Lawrence Block's Blog, page 19
October 10, 2014
Caution: DETOUR Ahead...
Mike Dennis, who did a remarkable job of voicing the audiobook of my own early novel, Borderline, discovered this great noir classic in the public domain. He decided to narrate an audio version, and while he was at it, made plans to publish ebook and POD paperback editions as well. (While other e-versions exist, he found them to be typographical disasters, and felt the book deserved a proper and respectful presentation.) He asked me if I'd write an introduction, and I thought some of you might enjoy a look at what I turned in.
You might also welcome a look at the book itself. And, if you're an audiobook fan, you'll want to hear Mike's rendition when it becomes available.
DETOUR by Martin M. Goldsmith
Foreword by Lawrence Block
Most people who know Detour at all know the film—specifically, the 1945 film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. (It was remade in 1992, with the male lead played by Tom Neal Jr. No, I’m not making this up.) No end of myth has grown up around the movie: Ulmer said he shot it in six days, Savage said it took four six-day weeks plus retakes; Ulmer said it cost under $20,000, a researcher found it was more like $100,000. But in 1998 it fell to Roger Ebert to say everything you need to know about it:
"Detour is a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade in film school. This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.”
And he finished his lengthy essay like so:
“Do these limitations and stylistic transgressions hurt the film? No. They are the film. Detour is an example of material finding the appropriate form. Two bottom-feeders from the swamps of pulp swim through the murk of low-budget noir and are caught gasping in Ulmer's net. They deserve one another. At the end, Al is still complaining: ‘Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.’ Oh, it has a reason.”
That’s the film—and, as it’s in the public domain, you can readily get hold of a copy and see it yourself. Full disclosure: if and when you do, you’ll be ahead of me. I haven’t seen Detour, but then I’m not here to write about the movie. I’ve read the book, the novel of the same name, published in 1939 when its author, Martin M. Goldsmith, was 25 years old. And it’s the book which I’m pleased to bring to your attention.
If Detour got in on the ground floor of film noir in 1945, the novel was even more of a novelty six years earlier, with its fast-paced narrative, hard-edged characters, and uncompromisingly dark world view. It’s an easy read, albeit an unsettling one, from the first page to the last, and much of what Ebert has to say about the film fits the book it came from.
It’s all over the place. It hinges on no end of coincidence, one element of which—Alexander’s happening to pick up a hitchhiker who happens to be Vera, the very woman who cat-scratched the poor mope who picked him up earlier—would be a dealbreaker for most publishers. It’s told by two first-person narrators, Alex and Sue, who were lovers before the book opens and who never—never!—encounter each other again.
It speaks well of Goldsmith’s narrative gifts that his story’s pace and drive can blind one to the wild irrationality of its plot. The actions of Alex and Vera, after they team up, never make a particle of sense. They’re afraid to sell their car, as if it’ll be traced to a dead man in another state, and yet they take other genuinely risky steps with astonishing sangfroid.
“People are afraid of all the wrong things.” That’s the promotional tag line for A Walk Among the Tombstones, the film based on a book of mine, so it’s much on my mind lately. And it applies well enough to Alex and Vera—and, for that matter, to Sue and Raoul.
Goldsmith, I should add, wrote and published another novel, Double Jeopardy, a couple of years before Detour. He went on to write two more novels, and received story and/or screenplay credits for a host of films and television programs. He was eighty when he died in 1994, and seems to have left behind an unpublished autobiography—which might make very interesting reading indeed, should somebody manage to hunt it down.
Meanwhile, here’s Detour. It’s a fast read, and I think you’ll find it worth your time.
You might also welcome a look at the book itself. And, if you're an audiobook fan, you'll want to hear Mike's rendition when it becomes available.
DETOUR by Martin M. Goldsmith
Foreword by Lawrence Block
Most people who know Detour at all know the film—specifically, the 1945 film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. (It was remade in 1992, with the male lead played by Tom Neal Jr. No, I’m not making this up.) No end of myth has grown up around the movie: Ulmer said he shot it in six days, Savage said it took four six-day weeks plus retakes; Ulmer said it cost under $20,000, a researcher found it was more like $100,000. But in 1998 it fell to Roger Ebert to say everything you need to know about it:
"Detour is a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade in film school. This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.”
And he finished his lengthy essay like so:
“Do these limitations and stylistic transgressions hurt the film? No. They are the film. Detour is an example of material finding the appropriate form. Two bottom-feeders from the swamps of pulp swim through the murk of low-budget noir and are caught gasping in Ulmer's net. They deserve one another. At the end, Al is still complaining: ‘Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.’ Oh, it has a reason.”
That’s the film—and, as it’s in the public domain, you can readily get hold of a copy and see it yourself. Full disclosure: if and when you do, you’ll be ahead of me. I haven’t seen Detour, but then I’m not here to write about the movie. I’ve read the book, the novel of the same name, published in 1939 when its author, Martin M. Goldsmith, was 25 years old. And it’s the book which I’m pleased to bring to your attention.
If Detour got in on the ground floor of film noir in 1945, the novel was even more of a novelty six years earlier, with its fast-paced narrative, hard-edged characters, and uncompromisingly dark world view. It’s an easy read, albeit an unsettling one, from the first page to the last, and much of what Ebert has to say about the film fits the book it came from.
It’s all over the place. It hinges on no end of coincidence, one element of which—Alexander’s happening to pick up a hitchhiker who happens to be Vera, the very woman who cat-scratched the poor mope who picked him up earlier—would be a dealbreaker for most publishers. It’s told by two first-person narrators, Alex and Sue, who were lovers before the book opens and who never—never!—encounter each other again.
It speaks well of Goldsmith’s narrative gifts that his story’s pace and drive can blind one to the wild irrationality of its plot. The actions of Alex and Vera, after they team up, never make a particle of sense. They’re afraid to sell their car, as if it’ll be traced to a dead man in another state, and yet they take other genuinely risky steps with astonishing sangfroid.
“People are afraid of all the wrong things.” That’s the promotional tag line for A Walk Among the Tombstones, the film based on a book of mine, so it’s much on my mind lately. And it applies well enough to Alex and Vera—and, for that matter, to Sue and Raoul.
Goldsmith, I should add, wrote and published another novel, Double Jeopardy, a couple of years before Detour. He went on to write two more novels, and received story and/or screenplay credits for a host of films and television programs. He was eighty when he died in 1994, and seems to have left behind an unpublished autobiography—which might make very interesting reading indeed, should somebody manage to hunt it down.
Meanwhile, here’s Detour. It’s a fast read, and I think you’ll find it worth your time.
September 26, 2014
Take A Walk Among the Tombstones and a Ride in The Getaway Car
>
Whew, what a week! It's been seven days since A Walk Among the Tombstones opened in the US and the UK and indeed throughout most of the world, and the reviews keep flooding in—from the media, and also from folks who paid their own way in and have been sharing their enthusiasm ever since on Facebook and Twitter, in blog posts and emails, and by what's always the most important element, old-fashioned word of mouth.The film industry pays a lot of attention to the box office figures for the opening weekend, and AWATT's were not high enough to get a sequel greenlighted. (Greenlit? Whatever.) My own hope, which I'm optimist enough to regard as realistic, is that this Movie For Grownups will prove itself where it matters most—in the hearts and minds of its audience. A friend saw it the other night in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and reports that a near-full house burst into applause at the end. "You rarely see that many people in the middle of the week," she said, "and they never applaud."
