Lawrence Block
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Alex Penn wakes up in a squalid Times Square hotel room. This is what he sees when he finally opens his eyes:
"The floor was a sea of blood. A body floated upon this ocean. A girl-black hair, staring blue eyes, bloodless lips. Naked. Dead. Her throat slashed deeply.
"It had to be a dream. It had to, had to be a dream. It was not a dream. It was not a dream at all.
"I've done it again, I thought. Sweet Jesus, I've done it again."
Years before,...
2) Small town
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New York is really a small town, filled with men and women from all walks of life whose aspirations, fears, disappointments, and triumphs are interconnected by bonds as unbreakable as they are unseen.
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That's the product description for Blackstone Audio's excellent rendition of You Could Call It Murder, expertly voiced by Peter Berkrot, and we could leave it at that-but there's an interesting backstory to the book, and the Classic Crime Library seems a good place to share it with you.
In 1961, Lawrence Block was living in New York and earning a living writing Midcentury Erotica and crime fiction. He'd just sold his first book under his own name,...
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Your name's Joe Marlin, but you change it almost as often as you change your shirt. It's David Gavilan when you skip a hotel bill and head for Atlantic City. You left empty-handed, and you need luggage to check into a decent hotel, so you grab two checked bags before the owner turns up to claim them. They're monogrammed L.K.B.-so now your name is Leonard K. Blake.
But you're not the only L.K.B. in Atlantic City. L. Keith Brassard is the owner of...
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SO A WAR VET, A PSYCHOPATH, AND A HOT BABE WALK INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK...
...and years later they tell us what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. Lawrence Block was on the scene, just starting to find himself as a writer, and A Diet of Treacle was his attempt to get it all down on paper.
It was published by a low-rent paperback house, with a tacky title and a pen name, and disappeared from view until Hard Case Crime found it and published...
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The pretty young prostitute is dead. Her alleged murderer-a minister's son-hanged himself in his jail cell. The case is closed. But the dead girl's father has come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.
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"Antiquarian bookseller by day, burglar by night, Bernie Rhodenbarr has an innate knack, a gift, for getting into places designed to keep him out." "Sophisticated yet down-to-earth, philosophical yet practical, Bernie is a gentleman who knows and loves his territory, the gloriously diverse and electric streets of Manhattan; a connoisseur who surrounds himself with the finer things in life, including his tailless Manx tabby, Raffles, and good friends...
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Lawrence Block’s seventeen Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and here is volume two which includes the following stories: Looking for David, Let’s Get Lost, A Moment of Wrong Thinking, Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen, and One...
10) Borderline
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THE SCORCHING PULP NOVEL BY LAWRENCE BLOCK, AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 50 YEARS! On the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide - with fatal results. You'll meet MARTY - the professional gambler who rolls the dice on a night with... MEG - the bored divorcee who seeks excitement and finds... LILY - the beautiful hitchhiker lured into a live sex show by... CASSIE - the redhead with her own...
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A military noir thriller from early in Lawrence Block's lengthy career, it deals with an ex-Green Beret, Paul Kavanagh, who is called out of semi-retirement on a little island in Florida to steal a shipment of high-tech weapons being stored in South Dakota -- an entertaining stand-alone with plenty of twists and turns and reversals, as military heists are apparently not that easy to pull off.
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Kenan Khoury's wife went out grocery shopping and never came home alive. But because Kenan Khoury buys and sells drugs for a living he can't go to the police for help. He goes to Matthew Scudder instead, an alcoholic ex-cop and unlicensed private eye who will stop at nothing to bring the brutal killers to justice before another innocent woman falls beneath their knives.
14) Hit parade
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Introspective professional assassin John Keller continues to ponder his life, the ethics of his lethal career, and his possible retirement as he accepts a couple of dubious contracts.
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"Bernie's tried to go legit by opening up a secondhand bookstore down in Greenwich Village but still can't resist his passion: stealing things. Especially when the price is right, and this time it most certainly is. Here's what Bernie's got to do: pilfer a rare Kipling edition and make off with a bundle."--BOOK JACKET. "That's the easy part. The hard part, Bernie finds, is returning the priceless volume to his employer. His instructions are to turn...
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Popular author Lawrence Block creates the wild and wonderful world of Bernie Rhodenbarr: fine, upstanding citizen by day, and crafty burglar by night. In this hilarious whodunit, Bernie does a favor for his dentist, only to discover mixing his personal and professional lives can be hazardous to his well-being. As Bernie squirms in the dental chair, Dr. Sheldrake presents a business proposition. He wants Bernie to rob his estranged wife's apartment...
20) Hit list
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A New York hit man named Keller becomes the target of a hit himself, a dilemma he is not accustomed to.