block collection, THE NAKED AND THE DEADLY, comes from Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle at the Men’s Adventure Library, and it showcases some of Block’s earliest published work as well as some later yarns, too.

As Sheldon Lord, the name he later used on soft-core novels published by Midwood, Block wrote several articles from the late Fifties and on into the Sixties for various men’s adventure magazines. Maritime disasters, hookers, swinging stewardesses, and bloodthirsty Nazis were all suitable subjects for these articles, which were a mixture of fact and fiction. Block’s skill as a writer is already apparent in these early efforts, especially in the pacing. These stories move right along and come to natural, well-developed endings. One thing I’ve noticed about the men’s adventure magazine stories is that many of them end rather abruptly as if the author had made the word count and wrapped things up as quickly as possible. The better writers didn’t do this, of course, and Block is certainly among their number.

Also included in this volume are three long private eye novellas featuring Ed London, the protagonist of Block’s early novel DEATH PULLS A DOUBLECROSS. London is Block’s first series character and the stories featuring him are top-notch, as you’d expect from the creator of Matt Scudder. I’d read these before but enjoyed them all over again.

There are also condensed versions—the magazines where they were first published called them Book Bonuses—of two of Block’s Evan Tanner novels. I had read the original versions of these when they were published as paperback originals nearly 60 years ago, but after all that time, reading the Book Bonus versions was like they were new to me, and I had a great time with both of them.

As usual with the books from the Men’s Adventure Library, plenty of great cover art from various books and magazines is lovingly reproduced, and there are informative and entertaining essays and introductions from editor Deis and Block himself. All of it comes together in a package that is well worth your time to read. THE NAKED AND THE DEADLY is available in a paperback edition, an e-book edition, and an expanded hardback edition, not to mention a limited signed edition. No matter which way you want to go, if you’re a fan of Lawrence Block’s work, you need this book. I really enjoyed it.

The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder - Lawrence Block

Is the autobiography of a fictional character still fiction? I think that’s what you’d have to call it. Not that it really matters in this case. Whatever else it is, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MATTHEW SCUDDER is a very good book.

Those of you who follow Lawrence Block’s career know that he’s been in a contemplative mood the past few years, publishing several books that serve as a look back and summing up not only of his life as a professional writer but also the lives of some of the characters he’s created. A quote from early in this book addresses that: "One reaches an age when the past is as interesting as the present, and a bit less difficult to make sense of."

This tendency can be seen in his most recent novel, THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN and in the Matt Scudder collection THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC and the Scudder novella A TIME TO SCATTER STONES. Block brings this trend to its logical conclusion by letting Scudder tell the story of his life up to the point where Block began chronicling his cases with THE SINS OF THE FATHER. As he has Scudder say in the book, "And what the hell am I writing now? I suppose it's the part between the books, the part you'd skip."

Yes, this concept is pretty meta, as they say. But it works. Since Scudder is the narrator of all the previous novels and stories about him, the voice is the same. Scudder the character takes a few gentle shots at Block the author for changing things in the fiction, such as his birthday. And he fills in the background on events that happened in some of the novels. But for the most part, this is a straightforward telling of Matt Scudder’s life and how he got to the point where the novels take up the story. It’s a tale that is, in many ways, compelling in its ordinariness. Scudder is no superhero, no eccentric genius of a detective, just a fairly ordinary guy with instincts that made him a good cop and unlicensed private detective, a guy with a lot of admirable qualities and a few deep flaws that threaten those better qualities but never quite overwhelm them. You just can’t help liking him, which of course is one of the appeals of the long-running series about him.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MATTHEW SCUDDER isn’t a mystery and I’m not sure you can even call it a novel. But it’s a very well-written book that kept me turning the pages and thoroughly entertained me. It’ll be out in June, and you can pre-order the e-book already. I’m not sure what the plans are for print editions, but I know there’ll be some. This is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, and I give it a very high recommendation.

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown - Lawrence Block

There’s an old saying about how all good things must come to an end, but Lawrence Block seems to be doing his best to disprove that. Since announcing his “retirement” several years ago, he’s produced a number of excellent novels, novellas, and volumes of non-fiction. His most recent novel, THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN, will be out in October and just adds to that list, as it’s a top-notch job all around.