Now that's the sort of thing that can make a sequel happen, and that's what all of us want—Scott Frank, Liam Neeson, and—duh—Your Humble Servant. Will it happen? Well, time will tell. Doesn't it always?
Before I move on to that speedy vehicle I mentioned in the header, I need to let you know about the poster shown above—and tell you how to get one of your own. I managed to lay hands on a small supply of full-size AWATT posters (27" x 40") and lobby cards (11" x 17") and we're offering them for sale—signed, natch—in LB's eBay Bookstore.
The large posters are priced at $24.99, with free shipping to US addresses—but I'm afraid we can't ship these out of the country. The lobby cards are $19.99 with free shipping to US addresses, and I'm pleased to say that we CAN fill international orders for these...although the shipping charges, by International Priority Mail, are on the high side.
We have 40 of each, and there's not much chance we'll be able to replenish our supply, so if you want a poster or a lobby card, what you don't want to do is wait. One to a customer on these, please.
("Um, would it be okay for me to order one of each? One poster and one lobby card?" "Well, uh, I never thought of that. Gimme a minute...Okay, I guess that'd be all right.")
Let's move on—to The Getaway Car, a collection of non-fiction by Donald E. Westlake just out in trade paperback and ebook from University of Chicago Press. (UCP also publishes those handsome editions of Westlake's Parker novels, written under his pen name of Richard Stark.)
Don and I were the best of friends for half a century, and it was my pleasure to provide a foreword for the new book. It's a wonderful collection—the man never wrote a clumsy sentence or a charmless page—and a substantial extract from his unpublished autobiography is worth the book's price several times over.
I'm pleased to recommend it to your attention—and, if you're able to be in or near New York this Monday, September 29, you can pay that attention up close and personal at The Mysterious Bookshop at 58 Warren Street in lower Manhattan. I'll be there, along with UCP's Levi Stahl, who did a magnificent job of sorting through Don's files and, to quote from my own foreword, "separating the best of the wheat from the rest of the wheat—Don didn't do chaff." Also on hand will be Abby Adams Westlake, and after the three of us have run out of things to say, we'll happily sign your copies of The Getaway Car.
Things should get underway around 7pm, though you might want to arrive earlier to get a seat. And if you can't be there, and want a signed book, that's easy. Call the store at (800) 352-2840 and tell Ian I sent you.
And that's all I've got. If you've taken A Walk Among the Tombstones, and if you'd like to see Liam reprise his role in a sequel, get out there and tell everybody—word of mouth begins with you. And if you haven't seen the movie yet, well, hop to it!
Cheers,
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Now that's the sort of thing that can make a sequel happen, and that's what all of us want—Scott Frank, Liam Neeson, and—duh—Your Humble Servant. Will it happen? Well, time will tell. Doesn't it always?
Before I move on to that speedy vehicle I mentioned in the header, I need to let you know about the poster shown above—and tell you how to get one of your own. I managed to lay hands on a small supply of full-size AWATT posters (27" x 40") and lobby cards (11" x 17") and we're offering them for sale—signed, natch—in LB's eBay Bookstore.
The large posters are priced at $24.99, with free shipping to US addresses—but I'm afraid we can't ship these out of the country. The lobby cards are $19.99 with free shipping to US addresses, and I'm pleased to say that we CAN fill international orders for these...although the shipping charges, by International Priority Mail, are on the high side.
We have 40 of each, and there's not much chance we'll be able to replenish our supply, so if you want a poster or a lobby card, what you don't want to do is wait. One to a customer on these, please.
("Um, would it be okay for me to order one of each? One poster and one lobby card?" "Well, uh, I never thought of that. Gimme a minute...Okay, I guess that'd be all right.")
Let's move on—to The Getaway Car, a collection of non-fiction by Donald E. Westlake just out in trade paperback and ebook from University of Chicago Press. (UCP also publishes those handsome editions of Westlake's Parker novels, written under his pen name of Richard Stark.)Don and I were the best of friends for half a century, and it was my pleasure to provide a foreword for the new book. It's a wonderful collection—the man never wrote a clumsy sentence or a charmless page—and a substantial extract from his unpublished autobiography is worth the book's price several times over.
I'm pleased to recommend it to your attention—and, if you're able to be in or near New York this Monday, September 29, you can pay that attention up close and personal at The Mysterious Bookshop at 58 Warren Street in lower Manhattan. I'll be there, along with UCP's Levi Stahl, who did a magnificent job of sorting through Don's files and, to quote from my own foreword, "separating the best of the wheat from the rest of the wheat—Don didn't do chaff." Also on hand will be Abby Adams Westlake, and after the three of us have run out of things to say, we'll happily sign your copies of The Getaway Car.
Things should get underway around 7pm, though you might want to arrive earlier to get a seat. And if you can't be there, and want a signed book, that's easy. Call the store at (800) 352-2840 and tell Ian I sent you.
And that's all I've got. If you've taken A Walk Among the Tombstones, and if you'd like to see Liam reprise his role in a sequel, get out there and tell everybody—word of mouth begins with you. And if you haven't seen the movie yet, well, hop to it!
Cheers,
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
September 24, 2014
Kindle Unlimited crosses the pond!
Here's the text of a special newsletter that just went out to subscribers in the UK and Ireland:
KINDLE UNLIMITED CROSSES THE POND!
You may already know this, but haven't I made a life's work of telling people what they already know? So let me say that Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, introduced two months ago here in the Colonies, has been extended to amazon.co.uk. For a subscription fee of £7.99 a month, you can choose from more than half a million titles and read as many of them as you want absolutely free. You're "borrowing" the ebooks—but you can keep them as long as you want, can have up to ten borrowed at a time, and can add new titles quite effortlessly by "returning" ones you've read—with a mouse click.Now I don't work for Amazon (except in the broadest sense, in which we ALL work for Amazon) so I won't labor to sell you on this, or explain its fine points and inner workings. As a writer, I'm all for it—it makes it truly inexpensive for high-volume readers to read all they want for a very low price. (And yes, I collect a royalty when you read a book of mine this way. It's less than if you buy the book, but it's enough to make me perfectly happy.)
So what I want to do here is let you know what books of mine are available to you via KU.
(1) Everything I've chosen to self-publish exclusively on Kindle. This includes most of the individual Matthew Scudder short stories, starting with Out the Window, several Keller short stories, most of the Ehrengraf short stories, all but one or two of my John Warren Wells sex-fact books, and most of my non-series short stories as well. KU makes it really easy and cost-free to gobble up short stories instead of buying them one at a time for close to £2 apiece. (And one entire book, Getting Off, is eVailable via KU as 12 Kit Tolliver stories.)
(2) All of my Open Road backlist titles—some 40+ of them—are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. These include seven Jill Emerson novels, four or five books for writers, a batch of Hard Case Crime titles, and more.
Here's one last piece of news that should make the offer irresistible. For the first thirty days, the whole shebang is FREE! You can read all you want, and for that first month it won't even cost you £7.99. It won't cost you tuppence. If they hadn't demonetized the farthing, it wouldn't cost you one of those, either.
Okay, that's all. May you read to your heart's content, and may much of what you read be something I wrote.
Cheers!
