Lawrence Block

• Born: June 24, 1938
• Place of Birth: Buffalo, New York

• TYPES OF PLOT: Inverted; private investigator; comedy caper
• PRINCIPAL SERIES: Evan Tanner, 1966- ; Chip Harrison, 1970- ; Matthew Scudder, 1976- ; Bernie Rhodenbarr, 1977- ; Martin Ehrengraf, 1983- ; J. P. Keller, 1994-

Contribution

Lawrence Block is a storyteller who experiments with several genres, including espionage, detective, and comedy caper fiction. Regardless of the genre, he delivers a protagonist with whom his readers can empathize, identify, and even secretly wish to accompany him on the different adventures. Block’s tone ranges from the serious and downbeat in the Matt Scudder novels to the lighthearted and comical found in the works featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr and Chip Harrison. His characters are outsiders to conventional society, and Block captures their true essence through their first-person vernaculars. Furthermore, his vivid and realistic descriptions of the deadbeats, the bag ladies, the pimps, the police officers—both good and bad—and those hoping for something better portray New York City as a place devoid of glitter and elegance. Writer has called Block the only “writer of mystery and detective fiction who comes close to replacing the irreplaceable .”

Several of Block’s novels were (rather poorly) adapted to film. These include Nightmare Honeymoon (1973), the 1983 Shamus Award-winning Eight Million Ways to Die (1986), The Burglar in the Closet (as Burglar, 1987, starring Whoopi Goldberg), and A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014). He also contributed to the screenplay for My Blueberry Nights (2007). Block's further twenty-first-century works include Keller's Fedora (2016), Shadows (2016), Resume Speed and Other Stories (2018), Dead Girl Blues (2020), A Writer Prepares (2021), The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022), and The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder (2023), among others.

Biography

Lawrence Block was born in Buffalo, New York on June 24, 1938. He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, from 1955 to 1959. In 1957, he became an editor for the Scott Meredith literary agency but left one year later to pursue a professional writing career. In 1960, he married Loretta Ann Kallett, with whom he had three daughters. In 1973, they divorced. Ten years later, he married Lynne Wood. Fond of travel, they joined the Travelers Century Club and visited around 160 countries by the late 2020s.

Block’s first books were soft-core sex novels (for which he used the pseudonyms Andrew Shaw, Jill Emerson, and—as did —Sheldon Lord), which were released in paperback. In fact, for many years, his novels were published as paperback originals. He is a multiple winner of nearly every major mystery award for his writing. He won Edgar Awards for his short stories “Keller on the Spot,” “Keller’s Therapy,” “By Dawn’s Early Light,” "Autumn at the Automat," and his novel A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (1991). He received a Nero Wolfe Award for The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979), a Shamus Award for Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), a Maltese Falcon Award for When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986), and an Anthony Award for Master’s Choice, Volume II. He also received a Shamus Award for "The Hammer" (2009).

He served as a member of the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America, which honored him with the title of Grand Master in 1994, and as president of the Private Eye Writers of America. In 1964, he became associate editor of the Whitman Numismatic Journal, a position that reflects his interest in and knowledge of coins. For many years, he was a contributing editor for Writer’s Digest, for which he wrote a monthly column on fiction writing. His seminar for writers, “Write for Your Life,” saw great success.

Analysis

Lawrence Block is one of the most versatile talents in the mystery field. His desire to entertain his readers is evident in the many categories of mystery fiction that he has mastered. With each subgenre, Block utilizes a fresh approach to the protagonists, the plots, and the tone and avoids relying on established formulas.

With Evan Tanner, introduced in The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966), Block created an agent who, faced with the prospect of rotting away in a foreign jail, reluctantly accepts his new career. While most private detectives are former police officers, thus having the proper knowledge and experience for their new professions, Chip Harrison’s previous employment in a bordello offered no formal training for working for Leo Haig. Bernie Rhodenbarr, the polished and sophisticated amateur sleuth, is actually a burglar for hire. With the character of Matthew Scudder, Block destroys the cliché of the hard-drinking private detective by making Scudder an alcoholic who wrestles with the demons of his past.

Block is a master at creating the right tone for each series of mysteries. The Tanner novels are laced with wisecracks and screwball characters. The Rhodenbarr novels not only are full of lighthearted comedy but also contain fascinating burglar lore, such as how to deal with locks, alarms, and watchdogs. With his two Chip Harrison mysteries, Make Out with Murder (1974) and The Topless Tulip Caper (1975), Block’s sense of humor is fully developed. (Two earlier Chip Harrison novels are actually erotica rather than mysteries.) The nineteen-year-old private eye’s adventures with Haig are full of mystery in-jokes and puns. In the short story “Death of the Mallory Queen,” Chip and Haig encounter a suspect named Lotte Benzler, which is clearly a play on the name Otto Penzler, the well-known mystery bookstore owner, authority, and critic.

Chip’s tales parody the tough, hard-boiled detective stories, but they are also Block’s tribute to ’s Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin legacy. In sharp contrast, though, are the novels featuring Matt Scudder. The stark, unsentimental prose lends these books a serious, somber tone, as glib dialogue and flowery metaphors would only ruin the effect for which Block strives: to allow his readers to enter the mind of a man who is haunted by his guilt.