As regular readers will recognize instantly from the title, this novel is a new entry in Block’s long-running and much-loved series about bookseller/burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Bernie is mostly retired from his criminal profession because of the proliferation of security cameras and advances in lock technology, and his bookselling business isn’t doing much better because of Amazon and eBay. But he’s still living a fairly enjoyable life in New York City, hanging around in his free time with his best friend Carolyn, who has a dog grooming salon near Bernie’s bookstore.

Then Bernie reads Fredric Brown’s science fiction novel WHAT MAD UNIVERSE, about alternate universes, and wakes up the next morning to discover that he and Carolyn have been transported to one such alternate universe, where security technology isn’t as advanced as it is in our world, and suddenly the fabulously valuable diamond Bernie had his eye on in our world (but knew he couldn’t steal) might just be within his reach after all . . .

Assuming he can navigate all the other changes from the world he knew and solve the two murders that take place along the way.

Block tackles a pretty tricky task in THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN, combining a traditional mystery with a science fiction/fantasy novel. It’s been done before, of course. Isaac Asimov’s THE CAVES OF STEEL and THE NAKED SUN come to mind, along with a number of futuristic private eye yarns. However, most of those are science fiction novels that are also mysteries, instead of the other way around, and I think that’s a significant distinction. This novel incorporates science fictional elements into a well-established mystery series, and I’m not sure that’s been done before.

Block makes both sides of this combination work well, but ultimately, I don’t think it matters much. Like much of Block’s recent work, THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN seems to be more about the passage of time and the relationships of the characters than anything else. With its references to earlier books in the series, along with the reappearances of characters from those books, this book strikes me as a love letter to the readers and a fond farewell to Bernie and Carolyn. I’d almost say that it’s elegiac, but I don’t normally use highfalutin words like that, and besides, it implies that Block will never write another Bernie Rhodenbarr novel, and at this point, I’m not betting money on that.

If it is the final Burglar novel, though, it’s a good way to go out. I enjoyed THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN and think it’s well worth reading. If you’re a Block fan, you probably have it on pre-order already, and if you don’t, it’s available to do so in both paperback and ebook editions.

In his last newsletter, Block mentioned that he’s more than 30,000 words into a new novel. I don’t what it’ll be, but I’m sure I’ll read it. As far as I know, he’s already been writing novels longer than any other American author currently alive (he started a few years earlier than Robert Vaughan), so why stop now?

A Writer Prepares - Lawrence Block

I’ve always been fascinated by writer’s memoirs. I’ve seen them criticized as being a series of “And then I wrote” recollections, but the best ones contain a lot more than that. Besides, I like reading about how certain books came to be written, the story behind the stories, if you will. This summer, Lawrence Block will release a memoir called A WRITER PREPARES, and I’ve been fortunate enough to read an advance copy of it. It’s a look at his college days and his early career as a writer, and how those two eras overlapped. He wrote a little more than half of it back in the mid-Nineties, then set it aside and never finished it until the past year. It makes for very interesting reading.

Some of this information I’ve seen before in introductions to various of Block’s novels and in published interviews with him, but there’s plenty that’s new to me, too. He doesn’t spare himself, going into some detail about personal failings, possibly unwise business decisions, and the various sorts of screw-ups that plague all of us. But he doesn’t dwell on those things and keeps the focus primarily on his writing. I especially enjoyed the section about his brief stint working in the mail room of Pines Publications, publisher of some of my favorite Western pulps. Next time I pick up an issue of RANCH ROMANCES from 1956, I’ll think that Block may have been wheeling a mail cart around the editorial offices when that issue was being put together.

There’s a lot of material about his time working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, his breaking into print with novels for Harry Shorten at Midwood under the pseudonym Sheldon Lord, his prolific output for William Hamling’s various soft-core imprints under the name Andrew Shaw, and his time writing medical case history books (which were almost all fictional) for Monarch, Lancer, and other publishers. All this makes me want to read more of those early books, and luckily I can since Block has reprinted most of them in the past decade. There are also sections about his friendship with Donald Westlake and Bill Coons (who ghosted a number of the Andrew Shaw novels for Block) and other authors, editors, and agents. It’s a vivid portrait of one little corner of the publishing business from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Sixties.

A WRITER PREPARES ends at a logical point, when Block has pretty much left the pseudonymous work behind to concentrate on books under his own name. This is when he began his Evan Tanner series for Gold Medal, and as it happens, those Tanner books were the first ones by Block that I ever saw, bought, and read, picking up most of them from the spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore, one of my regular stops for paperbacks and comic books. After that, I’ve kept up, more or less, with his career. So it’s nice to read about those early days. I really enjoyed A WRITER PREPARES. The e-book edition is already up for pre-order. I give it my highest recommendation. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I’ve been on a run of really great books, and this is another one in that streak.