So what I want to do here is let you know what books of mine are available to you via KU.
(1) Everything I've chosen to self-publish exclusively on Kindle. This includes most of the individual Matthew Scudder short stories, starting with Out the Window, several Keller short stories, most of the Ehrengraf short stories, all but one or two of my John Warren Wells sex-fact books, and most of my non-series short stories as well. KU makes it really easy and cost-free to gobble up short stories instead of buying them one at a time for close to £2 apiece. (And one entire book, Getting Off, is eVailable via KU as 12 Kit Tolliver stories.)
(2) All of my Open Road backlist titles—some 40+ of them—are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. These include seven Jill Emerson novels, four or five books for writers, a batch of Hard Case Crime titles, and more.
Here's one last piece of news that should make the offer irresistible. For the first thirty days, the whole shebang is FREE! You can read all you want, and for that first month it won't even cost you £7.99. It won't cost you tuppence. If they hadn't demonetized the farthing, it wouldn't cost you one of those, either.
Okay, that's all. May you read to your heart's content, and may much of what you read be something I wrote.
Cheers!
PS—This is going out to the relative handful of subscribers on my UK and Ireland lists. Many newsletter subscribers would qualify geographically, but are only on my master list—so please forward this to anyone you can think of who might find it of interest.
LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
September 22, 2014
Time to Tiptoe Through the Tombstones!
Have you seen it yet?
Here's the scoop— A Walk Among the Tombstones , starring Liam Neeson, written and directed by Scott Frank, and based on the tenth Matthew Scudder novel, opened Friday, September 19, throughout the US and UK and most of the world. (But some of y'all have to wait a while. The opening's set for mid-October in Australia and Taiwan—which seems odd, doesn't it? You folks get daybreak twelve hours before we do, but you have to wait an extra month for a movie. Well, the opening in Germany's not until November, so go figure.)
Lynne and I saw AWATT
Wednesday
at a special screening, and here we are in a photo with an unidentified stranger. (The stranger's latest venture,
Celebrity Name Game
, premieres this evening on a TV channel near you.) All three of us loved the film unreservedly, as did the rest of the audience and most of the critics. And so did a great many of you, as I've been assured by a tidal wave of emails and tweets and Facebook posts. It's a genuine rarity these days, a suspense thriller made by and for actual grown-ups, with a solid script and wonderful actors and a cinematographic vision of New York City that manages to be down-and-dirty and, at the same time, genuinely beautiful. Liam just plain IS Matt Scudder, and embodies the character even more perfectly than I knew he would. What a treat!
I'm very likely preaching to the choir here, as most of you have either already seen AWATT or placed it high on your To-Do list. Either way, I have a couple of suggestions. If you've seen the movie, and if you loved it, please spread the word. Word of mouth is what makes the difference, and I hope you'll enlist your mouth in the cause. Tweet, post, blog, send emails—and, if you're sufficiently retro to have actual conversations with folks, on the phone or even (shudder) in person, well, you know what to tell them, loud and clear.
And if you're planning to go see AWATT, sooner is better than later.
Why? Well, you'll be shocked to learn that I have an agenda here...but it's one I hope you share. See, if enough people buy enough tickets soon enough, the Powers That Be will greenlight a sequel and we'll all get to do
this again. Scott would love to write and direct another one, and Liam would welcome a return engagement as Matt, and you can probably figure out that I'm on board. So if you'd like to see a sequel—well, enough already. You get the point.
Moments before they lowered the house lights Wednesday night, an email informed me that Hard Case Crime's mass-market edition had just landed on the New York Times Best Seller List; it will debut there this Sunday, September 27 , in the #19 slot. That means a whole host of sales in airports and supermarkets, but it's becoming clear that the paperback's also a strong seller online . (And, while we're not able to offer this edition in LB's eBay Bookstore, David's got a good supply of autographed copies of our Trade Paperback edition @ $14.99.)
Now on to other matters. I know I've tipped you to Defender of the Innocent , the 12-story Ehrengraf collection coming September 30 from Subterranean Press. You can pre-order it now—and I'd recommend doing so, as
the publisher routinely sells out his entire printing, and prices tend to climb on the aftermarket. I self-published the book in audio, with the little lawyer expertly voiced by Don Sobczak, and you don't have to wait until the end of the month to download it; it's available right this minute at
Audible
,
Amazon
, and
iTunes
.
Emily Beresford voiced our audiobook of Jill Emerson's erotic novel in diary form, Thirty ; it's been getting a good reception from listeners and reviewers. She's just finished narrating Jill's first book, a sensitive novel of the lesbian experience with the unfortunate title of Warm and Willing. "Beautifully written as usual," Emily messaged me. "I really loved this story. You write so believably from a woman's perspective, more so than many women authors I have read." I'll let you know when Warm and Willing goes on sale; I can let you know now that Emily's on board to narrate Jill's second novel, Enough of Sorrow. (And the title, from a Mary Carolyn Davies poem, is a whole lot better than Warm and Willing.)
My friend Brian Koppelman, best known as a screenwriter and director, does a weekly podcast called The Moment on Grantland.com, and I sat down with him recently for an hour of conversation, most of it about Matthew Scudder. (Brian's a big fan of the books, and wrote a lyrical appreciation for The Night and the Music .) The podcast goes live sometime tomorrow ( Tuesday, 9/23 ); if you get there ahead of time, his chat with Gilbert Gottfried is a killer. As if he hasn't got enough to keep him busy, Brian made time to write a story for an anthology I'm editing, and it's a honey, set in a Kazakh-run NYC barber shop. I'll tell you all about that project a little later on.)
And that would be enough for now, but I have to keep David happy by mentioning a couple of items in LB's eBay Bookstore. Actually, I'll let him do the mentioning:
Okay, sure. Step by Step, LB's racewalking memoir, price xxxed to $9.99. Tanner's Tiger, Subterranean hard cover, way too cheap at $9.99. The Mundis book on breaking writer's block, don't recall the title, price reduced to $4.99, or a 10-copy lot for $29.99 postpaid. Grab bag lot of 8 Burglar paperbacks, six lots left and then forget about it, $49.99 postpaid. And I'll be adding titles if we can get the new scanner to work. That okay? You can edit it, fix it up nice.
I suppose I could, but I think I'll leave it as it is. It's got its own crude charm, and gives the folks out there an idea of what I have to put up with.
Cheers!
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Here's the scoop— A Walk Among the Tombstones , starring Liam Neeson, written and directed by Scott Frank, and based on the tenth Matthew Scudder novel, opened Friday, September 19, throughout the US and UK and most of the world. (But some of y'all have to wait a while. The opening's set for mid-October in Australia and Taiwan—which seems odd, doesn't it? You folks get daybreak twelve hours before we do, but you have to wait an extra month for a movie. Well, the opening in Germany's not until November, so go figure.)