What Block’s characters have most in common is that they are outsiders to the world in which they live. Walking the thin line between law and lawlessness, these men disregard the conforming demands of a complacent society. Bernie Rhodenbarr, for example, as a thief and an amateur sleuth, is a descendant of the outlaw of the Wild West or the gangster of the Roaring Twenties, both elevated to the status of folk heroes by the early dime novels and pulps. Bernie is able to beat the system and get away with it. When someone needs something stolen, Bernie is more than happy to oblige—for a price. His profession satisfies a secret desire that must be common to many readers, that of wanting something more exciting than the usual nine-to-five routine. Bernie is not, however, a completely amoral character. There are times when he does feel some guilt for his stealing, but as he says, “I’m a thief and I have to steal. I just plain love it.”

The Burglar in the Closet

Bernie’s illegal excursions into other people’s homes, however, often lead him into trouble. In The Burglar in the Closet (1978), before he can finish robbing the apartment that belongs to his dentist’s former wife, the woman comes home with a new lover. Trapped in her bedroom closet, Bernie must wait during their lovemaking and hope they fall asleep so that he can safely escape. The woman is later murdered, and Bernie must discover who killed her to keep himself from being accused of the crime. As an amateur sleuth, Bernie holds the advantage of not belonging to an official police force and is therefore not hampered by rules and procedures. With Bernie, Block adds a new twist to the role of the detective. Instead of being on a quest for justice or trying to make sense of the crimes of others, Bernie is motivated by more self-centered feelings. Like Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and a host of other detectives, Bernie is an outsider to the world through which he must travel on his investigation, but he is motivated by his need to save his own neck.

The Sins of the Fathers

Perhaps the most complex and believable of Block’s series characters is Matthew Scudder, the alcoholic private detective introduced in The Sins of the Fathers (1976). Scudder is a former police officer who abandoned his roles as a law enforcement officer, husband, and father after an incident that shattered his world. While in a bar one night after work, he witnessed two punks rob and kill the bartender. Scudder followed the two and shot them both, killing one and wounding the other. One of Scudder’s bullets, however, ricocheted and hit a seven-year-old girl named Estrellita Rivera, killing her instantly. Although Scudder was cleared of any blame in the tragic shooting and was even honored by the police department for his actions in apprehending the bartender’s killers, he could not clear his conscience. After resigning from the force and leaving his wife and two sons, Scudder moved into a hotel on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan to face his guilt in lonely isolation.

A Stab in the Dark

Scudder’s alcoholism is a central theme throughout each novel, and if the books are read in sequence, the alcoholism increasingly dominates Scudder’s life. He suffers blackouts more frequently, and twice, he is told to stop his drinking if he wants to live. As the alcoholism becomes worse, so does Scudder’s isolation from those for whom he cares. In A Stab in the Dark (1981), a female friend, a sculptress and fellow alcoholic, tries to make Scudder confront his drinking, but he denies having a problem and says that a group such as Alcoholics Anonymous would not work for him. By the end of the book, the woman refuses to see Scudder any longer, as she herself has decided to seek help.

Eight Million Ways to Die

Eight Million Ways to Die, published in 1982, is the turning point in the Scudder series. It is a superior novel for its social relevance and psychological insights into the mind of an alcoholic. In this book, Scudder has made the first steps toward confronting his alcoholism by attending regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He is hired by a prostitute, Kim Dakkinen, who wants to leave her pimp to start a new life. Afraid that the pimp, Chance, will talk her out of her plans or hurt her, Kim wants Scudder to act as a go-between with Chance. When Kim is murdered a few days later, Scudder suspects Chance, who had earlier agreed to Kim’s freedom. Chance, however, asserts his innocence and hires Scudder to find Kim’s murderer. Thus, Scudder’s quest to solve the murder holds the chance for him to quit drinking. “Searching for Kim’s killer was something I could do instead of drinking. For a while.”

In this novel, Scudder’s isolation is more complete. Because of his worsening alcoholism, he has been barred from buying any alcohol at Armstrong’s and becomes an outcast among the drinkers who have been a major part of his life for many years. Each day without a drink is a minor victory, but his mind is obsessed with the need for a drink. Scudder has also begun going to daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Usually, he sits off to the side or in the back, listening with cynical disdain to the statements of the many problem drinkers. To him, their saccharine-sweet tales of hope sound absurd in contrast to the brutal fate suffered by Kim. Not only is Scudder an outsider to his fellow drinkers, but also he is an outsider to those hoping for a life free of alcohol. He can admit to himself that he has a problem but cannot do so publicly. He needs the support group's help, but he wants to tackle the problem alone. This conflict between appearance and reality recurs throughout the novel. Scudder appears to be handling his period of drying out, but in reality, he is afraid to leave the bottle behind and is fearful of the future.