Dead Girl Blues - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block has been writing and selling novels since 1958, and he’s still at it. I can’t think of any living author who’s been producing at such a high level for so long. His latest novel is DEAD GIRL BLUES, which is something of a departure for him but also shares some of the strengths that have run through his entire career.

It starts out as the story of a young man calling himself Buddy (because that’s the name stitched onto the work shirt he was given when he took his current job), who, on a whim, commits a terrible crime, including murder, and gets away with it. Buddy feels the need to repeat the experience, so what it looks like we’re going to get is a deep dive into the mind of a sociopathic serial killer, since Buddy is also the narrator of this tale.

But then, with no warning, DEAD GIRL BLUES turns out to be something completely different. It’s still a deep dive, because this is novel driven almost solely by characterization rather than plot, but it’s not what I was expecting. And I certainly didn’t expect to feel about the characters like I did by the time I finished the book. Everything is just off-kilter enough that by the later stages of the book, I didn’t know what to expect. That’s not bad, because usually, even in the best books, I have some idea what’s going to happen.

I believe it was Ed Gorman who said that Block writes the best sentences in the business. That’s still true. His style isn’t flashy, but it sure makes you want to keep reading. That’s certainly true of DEAD GIRL BLUES. This is a book that may not be for everybody, since it’s a little squirm-inducing in places, but it’s also heartwarming at times, in its own oddball way. I really liked it, and if you’re a Lawrence Block fan, you’ll want to read it.

A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography 1958-2020

I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that A TRAWL AMONG THE SHELVES: LAWRENCE BLOCK BIBLIOGRAPHY, 1958-2020 is a monumental work. Author and compiler Terry Zobeck has done a fantastic job of documenting and listing the hundreds of novels, anthologies, short stories, and non-fiction produced by Lawrence Block, one of the major authors not only of the Twentieth Century but beyond, still producing excellent work after more than 60 years in the business, including a fine afterword in this volume.

Working with Block himself and other collectors and bibliographers, Zobeck has turned up previously unknown novels and stories, along with the best and most complete list of books Block wrote under the pseudonym Andrew Shaw. Actually, this book is going to cost me money, because Zobeck also provides a list of all of Block’s work that’s currently available as e-books, among them many of those early novels, and I know I don’t have all of them. I’ll be going through that list figuring out what I need to buy!

And if you’re a Lawrence Block fan, you need to buy A TRAWL AMONG THE SHELVES. It’s entertaining, it’s informative, and it gets a very high recommendation from me.

Now Available: Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails - Lawrence Block

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 Linn’s 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 he’s 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 Block’s collection of old subway cars?

(I'll be reading and reviewing this one soon, but really, how can you go wrong with anything by Lawrence Block? There'll be a limited edition from Subterranean Press later on, but the e-book and regular print editions are out now.)

A Time to Scatter Stones - Lawrence Block

As I've mentioned here before, I bought the paperback of THE SINS OF THE FATHERS, the first Matt Scudder novel by Lawrence Block, brand-new off the paperback rack at Buddies' Supermarket in 1976, not long after Livia and I got married. She was already getting groceries, but I'd stopped to look at the books and spotted Block's name. In the past, I had bought some of his Evan Tanner books right up the sidewalk in the same shopping center, from the spinner rack in Tompkins' Pharmacy, and enjoyed them. This one looked good, it was the first book in a series, and it was a private eye novel. Good enough for me.

Cut to 2019, more than forty years later, and what am I reading? A TIME TO SCATTER STONES, the newest Matt Scudder novella by Lawrence Block. The more things change, etc., etc., and sometimes I'm glad of that.

Block has aged Scudder in real time, so he's long since retired as an unofficial private detective and is living happily with his wife Elaine, a former prostitute who he met during one of his cases. She belongs to a group that calls themselves the Tarts, an informal organization of former prostitutes and ones who are trying to get out of that life. One of them has a problem with a client who's obsessed with her, and Elaine prevails on Scudder to help the young woman. He's willing to do so, but first he has to find out who the guy actually is, and once he does, decide how best to proceed from there.