Lynne and I saw AWATT
Wednesday
at a special screening, and here we are in a photo with an unidentified stranger. (The stranger's latest venture,
Celebrity Name Game
, premieres this evening on a TV channel near you.) All three of us loved the film unreservedly, as did the rest of the audience and most of the critics. And so did a great many of you, as I've been assured by a tidal wave of emails and tweets and Facebook posts. It's a genuine rarity these days, a suspense thriller made by and for actual grown-ups, with a solid script and wonderful actors and a cinematographic vision of New York City that manages to be down-and-dirty and, at the same time, genuinely beautiful. Liam just plain IS Matt Scudder, and embodies the character even more perfectly than I knew he would. What a treat!I'm very likely preaching to the choir here, as most of you have either already seen AWATT or placed it high on your To-Do list. Either way, I have a couple of suggestions. If you've seen the movie, and if you loved it, please spread the word. Word of mouth is what makes the difference, and I hope you'll enlist your mouth in the cause. Tweet, post, blog, send emails—and, if you're sufficiently retro to have actual conversations with folks, on the phone or even (shudder) in person, well, you know what to tell them, loud and clear.
And if you're planning to go see AWATT, sooner is better than later.
Why? Well, you'll be shocked to learn that I have an agenda here...but it's one I hope you share. See, if enough people buy enough tickets soon enough, the Powers That Be will greenlight a sequel and we'll all get to do
this again. Scott would love to write and direct another one, and Liam would welcome a return engagement as Matt, and you can probably figure out that I'm on board. So if you'd like to see a sequel—well, enough already. You get the point.Moments before they lowered the house lights Wednesday night, an email informed me that Hard Case Crime's mass-market edition had just landed on the New York Times Best Seller List; it will debut there this Sunday, September 27 , in the #19 slot. That means a whole host of sales in airports and supermarkets, but it's becoming clear that the paperback's also a strong seller online . (And, while we're not able to offer this edition in LB's eBay Bookstore, David's got a good supply of autographed copies of our Trade Paperback edition @ $14.99.)
Now on to other matters. I know I've tipped you to Defender of the Innocent , the 12-story Ehrengraf collection coming September 30 from Subterranean Press. You can pre-order it now—and I'd recommend doing so, as
the publisher routinely sells out his entire printing, and prices tend to climb on the aftermarket. I self-published the book in audio, with the little lawyer expertly voiced by Don Sobczak, and you don't have to wait until the end of the month to download it; it's available right this minute at
Audible
,
Amazon
, and
iTunes
.Emily Beresford voiced our audiobook of Jill Emerson's erotic novel in diary form, Thirty ; it's been getting a good reception from listeners and reviewers. She's just finished narrating Jill's first book, a sensitive novel of the lesbian experience with the unfortunate title of Warm and Willing. "Beautifully written as usual," Emily messaged me. "I really loved this story. You write so believably from a woman's perspective, more so than many women authors I have read." I'll let you know when Warm and Willing goes on sale; I can let you know now that Emily's on board to narrate Jill's second novel, Enough of Sorrow. (And the title, from a Mary Carolyn Davies poem, is a whole lot better than Warm and Willing.)
My friend Brian Koppelman, best known as a screenwriter and director, does a weekly podcast called The Moment on Grantland.com, and I sat down with him recently for an hour of conversation, most of it about Matthew Scudder. (Brian's a big fan of the books, and wrote a lyrical appreciation for The Night and the Music .) The podcast goes live sometime tomorrow ( Tuesday, 9/23 ); if you get there ahead of time, his chat with Gilbert Gottfried is a killer. As if he hasn't got enough to keep him busy, Brian made time to write a story for an anthology I'm editing, and it's a honey, set in a Kazakh-run NYC barber shop. I'll tell you all about that project a little later on.)
And that would be enough for now, but I have to keep David happy by mentioning a couple of items in LB's eBay Bookstore. Actually, I'll let him do the mentioning:
Okay, sure. Step by Step, LB's racewalking memoir, price xxxed to $9.99. Tanner's Tiger, Subterranean hard cover, way too cheap at $9.99. The Mundis book on breaking writer's block, don't recall the title, price reduced to $4.99, or a 10-copy lot for $29.99 postpaid. Grab bag lot of 8 Burglar paperbacks, six lots left and then forget about it, $49.99 postpaid. And I'll be adding titles if we can get the new scanner to work. That okay? You can edit it, fix it up nice.
I suppose I could, but I think I'll leave it as it is. It's got its own crude charm, and gives the folks out there an idea of what I have to put up with.
Cheers!
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
September 12, 2014
One More Week!
As you might possibly have heard, unless you've been trekking in Bhutan or meditating in an isolation chamber, A Walk Among the Tombstones opens Friday, September 19, all over the US and the UK and most of the rest of the world. (October 15, I believe, in Australia. As late as mid-November in a couple of other countries.)I'm preparing this newsletter in a hotel room in Los Angeles, where I came for a guest shot on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. If you set up your TiVo to record it, well, a presidential address jostled the TV schedule, and you may have missed it. We can't have that, can we? So just click the link and you get to see it all—except for the film clip Craig showed, which I guess they can't bundle in. But hey, that's okay. You'll see all that this coming weekend, in A Theater Near You.The promotional campaign for the picture, and the buzz that goes with it, is beyond anything I can recall. The posters are on every subway platform in New York and, from the looks of things, every bus in London. Overseas, some of the media placement has been downright spectacuar. The film trailer's running in theaters and turning
up in TV commercials. I've been getting tons of interview requests, and, media slut that I am, I've been saying yes to damn near all of them.It's exhausting, but so what? Writing's a wonderful life, and I wouldn't change it for anything, but it's rarely what you'd call exciting. For all the satisfaction of sitting in a room or hours on end in the company of figments of one's own imagination, it doesn't often make the heart pound and the blood race. But lately things have turned exciting, and I have to say I'm enjoying it.
So while I'm at it, let me share some news that's also pretty exciting. I believe I mentioned—quietly, elliptically—that I wrote a book in July. As I told Craig, I went to Philadelphia, holed up in an apartment on Rittenhouse Square, and came home a month later with a book written. What I didn't get the chance to tell him was that it's a down-and-dirty noir thriller, characterized by my Hollywood agent as "James M. Cain on Viagra." (Charles Ardai, who'll be publishing the book a year from now at Hard Case Crime, might want to put that line on the cover.) The title is The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes, the setting's a small town in Florida, an artist's already working on the cover painting—and I can't wait to see it. Soon as I do I'll give y'all a sneak preview.
But let's get back to the movie, because it's just so much fun. One happy effect of all the billboards and bus posters is that book sales have shot skyward. The book Craig held
up—and gave away to the studio audience—is Hard Case's movie tie-in edition, and besides flying off the racks in airports and supermarkets, which everybody expected, it's also having a surprisingly strong online sale. So is my trade paperback, available online or—if you want a signed copy—at our eBay bookstore. And ebooks of have been, well, spiking skyward at Kindle and Nook and pretty much everywhere. Ka-ching!The sales are mostly A Walk Among the Tombstones—no surprise there—but like any proper rising tide, this one's raising other boats as well, as readers drawn by the movie go on to work their way through the Scudder series. The first of the Scudder short stories, "Out the Window," has been absolutely surging, and people who read it and like it tend to pick up the complete collection, The Night and the Music. (The story's exclusive to Kindle, but the collection's widely available.)
I've seen the movie, as I believe I mentioned, but that was nine or ten months ago, and Lynne and I can't wait to see it again. A lot of you have asked if they'll be filming other books in the series, and I'm not the only one who hopes so. Scott Frank, who's done such a brilliant job as writer and director, wants to do more, and Liam Neeson would welcome another star turn as Matthew Scudder. Ultimately, it depends on the numbers. If the movie's a big success, there'll be more. Fingers crossed, huh?
