The Rest of the Story...

"Scudder, I found out, was not that easily abandoned. And so in 1977 I started writing a short story about him, 'Out the Window,' and it ran long enough for us to call it a novelette. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published it in their September issue, and two months later they printed another, 'A Candle for the Bag Lady.' (The latter was briefly retitled 'Like a Lamb to Slaughter,' so that it might serve as the flagship story of a collection with that title, and that's a story in itself—but one I'll save for another time.)"

Yesterday I was glancing through The Night and the Music, my self-published collection of Matthew Scudder stories, and I came across the paragraph quoted above in the overview essay, "About These Stories..." It struck me that now was as good a time as any to supply what Paul Harvey used to call "the rest of the story." And what better place to tell it than here?

In 1981, Arbor House published A Stab in the Dark, the fourth Matthew Scudder novel and the first hardcover. A year later they brought out Eight Million Ways to Die, and no sooner was that book in the stores than I got a call from Arnold Ehrlich, my editor at Arbor House...

to read the rest— http://lawrenceblock.wordpress.com/20...