It's really interesting and enjoyable to watch Scudder work this case. As he points out himself, he's really too old for that sort of thing and isn't as efficient at it as he once was, but he manages to get the job done anyway. A TIME TO SCATTER STONES is, fittingly enough, a rather low-key and leisurely affair, but despite that, Block manages to generate a considerable amount of suspense and really kept me reading. No one else's prose pulls me along quite so handily, and you can't really point to anything and say, it's because he does this and this and that other thing. I don't know why it works, but it sure does.

Block has said this may well be the final Matt Scudder story. Well, maybe, maybe not. We've heard that before. What I do know is that as long as he keeps writing them, I'll keep reading them. A TIME TO SCATTER STONES will be out in hardback and e-book editions at the end of the month, and I highly recommend it.

Sinner Man - Lawrence Block

Donald Barshter is an insurance salesman in Danbury, Connecticut, just an average guy who one day accidentally kills his wife in the course of an argument. Instead of facing what he has coming to him for that crime, he decides to leave town and establish a new identity for himself elsewhere. That turns out to be Buffalo, New York, and the new identity is that of Nat Crowley, an up-and-coming mobster. And son of a gun, wouldn't you know that Nat has a real talent for organized crime, so he soon finds himself rising in the ranks of the local mob. Of course, he has to kill some more to do it . . .

SINNER MAN is the first actual crime novel Lawrence Block wrote, although not the first published, and for decades it was considered a lost novel before the discovery that it was published in 1967 by Softcover Library (the same publisher that was known earlier as Beacon Books) under the title SAVAGE LOVER and the pseudonym Sheldon Lord. The story behind that is told in Block's excellent afterword to the new Hard Case Crime edition of SINNER MAN, published for the first time under Block's name and with its original title.

It's an excellent book, too, much too good to have been lost for decades. But we can be glad that it's been found and reprinted. Some of the plot is a little far-fetched, but Block is very good at making such things seem not only plausible but very possible. It's a good portrait of the era in which it was written, as well. Block admits to doing some slight revisions, but he left the period references alone, which is always good as far as I'm concerned. I also noted that this very early novel shares some thematic elements with his recent novella RESUME SPEED, which I also read not that long ago. It's interesting to compare the two tales written more than fifty years apart. RESUME SPEED doesn't fit quite as neatly into the crime fiction genre, but its protagonist is certainly a spiritual cousin to Donald Barsthter/Nat Crowley. I've already given RESUME SPEED a high recommendation on this blog. Now I do the same for SINNER MAN. It's a very good novel.

In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper - Lawrence Block, ed.

I have to admit that before I read this anthology edited by Lawrence Block, I wasn’t that familiar with the work of Edward Hopper, other than the painting “Nighthawks”. I came away quite impressed with Hopper’s work showcased here, as well as many of the stories inspired by those paintings.

Seventeen authors contributed stories for this volume. As they’re listed on the cover: Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, Craig Ferguson, Nicholas Christopher, Jill D. Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Justin Scott, Kris Nelscott, Warren Moore, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Gail Levin, and Lawrence Block. Naturally, I enjoyed some stories more than others. My favorites are Megan Abbott’s period yarn “Girlie Show”, Michael Connelly’s “Nighthawks” (a Harry Bosch story), Craig Ferguson’s oddball “Taking Care of Business” (inspired by the painting “South Truro Church”), Jonathan Santlofer’s tricky “Night Windows”, Lawrence Block’s “Autumn at the Automat”, which reminded me of some of his early crime digest stories, and my pick for the best story in the book, Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Projectionist” (inspired by the painting “New York Movie”).

A few words about those last two: I’m old enough to remember automats, although there weren’t many still around by the time I was a kid. I recall buying sandwiches and pieces of pie in them, however, so I felt a personal connection with Block’s story. There’s even more of a personal connection with Lansdale’s story, because I spent a great deal of time between 1970 and 1975 in the Worth, Palace, and Hollywood Theaters in downtown Fort Worth, and by then they were the sort of shabby movie palaces in which Joe’s yarn is set. This one really kicked up a lot of nostalgia in my mind.

All in all, IN SUNLIGHT OR IN SHADOW is an excellent anthology whether you’re familiar with Edward Hopper’s work or not. If you are, you’ll probably find it a veritable feast. If you aren’t (like me), it’s a very entertaining education. Either way, it gets a high recommendation from me.