Although it's okay to uncross them long enough to reserve your tickets for opening weekend...
Cheers!
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
August 21, 2014
An offer for Goodreads friends:
While I normally use this space to re-post entries from my blog, this is just for Goodreads folk. So it won't be tarted up with photos or links. It's just me, typing away.
I've posted before about my Jill Emerson novels. There have been eight in all, the first seven appearing under that pen name, the eighth—Getting Off—appearing from Hard Case Crime under an open pen name ("Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson").
Recently, I've been self-publishing in audio those few titles of mine not already available in that medium. Mike Dennis's inspired narration of Borderline is doing well as an Audible download, and Emily Beresford's narration of Thirty has just gone on sale.
Thirty is an interesting book. I've discussed it in my last post, so I'll just say that it was the first of three Jill Emerson titles for a line of paperback originals Berkley brought out in the early 1970s, aiming for literary merit with a high level of artful eroticism. I wrote it in the form of a diary kept by a woman for one year,commencing on her twenty-ninth birthday. (Hence the title.)
The Open Road ebook has somehow failed to get a single review on Amazon. (Jill's next for Berkley, Threesome, has had some excellent reviews. Go figure.) And ACX, the arm of Audible devoted to audio self-publishing, has supplied me with one-time download codes that will enable one to download the audio MP3 file free of charge.
So that's the windup. Here's the pitch: If you'd like to hear Emily's rendition of Thirty, and if you'll agree to review it here on Goodreads and perhaps on Audible and/or Amazon/iTunes, I'll be happy to send you a download code for your personal use. Let me know of your interest via email, please, to lawbloc@gmail.com. I've got a very limited supply of these, so the offer's good until I run out.
And if you're interested in Thirty but not in audio, well, I can't give you a code to get it for free, but it's already free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers, and only $2.99 to the rest of y'all. If you read it and like it, I'd appreciate your reviewing it—right here or wherever you please.
LB
I've posted before about my Jill Emerson novels. There have been eight in all, the first seven appearing under that pen name, the eighth—Getting Off—appearing from Hard Case Crime under an open pen name ("Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson").
Recently, I've been self-publishing in audio those few titles of mine not already available in that medium. Mike Dennis's inspired narration of Borderline is doing well as an Audible download, and Emily Beresford's narration of Thirty has just gone on sale.
Thirty is an interesting book. I've discussed it in my last post, so I'll just say that it was the first of three Jill Emerson titles for a line of paperback originals Berkley brought out in the early 1970s, aiming for literary merit with a high level of artful eroticism. I wrote it in the form of a diary kept by a woman for one year,commencing on her twenty-ninth birthday. (Hence the title.)
The Open Road ebook has somehow failed to get a single review on Amazon. (Jill's next for Berkley, Threesome, has had some excellent reviews. Go figure.) And ACX, the arm of Audible devoted to audio self-publishing, has supplied me with one-time download codes that will enable one to download the audio MP3 file free of charge.
So that's the windup. Here's the pitch: If you'd like to hear Emily's rendition of Thirty, and if you'll agree to review it here on Goodreads and perhaps on Audible and/or Amazon/iTunes, I'll be happy to send you a download code for your personal use. Let me know of your interest via email, please, to lawbloc@gmail.com. I've got a very limited supply of these, so the offer's good until I run out.
And if you're interested in Thirty but not in audio, well, I can't give you a code to get it for free, but it's already free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers, and only $2.99 to the rest of y'all. If you read it and like it, I'd appreciate your reviewing it—right here or wherever you please.
LB
August 10, 2014
Back to the Backlist #1: JILL EMERSON
Jill Emerson's in the spotlight this week, with Neda Ulaby's mention on NPR's Morning Edition:"Before Scudder, Block wrote lesbian erotica under the name Jill Emerson. While they may have been sensitive, they also had titles like Warm and Willing and belonged in the category of pulp fiction known for covers of women in lingerie silhouetted against bedrooms doors. For a while, Block disavowed those novels, but these days he's proud of them. He remembers having an off-mic conversation with Fresh Air's Terry Gross a few years ago in which she said, "But Larry, you're not actually a lesbian." His reply: "That's only an accident of birth."
There have been eight books with Jill Emerson's name on them, seven back in the day and the eighth just two years ago. All are eVailable. The seven Open Road titles are free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers—and reasonably priced to everyone else, for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple. The new one, Getting Off , while not a KU title, is readily available as a hardcover, paperback, or ebook.
Jill's work varies greatly from book to book, so let's take them in turn. Her first two titles,
Warm and Willing
and
Enough of Sorrow
, are sensitive novels of the lesbian experience, both published by Midwood as paperback originals. (Enough of Sorrow was my title, drawn from a short poem by Mary Carolyn Davies. Warm and Willing was Midwood's title, and I've always regretted it.)In 1964, after having published perhaps fifty books, a dozen of them with Midwood, I parted company with my agent—which closed several markets to me. While Midwood wasn't a closed shop, something led me to write W&W—I forget what I'd called it—and send it in over the transom, with a cover letter signed by Jill Emerson. The editor, one John Plunkett, bought it by return mail, and was similarly receptive a few months later to Enough of Sorrow. Someday I'll dig out my correspondence with Mr. Plunkett and share the letters with y'all. He got a tad flirty with Jill, talking about the good time he had auditioning cover models. Jill replied that she "really liked the little darling with the long-drink look."
Well, that's our girl for you.
Jill turned up next in 1970. Berkley was responding to the New Freedom by starting up a line of erotic fiction with some literary value, and it looked like an opportunity for Jill. At the time, I was going through a stretch where the novel as such seemed unacceptably artificial to me. Whose voice was recounting it to us? And how did it all get on the page, anyway? I felt more comfortable with the notion of a book that pretended to be an actual document of some sort. I'd also come to realize that a thirtieth birthday was a watershed moment in a woman's life, and so my first book for Berkley was
Thirty
, a diary begun on the narrator's twenty-ninth birthday and chronicling the ensuing twelve months.Some wet-brained doofus at Berkley retitled the book I Am Curious—Thirty, in order to cash in on the cachet of I Am Curious—Yellow, a tedious bit of Swedish cinematic erotica that had its fifteen minutes of fame when Jackie
Kennedy, caught leaving the theater by a papparazzo, displayed some unexpected martial arts skills and knocked the pest on his ass. I hated this title a whole lot more than I hated Warm and Willing, and made sure to change it for the Open Road ebook. (And it's Thirty on the new audiobook, narrated by the incomparable Emily Beresford and to be released any day now.)Next up was a book that's a personal favorite of mine. (I have, I blush to admit, more than a couple of personal favorites. Well, if I don't love these books, how can I expect you to?) Again, I wanted to write a book that wasn't a novel in the traditional sense, and drew inspiration from a highly successful (if not very good) collaborative novel produced by a batch of reporters and feature writers at Long Island Newsday. They called it Naked Came the Stranger, promoted it cleverly, and sold a lot of books.
So I wrote a book with three narrators, two women and a man, participants in a menage a trois, who are themselves inspired by Naked Came the Stranger to take turns writing chapters in order to tell their own story. But of course their story evolves as they tell it, and, well, it was enormous fun to write, and very much a tour de force—a French phrase I'm pleased to use, if only to keep menage a trois company.I called it Three. Berkley changed the title to Threesome , and I found that acceptable. And (he said grudgingly) probably an improvement.
