Bøger af Lawrence Block

A brilliant, fast-paced thriller. Adapted for major Hollywood release, starring Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens and Ruth Wilson.

Cashed out from the NYPD, Doak Miller operates as a PI in small-town Florida, doing jobs for the police. Like posing as a hit man and wearing a wire to incriminate a woman who's looking to get rid of her husband. But when he looks into her deep blue eyes... Soon he's working with her, plotting a plan that could put millions in her bank account.

A gripping Matt Scudder novel from the author of A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES.

A powerful Matt Scudder novel about love and loss.

A pulse-pounding Matt Scudder story.

A superb thriller from the writer of A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES.

From the author of A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES - set to be a major Hollywood film - comes the third novel in the Matt Scudder series.

From the author behind the upcoming Hollywood all-star film A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES - the second brilliant novel in the Matthew Scudder series

The 9th breakneck thriler in the Matt Scudder series, from a master of the genre.

There's no glass slipper in this fairy tale - just a damsel in distress, a bag of cash, and a whole lot of dead bodies.Reporter Ted Lindsay is trying to forget his ex-wife, and New York City's tough streets are just what the doctor ordered. They're also filled with alluring women, but only one catches Ted's eye. Cinderella Sims is not only beautiful, she's on the run and she needs Ted's help. She's got a bag full of cash and some very angry people staking out her apartment. Before long Ted's forgotten his heartbreak and is launched into the dark streets of crime with Cindy at his side.The author speaks: "Look, this wasn't my idea."Three or four years ago, Bill Schafer suggested that I might give some consideration to republishing a book of mine called $20 Lust, which had originally appeared under a pen name. I recalled the book he meant, but dimly; I had, after all, written it in 1960. But I didn't need to remember it all that vividly to know the answer to his suggestion."No, I told him."A little later I suggested he might want to publish a fancy edition of Mona, the first book under my own name; it had come out as a paperback original in 1961, and we could celebrate its fortieth anniversary with a nice limited edition hardcover."Bill was lukewarm to the notion, but had an alternative proposal; how about issuing a double volume, containing Mona and $20 Lust? Once again, I didn't have to do a lot of soul-searching to come up with a response."No, I told him."Time passed. Then Ed Gorman, the Sage of Cedar Rapids, used an ancient private eye novelette of mine in a pulp anthology. When it came out he sent me a copy, and, while I didn't read my novelette-I figured it was enough that I wrote the damned thing-I did read his introduction, which I found to be thoughtful and incisive and generous. I e-mailed him and told him so, and he e-mailed me back and thanked me, adding that my early work was probably better than I thought."'And, ' he added, 'I really think you ought to let Bill Schafer publish $20 Lust.'"I felt as though I'd been sucker-punched. Where the hell did that come from?"So I got in touch with Bill. 'I suppose I could at least read it, ' I said, 'except I can't, because I don't have a copy.' Three days later, a battered copy arrived in the mail. I looked at the first two pages, and I looked at the last two or three pages, and I heaved a sigh. Heaved it clear across the room, and would have heaved the book, too, but instead I hollered for my wife."'Bill Schafer wants to reprint this, ' I said."'Great, ' she said."'Not necessarily, ' I said, and explained the circumstances. 'I'd like you to read this, ' I said, 'or as much of it as you can without gagging, and then tell me it's utter crap and I'd surely destroy what little reputation I have if I consent to its republication.'"'Suppose I like it?'"'Not to worry, ' I said. 'I'll sign the commitment papers, and I'll make sure they take real good care of you.'"Well, she liked it. And Bill Schafer published it, and a lot of people liked it, and my agent sold it in France, where even more people liked it. Shows what I know. And it's now my pleasure to include it in the Classic Crime Library."Cinderella Sims was originally intended to be my second crime novel for Gold Medal, to follow Grifter's Game (aka Mona). At some point along the way I lost faith in it, and wrapped it up in a hurry, and sold it to Nightstand Books. Hope y'all enjo