Resume Speed - Lawrence Block

From the legendary author of A Walk Among the Tombstones comes this gripping tale of sudden endings and new beginnings. When a man called Bill spots a sign in a restaurant window, he grabs his carry-on and gets off his bus. Within an hour he’s got himself a job as a short-order cook, and a start on a whole new life in Cross Creek, Montana. Things just fall into place. He applies for a library card, and the next thing you know he’s having dinner with the librarian. One thing leads to another, and he can see a whole new life stretching out before him…

This novella by Lawrence Block came out earlier this year. It has a crime in it--maybe--and a mystery of sorts, but it's not really a crime or mystery story. Instead it's a character-driven, compelling portrait of a man who has no real identity other than that which he invents for himself. What's interesting to me is that Block could have used this same concept for a Gold Medal sort of novel or even an Andrew Shaw or Sheldon Lord book 50-some-odd years ago. He's honed it down to its essentials, though, and spun an intriguing tale in the usual smooth, excellent prose. Highly recommended.

Keller's Fedora - Lawrence Block

I’ve been in a bit of a reading funk in recent days, but I know how to cure that. I just reach for a Lawrence Block book. Block’s combination of plot, character, and some of the most readable prose in the business always reminds me why I love being a reader.

In this case, it was KELLER’S FEDORA, the most recent tale about Block’s hitman character. Block calls it a novella; at approximately 25,000 words, I tend to think of it as more of a short novel. But why quibble as long as the yarn is good, and it certainly is. As the story opens, Keller is mostly retired from his criminal profession and is living in New Orleans with his wife and daughter, collecting stamps and working as a building contractor. His former handler Dot contacts him with a possible job: rich guy has a trophy wife, trophy wife has a lover, rich guy wants lover gotten rid of. The potential client doesn’t know the lover’s identity, though, so Keller will have to function like a private eye and discover who the man is. So Keller buys a fedora, on what’s pretty much a whim, and sets out to do the job.

Of course, things turn out to be more complicated than that, although not extraordinarily so, but enough that Keller has to make two trips across the country to straighten things out and tie everything up in the sort of neat package he usually does. Along the way there’s plenty of fine dialogue and some pointed observations about modern life. It makes for effortless, entertaining reading, and that’s why I give KELLER’S FEDORA a high recommendation, whether you’re stuck in a reading funk or not.

The Wrap Up

READING

I read 127 books this year, a small increase from last year's 116. 77 of them were e-books, so while that makes up the majority of my reading, I still read quite a few print books, too, and I expect that rough split to continue. 33 of the 127 were review copies. I wasn't able to review all the books that were sent to me, but I read and blogged about as many of them as I could and I'm sure some of the others will show up on the blog in the future. 21 of the 127 were books that I edited and published. In looking through the list, I noticed that I didn't read any books published in 2015 by the so-called Big Five. The only new books I read from traditional publishers came from Kensington and Baen, companies that have distribution deals with the Big Five but are independently owned, and there were only a few of those. Everything else I read was either small press, self-published, or decades old. This wasn't intentional. I'm certainly not boycotting the Big Five. But it's an unavoidable fact that they're publishing less and less that I want to take the time to read these days, while there's so much good stuff coming out from those other sources that I couldn't even hope to keep up with it. The important thing to me is that I don't think I'll ever run out of good books to read.

Which brings us to my top ten favorites of the books I read this year, in alphabetical order by author:

LIE CATCHERS, Paul Bishop

THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES, Lawrence Block

THE SHOTGUN RIDER, Peter Brandvold

TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, Edgar Rice Burroughs

THE BIG DRIFT, Patrick Dearen

101 ESSENTIAL TEXAS BOOKS, Glenn Dromgoole and Carlton Stowers

FIRE WITH FIRE, Charles E. Gannon

TURN ON THE HEAT, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

RIVER RANGE, L.P. Holmes

WAITING FOR A COMET, Richard Prosch

My short list had 17 books on it, and I could have added another dozen or more that were pretty close. So it wasn't easy getting this list down to 10, but there they are, for what it's worth.

WRITING

As those of you who have read yesterday's post are aware, I wrote just over a million words this year, the 11^th consecutive year I've reached that mark. That breaks down to 12 novels and 7 shorter pieces of fiction, most of them novelette or novella length. Right now my plan is write at least that much in 2016. I'll need to if I'm going to keep up with the projects I've committed to do. It's a lot of hard work, but I'm still having fun so I don't see any reason to stop now.