Robin McLaughlin gave Threesome a lengthy and lovely five-star review at Amazon, and I can't refrain from quoting a paragraph:
"I count twenty-five passages that I underlined on my Kindle while reading. Some because they were laugh-out-loud funny, some because of clever wording, and some because they were insightful. Yes, I said insightful, and I meant it. It feels really odd (embarrassing?) to admit that one of my most highlighted books on my Kindle is an erotic pulp novel, but there you are. The funny is what surprised me the most. Threesome is downright hilarious, not because of the subject matter, but because of how witty Block is. His writing style is wonderful."
I'd show you the original Berkley cover, but I don't seem to have a scan of it. The book's genuinely rare, and commands a three-figure price when it does turn up. The cover shown is from the 1999 hardcover limited edition published by A.S.A.P. in tandem with Subterranean Press.
Next up is
A Madwoman's Diary
, and it's the diary form revisited, the title an homage to Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife. (And, as Donald Westlake has helpfully pointed out, homage is the French word for plagiarism.) It hardly mattered, as Berkley, ever inventive, retitled the book Sensuous—in order to echo The Sensuous Woman, a nonfiction bestseller of the day.A Madwoman's Diary, I should point out, has at its very heart an act of flagrant self-plagiarism—or, if you prefer, auto-homage. In one of my John Warren Wells books, I fabricated a case history that somehow stayed with me, so much so that I decided to make a novel out of it. IIRC, Jill paid that debt by dedicating the book to John Warren Wells. It was, she felt, the very least she could do.
Next came an epistolary novel, the letters to and from Laurence Clarke, the ingenious if unprincipled protagonist. Enough early readers enthused over the book to prompt my agent to offer it for hardcover publication under my own name, and Bernard Geis brought it out as Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man . So it's not one of Jill's books, but it started out that way.
Jill's next book,
The Trouble With Eden
, was supposed to be a hardcover bestseller. That was Berkley's idea; they asked for a big Peyton Place kind of novel, and I wrote one set in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I'd had the bad judgment to open an art gallery, and the good sense a year later to close it. It got a very strange review in Esquire, where the reviewer said he thought when he started it that it was really quite good, but changed his mind along the way. Uh, thanks, guy. I myself used to say, with the self-deprecating humor for which I am justly renowned, that it was the kind of book John O'Hara might have written if he'd had no talent. I've come to regard that judgment as unfair, but if you substitute "scruples" for "talent," I suppose the comment could stand.Finally, a lunch with the Peggy Roth, then editor-in-chief at Dell, led me to write a novel set in the Jewish community in my hometown of Buffalo. I'd never done this before, and characteristically I felt the need to bring out A Week as Andrea Benstock under a pen name. (The titular protagonist is a
woman, so I told myself a female pen name would be commercially advantageous, but I know now that wasn't my real reason.) The structure was suggested by a Georges Simenon novel called Four Days in a Lifetime, which I'd read but of which I recalled nothing beyond the fact that the narrative was limited to four separate and significant days in the lead character's life.My novel picks out seven representative days over ten years. I think it's a good piece of writing, and so did Donald I. Fine at Arbor House, who wanted to publish it, and who was astonished when I showed up to keep his appointment with Jill Emerson. He pleaded with me to use my own name, but I was adamant; I could always be counted on to take a stand so long as it was not in my own best interests. Don managed to sell the book to Redbook for serialization, and wasn't Jill chuffed at that?
Finally, in 2012 Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime published my new novel,
Getting Off
, with the undebatable subtitle "a novel of sex and violence." I felt it was a good fit with Jill's body of work, and decided accordingly on an open pen name: "By Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson."The combination of pen name and publisher led some readers to assume it was an old book brought back to life, which was by no means the case. Kit Tolliver is very much today's woman, and she could never have been written in the last millennium. And the book did draw attention to Jill's earlier work, which was certainly a Good Thing.
The links here are all to Amazon, where Kindle Unlimited members can scoop up the first seven titles free of charge. (I know, it's remarkable. And yes, I get paid, even if you don't pay a cent. Neat, huh?) Getting Off is $6.99 as an ebook, a few dollars more in paperback. But if you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you can get the book free in installments. I've self-published it in twelve sections, priced at $2.99 each, which is way too expensive...but KU subscribers can pick up all 12 free of charge and get the whole book that way. ("There are tricks and shortcuts in every trade but mine," said the carpenter, hammering a screw.) They're numbered, to make it easy to read them in order.
All of Jill Emerson's ebooks are available, via Open Road, on all ePlatforms. I'm sure you can find your own way to them, and I'll stop here, as I've already devoted more of my Sunday to this post than I'd intended.
Cheers!
August 3, 2014
David's back and the Bookstore's open!
I don't know, maybe that exclamation point's more than the occasion warrants. But I'm thrilled to be able to report that the inestimable David Trevor is back in town, after a month spent elsewhere, doing God knows what. He'll report for work tomorrow, and so I've flung wide the virtual doors of LB's eBay Bookstore, where you can buy signed copies of many of my books, some of them scarce and hard to find, some of them remarkably reasonable in price, and some of them both of the above.It's my profound hope that, empowered by the restorative effect of thirty days of God knows what, the lad will dig through the storeroom and add some new items to our virtual shelves. And perhaps I can even prevail upon him to put together some special collectibles for an eBay auction.
If so, one or the other of us will very likely get out an announcement to that effect. In the meanwhile, why don't you click your way through the virtual door and see what looks good to you?
LB
August 1, 2014
New! Improved! Free!
Those are the magic words, aren’t they? So let’s look at some things that are undeniably New, and arguably Improved—and, yes, Free.
Why do I get the feeling we’re gonna hear about Kindle Unlimited?
You're just a deeply intuitive human being, that's why. Amazon unveiled this new program on July 18, and it could be a real game-changer for ebook readers. Here’s how it works: (1) Anyone with a Kindle (or a Kindle app for a smartphone or iPad) can subscribe for $9.99 a month. You do not have to be an Amazon Prime member. And right now you can get a trial month free. (2) A subscription entitles you to borrow up to ten books at a time at no charge, and keep them as long as you like. When you want a new title, you simply select one you’ve read and tell them to take it back.
So I get to read ten books a month for my $9.99?
No, you can read a hundred books, or a thousand. There’s no limit. You pay the monthly fee, and you read as rapidly as you please, and you replenish your KU library as you go.
What books are available?
At the moment, Amazon has 600,000 titles in the program. That includes ALL self-published titles enrolled in the Kindle Select program (which essentially means they’re Amazon exclusives). It also includes books of those commercial publishers who elect to make them available to KU.
So is your stuff available?
Some is, some is not. Of my self-published work, the KU-available titles include most of the short stories, most of the John Warren Wells books, and The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons . Open Road is the publisher of 40+ of my backlist works—the Chip Harrison and Jill Emerson novels, most of my non-series crime novels, Random Walk, Ronald Rabbit, and a spread of my Midcentury Erotica—and all of their titles are enrolled in KU.
KU looks to be particularly good for short fiction. Here’s a case in point. in 2012 Hard Case published my novel Getting Off, and it’s been available ever since in both printed and electronic form. The book’s an episodic novel, and it started life as a short story series, so I broke the book into twelve sections and ePublished them separately as the
Kit Tolliver Stories
.