Here's one reviewer's take: "Originally marketed as "occult horror", Ariel is neither. It's a story of the madness that lies just under the surface, and what it takes to bring it out; the need to give evil a face and a name. Who better to scapegoat for unexplainable tragedies than the one who is Different? Ariel is adopted, and looks slightly unusual. Her unstable mother never fails to assume the worst, almost deliberately misreading the girl's ordinary teenage perceptiveness and need for privacy. By the book's end, almost everyone believes that Ariel is a monster -- including Ariel herself."Great characterizations, wonderful descriptions -- I want to live in Ariel's house. I could wish for a sequel, or just for more books like it."And here's LB's: "A publisher provided the premise of Ariel-an adoption that went awry. I was in Charleston when I began the book, and chose that extraordinary city as its setting. I don't know to what extent the book works-I should note that not every reader agreed with the one quoted above-but I greatly enjoyed the interplay of Ariel and her friend Erskine, and on certain nights I can still hear her flute off in the distance."THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.

A thriller loaded with international intrigue from mystery master Lawrence Block.Struggling folksinger Ellen Cameron can't believe her luck. Not only is the State Department sponsoring her trip to West Berlin, but her agent has arranged for her to tour Ireland. It's just the break she needs. And better yet, she's meeting the friendliest and most interesting people on her trip, from a kind priest on the plane to a handsome American studying abroad. But things - and people - aren't always what they seem, and her European adventure could turn out to be the type of international affair she never imagined.LB says: "This book was originally published by Lancer Books under the pen name Anne Campbell Clarke, a pseudonym I never used before or since. I'd been engaged to write a romantic espionage novel in the tradition of Helen MacInnes, and chose Ireland as a setting, being familiar with the countryside and with the folk music. I had a good time writing it, but of course that's no guarantee you'll have a good time reading it. But I certainly hope you do." THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.

"Ed London is the kind of private investigator you call to clean up the mess when your mistress turns up dead. But after he dumps a body in Central Park, it appears this case is still alive and kicking. Seems that the dead girl was in possession of something special that some very shady characters want back. Now Ed, along with his actress friend Maddy, will have to crack the case before he ends up dead himself. But there's more than a murder here; there's missing jewels, Israeli intelligence, Nazi spies, and a host of double-dealing, backstabbing thieves."Coward's Kiss started life as a tie-in novel for Belmont Books, linked to the TV series Markham, starring Ray Milland. When a very young Lawrence Block turned in the book, his agent sent it instead to Knox Burger at Gold Medal, who shared the agent's enthusiasm. Block rewrote the book, changing Roy to Ed and Markham to London, and Gold Medal published the book with the unfortunate title of Death Pulls a Doublecross.After fulfilling his assignment by writing another book for Belmont (You Could Call It Murder, Classic Crime Library #12) Block tried to write a second Ed London novel, but somehow never managed it. He did write three magazine novelettes with London, and you can find them in One Night Stands and Lost Weekends, a collection of his earliest pulp work.The legendary Anthony Boucher gave the book a nice review in the New York Times Book Review, and if Lawrence Block had the sense to hang on to things, we'd reproduce it here. But he doesn't, so you'll have to take our word for it. THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.