PUBLISHING

Rough Edges Press continues to occupy a significant portion of my time. With plenty of invaluable technical help from Livia, along with some great covers, REP brought out 9 books in the Blaze! Adult Western series, along with a number of reprints and originals from Stephen Mertz, Ed Gorman, John Hegenberger, James J. Griffin, and David Hardy. We published three original anthologies, the two WEIRD MENACE volumes and the Alternate History anthology TALES FROM THE OTHERVERSE. The Blaze! series will continue in 2016, along with a full slate of original and reprint novels and collections, and we'll also have a big science fiction anthology next summer, if all goes according to plan. More details on that later. UPDATE: I added a picture of all the books REP published in 2015 to the top of the post.

So you can see there's plenty going on to keep me busy. I guess I stay out of trouble that way. Many thanks to those of you who have stuck with the blog for another year. I'll be around.

Writing the Novel From Plot to Print to Pixel - Lawrence Block

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been in the writing business for 39 years now. In the early days, when I was trying to break in and during the first few years after I started selling, I read every book on writing that the Fort Worth Public Library had on its shelves. I don't know if it did any good or not, but I immersed myself in them.

I didn't actually buy many books about writing, though, because we just couldn't afford them. But I subscribed to Writers Digest and The Writer, and I managed to acquire copies of three books on writing that I had for many years and read countless times: THE MYSTERY WRITER'S HANDBOOK, edited by A.S. Burack; WRITING POPULAR FICTION by Dean Koontz; and WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT by Lawrence Block. I also read Block's column every month in Writers Digest.

So it was almost like a visit from an old friend when I began reading the new, expanded, and updated version of Block's book, now called WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT TO PIXEL. Like any old friend you haven't seen for a while, it looks a little different—it's an e-book now, for one thing, at least the edition I read was—and a lot has been added to it.

But the information about how to develop ideas, to create interesting characters, to handle plot problems and all the other nuts and bolts of writing is just as useful as ever. The sections that have been updated the most are the ones that involve e-books and self-publishing, since that's what's changed the most in the publishing business in recent years.

Block talks about several things that I firmly believe: When it comes to writing, there is no right or wrong way to do anything; there is only what works. Every writer has a particular speed to which they're best suited, and the only way to discover that speed is to write a lot until you've figured out what's comfortable and sustainable. You have to be able to sustain that pace, whatever it may be, because to produce good fiction effectively and efficiently, you have to work at it consistently. You sit in a room and type. Sometimes for decades.

Because he doesn't seem capable of writing a sentence that's not entertaining, reading this book is an enjoyable experience in itself, not just for its educational and informational value. Block also provides quite a bit of background on how some of his novels came to be written, and that's always interesting to me. As for the writing, I already do many of the things he suggests, habits that I've developed over the years, and they work for me, I guess, since I've been at it for so long, but I also picked up some ideas about things I'm going to be watching for in my own books. One of the nice things about writing is that you can always get better at it.

WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT TO PIXEL will be available soon. If you're a novice writer or an experienced writer or anywhere in between, or if you're just interested in good fiction and its creation, I highly recommend it.

The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes - Lawrence Block

You don't get much more noir than this set-up: a Florida private eye who's a retired New York cop is recruited by the local sheriff to pose as a hitman and gather evidence against a beautiful young woman who wants to have her older, very wealthy husband murdered. You've read these books. What do you think the guy's going to do?

You're right, of course. He's going to fall hard for the woman and start plotting with her to murder her husband for real, all the while scheming to cover up the crime with the authorities. You've read these books, and Lawrence Block has written them. Heck, he was writing them more than fifty years ago.

Not quite like THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES, however. It quickly becomes obvious that despite its Gold Medal-like plot, Block's not going to handle it like a Gold Medal. Those books had a lot of sexual tension in them, but the sex itself was mostly the fade-to-black kind. In this brand-new novel from Hard Case Crime (officially published and on-sale tomorrow), there's a lot of sex and nearly all of it is graphic. In the hands of a writer less skilled then Block, it would border on pornography. In this novel, though, it just seems realistic, a necessary updating of the classic material to go along with all the talk about computers and flash drives and burner cell phones.

In fact, it may be that's what Block is trying to point out, that our society, for all its technological advances, is a lot coarser today than it was fifty or sixty years ago. Sure, the lovers in those books from Gold Medal and Dell slept with each other and knocked off spouses and ran from the law, but there was still a certain innocence about it. (Well, maybe not in the books by Gil Brewer!) Or maybe Block's just trying to tell a good story, which he does. With his smooth, unobtrusive prose and his knack for creating interesting characters, he keeps the reader flipping the pages with an undeniable urge to find out what's going to happen.