That makes it easy to sample the book, or to read a section you may have missed. But if you buy all 12 stories at $2.99 apiece, you wind up paying way too much; the complete Getting Off ebook is a much better deal at $6.99. With KU, however, you can read all the stories absolutely free.
So I’ll be saving $6.99.
Or $35.88, depending how you look at it. More to the point, it’s all free. I hate to say anything’s a no-brainer, but it seems to me that anyone with a Kindle who doesn’t jump on the free month’s enrollment in Kindle Unlimited is, um, eating with one chopstick.
But even if you don’t sign up, you can get the first Kit Tolliver story free.
I can? How?
It’s called “If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” and for the next five days it’s free to all comers. The link is to amazon.com, but it’s every bit as free on all the other Amazon sites—Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Mars, Alpha Centauri...Sorry, my bad, Amazon hasn't officially announced those last two yet. You won’t be borrowing the story, it’s yours to keep, and after you read it you can (1) sign up for KU and read the others for free, or (2) cut to the chase and buy the Getting Off ebook, or (3) decide you don’t much care for Kit Tolliver, the homicidal slut, and quit while you’re ahead, or (4) do nothing, which is always a safe choice.
A last word on Kindle Unlimited: I don’t know what it’s going to amount to, or even if it’ll be around for very long. Amazon doesn’t make many dumb moves, but whether or not this’ll fly is something I can’t know yet, and I’m not sure they can either. While it’s here, I’m taking full advantage of it myself—I just downloaded Jerrold Mundis's 5-book Shame and Glory saga—and I can only suggest you do the same.
Can we move on to something else now?
I’d be happy to. I’m a little punchy at the moment, because earlier this week I did something I once thought I’d never do again. I wrote a new book.
A book! A book! What’s it about? What’s the title? When will it be out? Who’s gonna publish it? How can I get my hands on a copy?
Whoa! Easy there, big fella. You’ve asked a lot of questions, and the only one I’m prepared to answer is the first. What's it about? It’s about 60,000 words long. I can also say that it’s a non-series crime novel, but as for the rest, I don’t even know the answers myself. Some weeks ago I moved to a rented apartment in another city, propped my MacBook Air on a desk, and got to work. A few days ago I typed The End and collapsed. Rest assured that you’ll know more as soon as I do.
Meanwhile, some other news. I think I’ve told you about my venture into audio self-publishing. Hard Case Crime brought out my very early novel Borderline this spring, and just last month I published it as an ACX audiobook, superbly narrated by Mike Dennis. The whole process was so quick and easy and so much fun that I looked through my backlist
for other titles not yet available in audio, and found
Thirty
, which I wrote as Jill Emerson. The book’s in diary form, covering the thirtieth year in the life of a restless married woman, and Open Road offers it for $2.99. (Or free, via KU, but you already knew that, right?)
A female voice artist was called for, and I found a terrific one in Emily Beresford. She’s completed the narration, and in a week or two you’ll be able to buy her rendition of Thirty from Amazon, Audible, or in the iTunes store. Emily tells me she loved reading the book, and I think you’ll love listening to her.
Before I forget, ACX gave me a batch of one-time free download codes for Borderline reviewers, and I have a few left. If you're a fan of audiobooks—and of old-time pulp fiction—and think you might like to review Borderline for a print or online publication, or blog about it, email me and ask for one. I only have a few, I can't get more when they're gone—so, well, you get the drift.
I’m sure there was something else...
Uh, like the movie???
Oh, right. A Walk Among the Tombstones opens September 19 , with Liam Neeson as Matthew Scudder. This week the trailer began getting wide distribution in theaters, and the reactions have been all I (or Universal) could hope for. And I’ve just been booked to join my good buddy Craig Ferguson on the Late Late Show on CBS on the night of Wednesday, September 10th . Astonishingly enough, I believe this will be my tenth appearance on the program—and probably my last, as America’s favorite Scotsman is leaving the show in December.
Gosh, I’m gonna miss that wild and crazy guy.
You won’t be the only one. Rest assured, though, that the great man will be Doing Other Things. He’s about as likely to retire as I am.
Cheers,
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Why do I get the feeling we’re gonna hear about Kindle Unlimited?
You're just a deeply intuitive human being, that's why. Amazon unveiled this new program on July 18, and it could be a real game-changer for ebook readers. Here’s how it works: (1) Anyone with a Kindle (or a Kindle app for a smartphone or iPad) can subscribe for $9.99 a month. You do not have to be an Amazon Prime member. And right now you can get a trial month free. (2) A subscription entitles you to borrow up to ten books at a time at no charge, and keep them as long as you like. When you want a new title, you simply select one you’ve read and tell them to take it back.
So I get to read ten books a month for my $9.99?No, you can read a hundred books, or a thousand. There’s no limit. You pay the monthly fee, and you read as rapidly as you please, and you replenish your KU library as you go.
What books are available?
At the moment, Amazon has 600,000 titles in the program. That includes ALL self-published titles enrolled in the Kindle Select program (which essentially means they’re Amazon exclusives). It also includes books of those commercial publishers who elect to make them available to KU.
So is your stuff available?
Some is, some is not. Of my self-published work, the KU-available titles include most of the short stories, most of the John Warren Wells books, and The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons . Open Road is the publisher of 40+ of my backlist works—the Chip Harrison and Jill Emerson novels, most of my non-series crime novels, Random Walk, Ronald Rabbit, and a spread of my Midcentury Erotica—and all of their titles are enrolled in KU.
KU looks to be particularly good for short fiction. Here’s a case in point. in 2012 Hard Case published my novel Getting Off, and it’s been available ever since in both printed and electronic form. The book’s an episodic novel, and it started life as a short story series, so I broke the book into twelve sections and ePublished them separately as the
Kit Tolliver Stories
.That makes it easy to sample the book, or to read a section you may have missed. But if you buy all 12 stories at $2.99 apiece, you wind up paying way too much; the complete Getting Off ebook is a much better deal at $6.99. With KU, however, you can read all the stories absolutely free.
So I’ll be saving $6.99.
Or $35.88, depending how you look at it. More to the point, it’s all free. I hate to say anything’s a no-brainer, but it seems to me that anyone with a Kindle who doesn’t jump on the free month’s enrollment in Kindle Unlimited is, um, eating with one chopstick.
But even if you don’t sign up, you can get the first Kit Tolliver story free.
I can? How?
It’s called “If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” and for the next five days it’s free to all comers. The link is to amazon.com, but it’s every bit as free on all the other Amazon sites—Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Mars, Alpha Centauri...Sorry, my bad, Amazon hasn't officially announced those last two yet. You won’t be borrowing the story, it’s yours to keep, and after you read it you can (1) sign up for KU and read the others for free, or (2) cut to the chase and buy the Getting Off ebook, or (3) decide you don’t much care for Kit Tolliver, the homicidal slut, and quit while you’re ahead, or (4) do nothing, which is always a safe choice.
A last word on Kindle Unlimited: I don’t know what it’s going to amount to, or even if it’ll be around for very long. Amazon doesn’t make many dumb moves, but whether or not this’ll fly is something I can’t know yet, and I’m not sure they can either. While it’s here, I’m taking full advantage of it myself—I just downloaded Jerrold Mundis's 5-book Shame and Glory saga—and I can only suggest you do the same.