BROADWAY CAN BE MURDER started out to be a novel based on Johnny Midnight, a TV series which everyone has long since forgotten.Except, of course, that nothing manages to be forgotten in the Internet Age. I, whose job it was to knock out 50,000 words of Johnny Midnightish prose and dialogue, had forgotten when it ran and who was in it, but Google took no time at all to remind me that the title role was played by Edmund O'Brien, and that the series ran during the first nine months of 1960. And if you want to know more about it, well, Google and Wikipedia are there to enlighten you.I was in New York, newly married, living at 110 West 69th Street. I was writing short stories for crime fiction magazines, erotic novels for Midwood and Nightstand, and fielding assignments that my agent steered in my direction. Two of these were from paperback publishers who had acquired the book rights to a TV drama and wanted to hire someone to write a book.First up for me was a show called Markham, which starred Ray Milland. Belmont was to be the publisher, and I had to write the damn book twice. My first effort turned out to be too good to waste its fragrance on Belmont's desert air, and my agent had me change the title and the names of the characters and sold the thing to Gold Medal. So I had to write it again, and I did, and they liked it okay and published it.Next up was Beacon Books, with "Johnny Midnight" as both the book's inspiration and its title. I wrote it, but by the time Beacon was preparing it for publication, the series had been canceled. The publisher saw no reason to pay a licensing fee for a moribund show, and accordingly changed names: Johnny Midnight became Johnny Lane, and his trusty servant morphed from Uki to Ito. And Lawrence Block became Ben Christopher for the occasion. I don't know what kept me from using my own name, the book was crime fiction rather than the erotica that seemed to call for a pen name, but I do remember that my great friend Donald E. Westlake had recently done some sort of tie-in novel and hung the name Ben Christopher on it, telling me it would be his pen name for tie-ins he was anxious to forget. I horned in on the name, and if Don found this irksome he kept it to himself.Someone at Beacon picked the title. STRANGE EMBRACE. Well, there's a lesbian element in the book, and I guess they wanted to play it up, and "strange" was a useful code word toward that end. II let the title stand when Subterranean published the book in a double volume with 69 BARROW STREET, and kept it when I reissues it in the Classic Crime Library.Now, in 2021, Theo Holland is voicing an audio edition of the book-and I think it's high time it have an appropriate title, one that sounds like the hard-edged crime novel it is instead of the bit of erotica Beacon wanted to make it resemble. It's a murder mystery with a Broadway theater setting, so why not call it BROADWAY CAN BE MURDER? We can still use the original cover art, if my production goddess can put her Photoshop skills to work on the title...Done and done.Ray Milland, I should add, had no better luck than Edmund O'Brien; his show Markham was canceled after a single season. Belmont evidently didn't get the news in time to act on it, and they dutifully published the book as Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos. When I okayed a reissue years later by another publisher I changed the title to YOU COULD CALL IT MURDER-and it's available now with that title, in paperback or ebook, as Classic Crime Library #12. (And the book it was written to replace, which Gold Medal called Death Pulls a Doublecross, is now #13 in the Classic Crime Library with my original title restored: COWARD'S KISS.)And here's CCL #19, BROADWAY CAN BE MURDER. Enjoy it!

"Jimmie John Hall wasn't anything until he was a killer, and Betty Dienhardt wasn't anything until she met Jimmie John Hall. When they get together, sparks fly and bullets follow. The first to go are Betty's parents, but Betty isn't bothered. She only wants to be with her man - the first person to ever make her feel special."They set off on a cross-country spree, killing for gas money and food, killing to swap their car for one the police aren't looking for. As the dragnet draws tighter, they only grow closer, riding a road that leads to death because death has surrounded them all the time."That's the copy on Dreamscape Audio's excellent audiobook, expertly narrated by Alan Sklar, and I'd be hard put to improve on it. It's worth noting, though, that the novel derives from and was inspired by the real-life (and real death) rampage of Charles Starkweather and Caryl Fugate in 1950s Nebraska; the novel itself is set fifteen years later, and does not attempt a literal reconstruction of the original case.It's a powerful work of fiction, a penetrating look at two disturbed and disturbing individuals, and a breakneck tear across the American Midwest. Like Such Men Are Dangerous and The Triumph of Evil, it was originally published under LB's Paul Kavanagh pen name, but as soon as he could he resides all three books under his own name, and is pleased to make them available now in the Classic Crime Library. THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.