Probably the last thing Lawrence Block wants to do at this stage of his career is create a new series, but I really liked the sheriff in this novel and wouldn't mind seeing him again. Got to be more crime in Florida, right? In the meantime, if you're a fan of Block's work, you probably have THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES on order already. If you don't...well, like I said, it'll be out tomorrow.

Now Available: Dark City Lights: New York Stories - Lawrence Block, editor

Famed detective and mystery writer Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones, 8 Million Ways to Die) takes the helm as guest editor for DARK CITY LIGHTS, the fourth edition of the Have a NYC series. Twenty-three thrilling, hilarious and poignant short stories—all based in New York City—written by new and acclaimed fiction masters, including Robert Silverberg (Hugo and Nebula Award multiple winner; grand master of SFWA); Ed Park (author, Personal Days; senior editor, Amazon’s literary imprint, Little A); Jim Fusilli (rock and pop music critic, The Wall Street Journal; author, Closing Time and A Well-Known Secret); Parnell Hall (author, Last Puzzle & Testament); S. J. Rozan (Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero and Macavity award-wining author); Brian Koppelman (co-writer, Ocean’s 13 and Rounders); and Elaine Kagan (author, No Good-Byes; actress, GoodFellas).

Additional authors include Thomas Pluck (Blade of Dishonor), Warren Moore (Broken Glass Waltzes), Jerrold Mundis (How to Get Out of Debt, The Dogs), Jonathan Santlofer (The Death Artist, Anatomy of Fear), David Levien (co-writer, Ocean’s 13 and Rounders; author City of the Sun), Jill D. Block (contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine), Jane Dentinger (author, Murder on Cue), Erin Mitchell (Crimespree magazine contributor); Peter Carlaftes (author, I Fold with the Hand I Was Dealt; co-director, Three Rooms Press and A Year on Facebook), Tom Callahan (author), Eve Kagan (actress and international teaching artist), Bill Bernico (author, Cooper, PI series), Kat Georges (author, Our Lady of the Hunger; co-director, Three Rooms Press), Annette Meyers (author, The Smith & Wetzon Wall Street Wall Street mystery series), and Peter Hochstein (author, Heiress Strangled in Molten Chocolate at Nazi Sex Orgy). Editor Lawrence Block also contributes a story.

A brilliant book that redefines the New York of today—and tomorrow.

(This looks like a great anthology. I have a copy and will be reading the stories between novels.)

The Crime of Our Lives - Lawrence Block

Nobody breaks me out of a reading funk—that feeling of vague dissatisfaction and the inability to find anything you really want to read despite having books piled around you—better than Lawrence Block. I found myself edging in the direction of a funk the other day, and what should come along just in time but THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES, Block's new non-fiction collection.

Ed Gorman likes to say that Lawrence Block writes the best sentences in the business. Ed is no slouch in that area himself, and I think a lot of writers, myself included, come up with some pretty good sentences here and there. But Ed's right, no one makes it look as effortless as Block, and no one can do it anywhere near as consistently, either.

THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES is a collection of essays and introductions to various books, a few autobiographical but mostly about other authors of crime and mystery fiction. Some of the writers Block talks about are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, Robert B. Parker, Mary Higgins Clark, Ross Thomas, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Mickey Spillane. (I use the phrase "talks about" deliberately, because in many ways reading this book is like sitting down and having an entertaining, informative conversation with Block.) Other sections are devoted to authors who maybe aren't as well-known these days, such as Frederic Brown, and some who are almost forgotten, for example Henry Kane. There are also several pieces about Scott Meredith and his literary agency where Block was first an employee and then a client.

(If I can intrude with a personal story—and I can, since it's my blog—after I had written my first novel in the fall and winter of 1977-78, I sent it around to various publishers, knowing the odds of selling it were slim without an agent, but I didn't know any agents at the time and hadn't quite figured out how to find one. I was just a good ol' boy in a small town in Texas. But after several swift rejections, I came across an ad in WRITER'S DIGEST about how the Scott Meredith Literary Agency was looking for manuscripts. Now, I knew that name because I had seen it on the copyright pages of many mystery novels I'd read—"Published by arrangement with Scott Meredith Literary Agency"—and thought, wouldn't it be great to be represented by Scott Meredith? If I could get him to take on my book, how could I possibly go wrong? Of course, there was a reading fee involved, $200 as I recall, and that was a lot of money in those days, but it seemed like a worthwhile investment...