Can we move on to something else now?I’d be happy to. I’m a little punchy at the moment, because earlier this week I did something I once thought I’d never do again. I wrote a new book.
A book! A book! What’s it about? What’s the title? When will it be out? Who’s gonna publish it? How can I get my hands on a copy?
Whoa! Easy there, big fella. You’ve asked a lot of questions, and the only one I’m prepared to answer is the first. What's it about? It’s about 60,000 words long. I can also say that it’s a non-series crime novel, but as for the rest, I don’t even know the answers myself. Some weeks ago I moved to a rented apartment in another city, propped my MacBook Air on a desk, and got to work. A few days ago I typed The End and collapsed. Rest assured that you’ll know more as soon as I do.
Meanwhile, some other news. I think I’ve told you about my venture into audio self-publishing. Hard Case Crime brought out my very early novel Borderline this spring, and just last month I published it as an ACX audiobook, superbly narrated by Mike Dennis. The whole process was so quick and easy and so much fun that I looked through my backlist
for other titles not yet available in audio, and found
Thirty
, which I wrote as Jill Emerson. The book’s in diary form, covering the thirtieth year in the life of a restless married woman, and Open Road offers it for $2.99. (Or free, via KU, but you already knew that, right?)A female voice artist was called for, and I found a terrific one in Emily Beresford. She’s completed the narration, and in a week or two you’ll be able to buy her rendition of Thirty from Amazon, Audible, or in the iTunes store. Emily tells me she loved reading the book, and I think you’ll love listening to her.
Before I forget, ACX gave me a batch of one-time free download codes for Borderline reviewers, and I have a few left. If you're a fan of audiobooks—and of old-time pulp fiction—and think you might like to review Borderline for a print or online publication, or blog about it, email me and ask for one. I only have a few, I can't get more when they're gone—so, well, you get the drift.
I’m sure there was something else...
Uh, like the movie???
Oh, right. A Walk Among the Tombstones opens September 19 , with Liam Neeson as Matthew Scudder. This week the trailer began getting wide distribution in theaters, and the reactions have been all I (or Universal) could hope for. And I’ve just been booked to join my good buddy Craig Ferguson on the Late Late Show on CBS on the night of Wednesday, September 10th . Astonishingly enough, I believe this will be my tenth appearance on the program—and probably my last, as America’s favorite Scotsman is leaving the show in December.
Gosh, I’m gonna miss that wild and crazy guy.
You won’t be the only one. Rest assured, though, that the great man will be Doing Other Things. He’s about as likely to retire as I am.
Cheers,
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
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July 3, 2014
A Newsletter for the Fourth of July
I know, I know. These newsletters are like buses. You wait and you wait and you wait, and then three of them come one right after the other. But I’m leaving town in a couple of days, and it’ll be the middle of August before my next newsletter can darken your mailbox—and I’ve got some news that just can’t wait that long.I suspect most of you are well aware of Borderline, a long-lost pseudonymous effort of mine from 1961, re-issued with a gorgeous Michael Koelsch cover by Hard Case Crime. Much to my surprise, this early walk on the dark side has been getting a warm reception from readers and reviewers alike, heralded as a pulp classic, cheered for its vigor and energy, and making the folks at Hard Case very happy. A pulp classic? Really? I feel like the Moliere character who wasn’t half chuffed to learn that all his life, quite unbeknownst to himself, he’d been speaking prose!
One copy of Borderline found its way to Mike Dennis, a voice artist with a soft spot for
hardboiled noir. He got in touch to express enthusiasm, and included his rendition of the first ten minutes of the book. I loved what I heard, and Amazon’s ACX platform provided a way for me to self-publish Borderline as an audiobook. I engaged Mike to narrate and produce; while he was so occupied, I was able to arrange with Michael Koelsch to use his cover art, and Jaye Manus turned the book-shaped rectangle into an audiobook-shaped square. Mike delivered an outstanding reading, and ACX has made it available at Amazon and Audible and iTunes.
It’s far too early to tell what kind of return I’ll get on my investment, but it’s already paid off emotionally; just looking at the cover and seeing the LB Publishing logo in the upper left corner is hugely satisfying. I enjoyed the whole process so much that I didn’t stop there. A couple of Jill Emerson novels have never made it into audio, and I picked one of them—Thirty, the sassy diary of a savvy young woman in her pivotal thirtieth year—and hung it out there for ACX auditions. The book really resonated for Emily Beresford, and her reading brought diarist Jan Giddings Kurland vividly to life, and I can’t wait to hear the rest of her rendition—and to share it with all of you.
This is fun!
And it’s enough for now, except that several of you have inquired about signed copies of Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf, available for pre-order now from Subterranean Press. We don’t plan to offer the book in LB’s eBay Bookstore, but encourage you to order directly from Subterranean; however, if an autograph is important to you, I’d suggest you reserve a signed copy from Mysterious Bookshop (800.352.2840) or VJ Books ( 503.750.5310).
I’m off, back sometime in August. David’s off as well, for what he would like you to believe is a well-earned vacation; the eBay bookstore will re-open upon our return. I’ll close by wishing all of y’all a Glorious Fourth of July—especially those of you in the UK, who may well congratulate yourselves for having got rid of us when you did.
Cheers!
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
One copy of Borderline found its way to Mike Dennis, a voice artist with a soft spot for
hardboiled noir. He got in touch to express enthusiasm, and included his rendition of the first ten minutes of the book. I loved what I heard, and Amazon’s ACX platform provided a way for me to self-publish Borderline as an audiobook. I engaged Mike to narrate and produce; while he was so occupied, I was able to arrange with Michael Koelsch to use his cover art, and Jaye Manus turned the book-shaped rectangle into an audiobook-shaped square. Mike delivered an outstanding reading, and ACX has made it available at Amazon and Audible and iTunes.It’s far too early to tell what kind of return I’ll get on my investment, but it’s already paid off emotionally; just looking at the cover and seeing the LB Publishing logo in the upper left corner is hugely satisfying. I enjoyed the whole process so much that I didn’t stop there. A couple of Jill Emerson novels have never made it into audio, and I picked one of them—Thirty, the sassy diary of a savvy young woman in her pivotal thirtieth year—and hung it out there for ACX auditions. The book really resonated for Emily Beresford, and her reading brought diarist Jan Giddings Kurland vividly to life, and I can’t wait to hear the rest of her rendition—and to share it with all of you.
This is fun!
And it’s enough for now, except that several of you have inquired about signed copies of Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf, available for pre-order now from Subterranean Press. We don’t plan to offer the book in LB’s eBay Bookstore, but encourage you to order directly from Subterranean; however, if an autograph is important to you, I’d suggest you reserve a signed copy from Mysterious Bookshop (800.352.2840) or VJ Books ( 503.750.5310).
I’m off, back sometime in August. David’s off as well, for what he would like you to believe is a well-earned vacation; the eBay bookstore will re-open upon our return. I’ll close by wishing all of y’all a Glorious Fourth of July—especially those of you in the UK, who may well congratulate yourselves for having got rid of us when you did.
Cheers!
PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you've received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that's easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
LB's Bookstore on eBay
LB's Blog and Website
LB's Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