With Chance, Block has created a man who longs for power and must lead a double life to maintain it. He lives in a quiet neighborhood, pretending to be the faithful manservant of a nonexistent, wealthy retired doctor so as not to arouse suspicion from his neighbors. He appears to care for his prostitutes, support them financially, and encourage them to follow their dreams. In reality, though, Chance demands complete loyalty from his girls. He uses them for his financial gain and need for power. Coming from a middle-class background, he studied art history in college. When his father died, however, he left school, enlisted in the military, and was sent to Vietnam. When he returned, he became a pimp and created a new identity, that of Chance. In the end, however, he is left with nothing. Because of Kim’s murder and another girl’s suicide, the rest of his prostitutes leave him.

The world that Block depicts in Eight Million Ways to Die is precariously balanced on the edge between appearance and reality, hope and despair, life and death. Although Chance’s prostitutes appreciate his care and protection, they want something better for their lives—one dreams of being an actress, another, of being a poet. There is hope that they will leave their present professions and pursue these dreams, but underneath is the impression that they will never do so.

Another perspective is furnished by the stories of hope told by the members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each alcoholic who publicly admits their problem tells of a past life full of despair. These stories contrast the tales of modern urban horror Scudder reads in the newspapers. In one case, Scudder hears about an older woman who was killed when her friend found an abandoned television and brought it to her house; when he turned on the television, it exploded. A bomb had been rigged inside, probably as part of a mob execution attempt that failed when the target grew suspicious and discarded the television.

These tragically absurd tales of people who die sudden, violent deaths serve as proof of life’s fragile nature. The ways that people die are just as numerous as the body counts. As a police officer tells Scudder, “You know what you got in this city? . . . You got eight million ways to die.” The prospect of death scares Scudder. In the end, he realizes the seriousness of his alcohol addiction and his desperate need for help, even if it comes only one day at a time. As the novel closes, he is finally able to say, “My name is Matt, . . . and I’m an alcoholic.” With the Scudder novels, Block has achieved a “kind of poetry of despair.” Scudder is a man who loses a part of himself but takes the first steps in building a new life.

J. P. Keller Series

Stories about a wistful hitman named J. P. Keller began appearing in Playboy magazine in the 1990s. Often anthologized, many of these stories were arranged into episodic novels. Keller got a dog in his second story, “Keller’s Therapy,” and soon had a dog walker to care for the dog while he was on assignment. The charm of the Keller stories is the lonely, bachelor existence of an ordinary, likable man who kills people for a living.

Small Town

Block, a native New Yorker, responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the novel Small Town (2003). Told from the points of view of several characters, this novel explores the catalytic effects of the attack, including serial murder on a small scale. Many critics consider Small Town, which finely balances suspense, psychological insight, and comic timing while hearkening back to Block’s early soft-porn days, his finest novel.

Principal Series Characters:

• Evan Tanner is an agent working for an unnamed secret government agency who cannot sleep because of a shrapnel wound to the brain. When not working, he spends his spare time joining various oddball political movements.
• Chip Harrison is a private investigator and assistant to Leo Haig, an overweight private detective who raises tropical fish and patterns his life after Nero Wolfe. Acting as Haig’s Archie Goodwin in his two mystery adventures, he is full of humorous references to various mystery writers and their characters and his own sexual exploits.
• Matthew Scudder is a private investigator and an alcoholic former police officer who works without a license. Guilt-ridden because he accidentally killed a young girl in a shootout, he drowns his despair with alcohol and occasionally accepts a case to pay the rent.
• Bernie Rhodenbarr is a burglar and amateur sleuth who steals for a price. In his amusing capers, Bernie, who derives an emotional thrill from thievery, usually winds up in trouble when dead bodies appear in places he illegally enters. He then must play detective to clear himself.
• Martin Ehrengraf is a dapper little criminal defense attorney who believes that all his clients are innocent. To prove this, he is willing to use every trick in the lawyer’s black bag and will even kill to win his cases.
• J. P. Keller is an appealing, conscientious hired assassin who is a thorough professional and cool but always on the lookout for a girlfriend. For a killer, he is an occasionally whimsical man prone to loneliness and self-doubt, the sort who worries about what kind of present to give the woman who walks his dog.

Bibliography

"All About LB." Lawrence Block, www.lawrenceblock.com/about. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Baker, Robert A., and Michael T. Nietzel. Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights—A Survey of American Detective Fiction, 1922-1984. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985.

“Block, Lawrence.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1998.

Block, Lawrence, and Ernie Bulow. After Hours: Conversations with Lawrence Block. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Block, Lawrence, and Tom Callahan. “Lawrence Block, Master of Mystery.” Writer 116, no. 7 (July 2003): 22.

Geherin, David. The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.

King, Stephen. “No Cats: An Appreciation of Lawrence Block and Matt Scudder.” In The Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Dark Harvest, 1992.

"Lawrence Block." GoodReads, www.goodreads.com/author/show/17613.Lawrence‗Block. Accessed 20 July 2024.

McAleer, John. Afterword to AKA Chip Harrison. Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman, 1983.

Meyer, Adam. “Still Out on the Cutting Edge: An Interview with the Mystery Man: Lawrence Block.” Pirate Writings 7 (Summer, 1995).

Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller, eds. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.

Scott, Art. “Lawrence Block.” In Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.