Lawrence Block knows where this story is going, and you probably do, too. I sent the manuscript off, along with a check, and got a letter back a couple of weeks later, a detailed letter several pages long, telling me how my book was good, but just not quite good enough, and the problems it had were too ingrained to be overcome, so I'd be well-advised to start over and write another book, and if I did, and sent it in with another couple of hundred bucks, I stood a good chance of breaking in and becoming a client of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. And it was signed by the man himself, the same guy whose name I'd seen in all those novels I'd read!

Needless to say, I never became a client, but the book eventually sold and can be purchased on Amazon this very day, in either trade paperback or e-book edition, whichever you prefer. I've often wondered over the years, after reading Lawrence Block's reminiscences in other places about Scott Meredith and how his agency operated, just who really wrote that letter to me back in 1978.)

I've gotten far off track from the purpose of this post, which is to tell you just how enjoyable THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES is and how it's one of the best books I've read so far this year. You won't find a better collection about mystery fiction and the people who write it. This one gets my highest recommendation.

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons - Lawrence Block

I've been reading Lawrence Block's Burglar books almost as long as I've been reading his Matt Scudder books, and that's quite a while. The latest novel featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr, THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS, will be out later this month—Christmas Day, in fact, but you can pre-order it now—and it's a fine addition to the series.

As this one begins, Bernie is hired to steal the original holographic manuscript of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", with its original title "A Life Lived Backward", from the museum where it's being kept in storage. Bernie's client isn't a Fitzgerald collector, however. He collects buttons, and anything connected to buttons, which later in the book leads to him hiring Bernie again, this time to steal a spoon bearing the likeness of Button Gwinnett, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

While this is going on, Bernie is also hanging around with his friend Carolyn, running his bookstore (which never does much business), ruminating about books and authors and Amazon, and helping one of his other friends (and sometimes nemesis), police detective Ray Kirschmann, with a case where an elderly woman appears to have died of natural causes, but under odd circumstances.

At times the book appears to amble around sort of aimlessly, but I knew better. Everything is there for a reason, and watching Block sort it all out is one of the joys of THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS, along with his seemingly effortless prose. All the asides about various books and authors and the publishing business are great fun, too. I stayed up well past my bedtime to finish this novel, which almost never happens these days.

Another thing I should point out is something that most of Block's readers probably won't ever notice. THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS contains a very important element that's virtually identical to something in Livia's latest novel, THE FATAL FUNNEL CAKE. I can't say any more without venturing far into the realm of spoilers. Now, I happen to know for a fact that it's physically impossible for either of them to have read the other's book before writing theirs. So this is one of those bizarre coincidences that happen from time to time, and as Ray Kirschmann says in the book, if coincidences didn't happen, we wouldn't have a word for them. However, I prefer to think that it's a prime example of how Great Minds Think Alike.

Those who have already done "best of the year" lists have jumped the gun, since THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS belongs on such lists. I had a great time reading it and think most of you probably would, too, so it gets a very high recommendation from me.

Catch and Release - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block's new collection, CATCH AND RELEASE, features 17 stories, a newspaper essay, a one-act play, and the usual fascinating story notes about each item. Several of the stories have to do with sports—golf, tennis, and fishing—while many of them feature serial killers and hitmen. And not surprisingly, there's some overlap between the categories. What they all have in common is that they're some of the best written stories you'll find anywhere.

Among the highlights are the novellas "Clean Slate", which became part of Block's novel GETTING OFF, and "Speaking of Greed" and "Speaking of Lust", which were the lead stories in a couple of anthologies that used that title. I love the framing device in the latter two stories, which consists of a policeman, a soldier, a doctor, and a priest sitting around playing cards and swapping yarns, while a fifth character, an unnamed old man, sits next to the fireplace and passes gas. "Speaking of Greed" has a very funny section in it about a literary agent and a young writer, but I'm sure that any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is, as they say, entirely coincidental.

Several of the stories I'd read before, including two from the Matt Scudder collection THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC. One of them, "One Last Night at Grogan's", is my second-favorite Block story. For what it's worth, "The Night and the Music" from that same Scudder collection is my favorite Block story and one of my favorite short stories, period, right up there with Irwin Shaw and John O'Hara. The thing about rereading Block is that you start to skim the story, thinking that you've already read it, and then before you know it you've slowed down and read the whole thing again. The prose just draws you in.

CATCH AND RELEASE is available in several formats, whatever your preference, and it's one of the best books I've read this year. Highly recommended.