"This goes through you like a dose of salts and stings like iodine."So said Virginia Kirkus Reviews of Such Men Are Dangerous when it first appeared almost fifty years ago, and since then this edge-of-the-chair novel hasn't lost a step. It's the story of Paul Kavanagh, a burnt-out ex-Green Beret who copes with what we've since learned to call PTSD by retiring to a dime-sized islet in the Florida Keys. There he lives a determinedly simple life, his human contact limited to a weekly visit to a storekeeper on a nearby island.Then George Dattner turns up with a plan. A CIA op, he has inside knowledge of a scheduled shipment of military goods from an army base in South Dakota. It's really nasty stuff-atomic grenades, lethal gas, tactical weaponry that could be a game-changer for a border war or insurgency. And he's got a buyer lined up. All he needs is a partner, because the way he's got it figured, hijacking the shipment is a job that the right two men can pull off.Kavanagh signs on.The operation is brilliantly planned and executed, but not without a few surprises along the way. But the greatest surprise, and a denouement that's as shocking now as it was half a century ago, will hit you as hard as it hit readers half a century ago.THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.

"If you're not part of the solution, you must be part of the problem."You heard that a lot in the early 1970s, when the country seemed to be teetering on the brink of revolutionary upheaval. Miles Dorn, living quietly in retirement in the U.S., had come a long way from his roots in Central Europe, leaving his past as an assassin and agent provocateur behind him. But as soon as he walks into his house and smells the smoke from a Turkish cigarette, he knows nobody can walk away from the past. It's always there, and it can reach out at any moment and get hold of you.He's recruited for a series of assassinations designed to render his adopted country vulnerable to a political coup. Instead of the elaborate web that's the staple of conspiracy theorists, he's one man, working alone.He's also a man falling in love, and with a woman a generation too young for him. "We're the same age, Miles," she insists. "I've known you for exactly as long as you've known me."Of course he likes the sound of that, but he knows better than to believe it. Just as he knows better than to believe that their love affair-or anything else in his life-has a real chance of working out. But what can he do? Is Dorn part of the solution-or a principal part of the problem?The Triumph of Evil is a powerful evocation of perilous time in America's recent past. It's a thriller on a human scale, and you'll be stunned by its plausibility and gripped by its suspense. THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.

"The colonel was right. You had to draw a line through mankind, a wavy line but a line, and on one side you had Good and on the other side you had Evil. There was good and bad in everyone, sure, and every shitheel was some mother's son, and it was all well and good to know this, but when push came to shove, it was just words; there was Good and Evil with no shades of gray and Judgment Day came seven time a week."Meet the Specialists, five good men, Manso and Murdock and Simmons and Giordano and Dehn. They scattered when they took off their green berets and returned to civilian life, but now and then their colonel picks up the phone and gets in touch-and they get together to do as they did in Vietnam.Colonel Roger Elliott Cross left a leg in Vietnam. His men came home physically intact, but each bears scars nonetheless. But when they come together, teamed up to right wrongs, they are a powerful force for good.And, by doing good, they also manage to do well. Because when five specialists take on a Mafia-owned bank, why shouldn't they turn profit on the deal?If you saw The A-Team on television, this may seem familiar to you. When Lawrence Block saw the A-Team, it seems uncannily familiar to him, and he had the feeling the show's producers had read his 1968 novel. But he decided, wisely or not, that life is too short for litigation. Now, years later, the TV show has vanished and the book lives on. Isn't that as it should be?THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art

Jeff Flanders has a perfectly good life. Until Candace Cain sashays into it and turns it upside-down. Jeff's got a good-looking wife; he loves her and she loves him. He's got a job, swinging a desk at a semi-shady finance company, signing off on usurious loans to losers; he doesn't love it and it doesn't love him, but it's easy work and it pays the bills. Until a girl called Candy applies for a $1000 loan-with no job, no bank account, no security. Nothing but a beautiful face, an awesome body, and all the nerve in the world. He lends her the money himself. That's a mistake. In return, she takes him to bed. That's a bigger one. All she wants in the world is someone who'll keep her in style. All he wants is more Candy. . . CANDY, first published in 1960, is a noir novel of sexual obsession. It seems a better fit for the Classic Crime Library than the Collection of Classic Erotica. Either way, we get to use the gorgeous Paul Rader cover.