THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES by Lawrence Block - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
See all titles by Lawrence Block.
An MWA Grand Master tells it straight.
An MWA Grand Master and a multiple
winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Maltese Falcon awards, Lawrence Block's
reflections and observations come from over a half century as a writer
of bestselling crime fiction. Several of his novels have been filmed,
most recently A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson. While
he's best known for his novels and short fiction, along with his books
on the craft of writing, that's not all he's written. THE CRIME OF OUR
LIVES collects his observations and personal reminiscences of the crime
fiction field and some of its leading practitioners. He has a lot to
say, and he says it here in convincing and entertaining fashion.
Fredric Brown: "When I read
Murder Can Be Fun, I had a bottle of bourbon on the table and every
time Brown's hero took a drink, I had a snort myself. This is a
hazardous undertaking when in the company of Brown's characters, and,
I've been given to understand, would have been just as dangerous around
the author himself. By the time the book was finished, so was I."
Raymond Chandler: "You have to wonder how he got it so right. He
spent a lot of time in the house-working, reading, writing letters. He
saw to his wife, who required a lot of attention in her later years. And
when he did get out, you wouldn't find him walking the mean streets. La
Jolla, it must be noted, was never much for mean streets."
Evan
Hunter: "In his mid-seventies, after a couple of heart attacks, an
aneurysm, and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his
larynx, Evan wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on
Becca in Jeopardy, with every intention of working his way through the
alphabet. Don't you love it? Here's a man with one foot in the grave and
the other on a banana peel, and he's perfectly comfortable launching a
twenty-six book series."
Donald E. Westlake's Memory: "Here's the
point: Don's manuscript arrived, and we had dinner and put the kid to
bed, and I started reading. And my wife went to bed, and I stayed up
reading, and after a while I forgot I was having a heart attack, and
just kept reading until I finished the book around dawn. And somewhere
along the way I became aware that my friend Don, who'd written a couple
of mysteries and some science fiction and his fair share of soft-core
erotica, had just produced a great novel."
Charles Willeford: "Can
a self-diagnosed sociopath be at the same time an intensely moral
person? Can one be a sociopath, virtually unaware of socially prescribed
morality, and yet be consumed with the desire to do the right thing?
That strikes me as a spot-on description of just about every character
Willeford ever wrote. How could he come up with characters like that? My
God, how could he help it?"