Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

Edgar Award-winner Lawrence Block invites you into the criminally funny world of the most notorious star of mystery fiction: Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookseller by day and burglar by night. In this humorous mystery, Bernie's passion for Humphrey Bogart movies leads him to a beautiful damsel in distress, a dangerous international conspiracy, and more than a few incriminating bodies. Sparkling with wit and energy, The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart is guaranteed to have you laughing out loud.

A deranged, derelict, crazed Vietnam vet has been arrested for gunning down successful young lawyer Glenn Holtzmann at a corner phone booth on 11th Avenue—and the suspect's brother wants unlicensed private investigator Matthew Scudder to prove the madman innocent. But Scudder's curiosity and dedication are leading him to dark, unexplored places in his own heart…and to passions and secrets that could destroy everything he loves. In this unmerciful metropolis, no one is truly innocent—including Matthew Scudder.

On the border between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide - with fatal results. This is MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block at his rawest and most visceral, a bloody, bawdy, brutal story of passion and punishment - and of lines that were never meant to be crossed - available for the first time in 50 years!

Matt Scudder is drawn into the case of a serial killer targeting criminals the law cannot touch. The Will of the People, egged on by a vitriolic newspaper columnist, kills a sex offender, a mobster, and a racist cult leader despite their seemingly impenetrable security. Then Scudder gets a call from a hot-shot attorney, the recipient of the Will's latest letter....

An ancient brotherhood meets annually in the back room of a swank Manhattan restaurant, a fraternity created in secret to celebrate life by celebrating its dead. But the past three decades have not been kind to the Club of 31. Matthew Scudder - ex-cop and ex-boozer - has known death in all its guises, which is why he has been asked to investigate a baffling thirty-year run of suicides and suspiciously random accidents that has thinned the ranks of this very select group of gentlemen.

Since the 1970s, Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning novels and short fiction featuring Matthew Scudder. Now, with both himself and his detective half a century older, the author found himself charged with writing a book about his protagonist. And he decided he wasn’t the right person for the job.

After appraising the worth of a rich man's library—conveniently leaving his fingerprints everywhere in the process—Bernie finds he's the cops' prime suspect when his client is murdered.

Matthew Scudder, a down-but-not-out-detective, is shocked by the apparent suicide of Paula, a waitress at Armstrong’s, one of Scudder’s hangouts. When Paula’s sister shows up and asks Matt to investigate what she believes to be a murder, Scudder agrees to take on the case. A number of clues don’t add up to suicide, and Scudder’s investigation leads him to the dark corners of Paula’s world.

For all those craving more adventures of their favorite bookseller-by-day and burglar-by-night, The Burglar in Short Order for the first time ever collects all of Bernie Rhodenbarr's short-form appearances in one complete volume. From the story in which a prototype of Bernie first appeared (“A Bad Night for Burglars”) to his appearances in Playboy and (maybe? It's kinda complicated) Cosmopolitan...from an essay discussing Bernie's misadventures in Hollywood to a piece commissioned by a European publisher for a tourist guide to New York....

From the revered The New York Times best-selling author comes a touching, insightful, and humorous memoir of an unlikely racewalker and world traveler. Lawrence Block is the author of bestselling novels featuring unforgettable characters such as the hit man Keller, private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and time traveler Evan Tanner. But much before he became an author, he was a walker.

This classic noir tale twists and turns down New York's mean streets and around Hamptons' beaches and back roads, during a bitterly cold and gray winter where nothing is as it seems and everyone has something to hide.

Keller is a regular guy. He goes to the movies, works on his stamp collection. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. Then every so often he gets a phone call from White Plains that sends him flying off somewhere to kill a perfect stranger. Keller is a pro and very good at what he does. But the jobs have started to go wrong. The realization is slow coming, yet when it arrives, it is irrefutable: Someone out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him, has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.

A Writer Prepares, an examination of the first quarter century of one writer's life, is arguably the work of two writers. There's the middle-aged fellow who wrote about half of it at a blistering pace in 1994, and there's the octogenarian who finished the job another quarter century later. The older fellow brought less raw energy to the task, and his memory is a long way from infallible, but one can only hope he's offset these losses with a slight edge in judgment, in perspective, in maturity.

Matthew Scudder is called to a hospice center for AIDS patients to investigate what the press is dubbing as "Mercy Killings".

Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block has been named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. A Drop of the Hard Stuff continues Block’s popular series starring New York private detective and recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Scudder is already struggling with his sobriety when his friend and fellow AA member Jack Ellery is found murdered. Now the only thing keeping Scudder from the bottle is his obsession with finding the culprit.

Matthew Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life—and then all hell breaks loose. Scudder discovers he's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present a war zone—and that he's not so respectable after all.

Five-time Edgar winner and MWA grand master Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column for the Writers Digest magazine for 14 years. The Liar's Bible consists of previously uncollected columns, chosen to illuminate the often dimly-lit path of the writer of fiction.

I wrote three paperback original novels for Berkley under the pen name Jill Emerson, two of them in diary form, the third a presumed collaborative novel written in concert by the three viewpoint characters. These were fun to do and worked out well, and they led to Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. I riffed on the experience of my friend George Dickerson, who, like the novel's protagonist, had the magazine he was editing folded out from under him.

In this brand-new novella, Keller, everyone's favorite assassin for hire, is Chicago-bound on Amtrak's City of New Orleans, ready to do what he does best. But it's complicated. Usually there's someone ready to point him toward the target. Or he'll have a photo, say. Or, bare minimum, a name and address. Not this time. When he gets to Baker's Bluff, Illinois, he'll have to play private detective before he can get down to business. Well, okay. He knows how it works. So before he even packs his suitcase, Keller buys a fedora.

"Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood - Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book's contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan's Inwood and Charles Ardai's Upper East Side, to Justin Scott's Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin's Greenwich Village."