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Death Pulls a Doublecross
She was a beautiful girl with a talent for two-timing: she led two lives, tormented two men--but the one thing she couldn't doublecross was murder! I'm Ed London, PH. D.--PHILANDERER IN DANGER Nailing killers is my racket But hiding their victims' corpses, from the law? Better conjure up Houdini, buddy, I'm not the man you want. That's what I should have sai. But I've got a heart as big as a bawdy house. When I saw my sister's marriage going up in smoke because her husband's extramarital flame got murdered, I decided to stick my neck out and plant the body so it couldn't be traced to him. That's when the fur began to fly--and so, in fact, did the bullets. First the girl had been leading a double life. Second, she had pulled a neat little doublecross that left me holding the bag--a bag with the keys to a priceless fortune and up for grabs to every hood in town. Also published under the title Coward's Kiss.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
Lawrence Block
761 books3,001 followersLawrence Block has been writing crime, mystery, and suspense fiction for more than half a century. He has published in excess (oh, wretched excess!) of 100 books, and no end of short stories.
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., LB attended Antioch College, but left before completing his studies; school authorities advised him that they felt he’d be happier elsewhere, and he thought this was remarkably perceptive of them.
His earliest work, published pseudonymously in the late 1950s, was mostly in the field of midcentury erotica, an apprenticeship he shared with Donald E. Westlake and Robert Silverberg. The first time Lawrence Block’s name appeared in print was when his short story “You Can’t Lose” was published in the February 1958 issue of Manhunt. The first book published under his own name was Mona (1961); it was reissued several times over the years, once as Sweet Slow Death. In 2005 it became the first offering from Hard Case Crime, and bore for the first time LB’s original title, Grifter’s Game.
LB is best known for his series characters, including cop-turned-private investigator Matthew Scudder, gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, globe-trotting insomniac Evan Tanner, and introspective assassin Keller.
Because one name is never enough, LB has also published under pseudonyms including Jill Emerson, John Warren Wells, Lesley Evans, and Anne Campbell Clarke.
LB’s magazine appearances include American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Linn’s Stamp News, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and The New York Times. His monthly instructional column ran in Writer’s Digest for 14 years, and led to a string of books for writers, including the classics Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and The Liar’s Bible. He has also written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights.
Several of LB’s books have been filmed. The latest, A Walk Among the Tombstones, stars Liam Neeson as Matthew Scudder and is scheduled for release in September, 2014.
LB is a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America, and a past president of MWA and the Private Eye Writers of America. He has won the Edgar and Shamus awards four times each, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon award twice, as well as the Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the Crime Writers Association (UK). He’s also been honored with the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award from Mystery Ink magazine and the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in the short story. In France, he has been proclaimed a Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice been awarded the Societe 813 trophy. He has been a guest of honor at Bouchercon and at book fairs and mystery festivals in France, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Taiwan. As if that were not enough, he was also presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana. (But as soon as he left, they changed the locks.)
LB and his wife Lynne are enthusiastic New Yorkers and relentless world travelers; the two are members of the Travelers Century Club, and have visited around 160 countries.
He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., LB attended Antioch College, but left before completing his studies; school authorities advised him that they felt he’d be happier elsewhere, and he thought this was remarkably perceptive of them.
His earliest work, published pseudonymously in the late 1950s, was mostly in the field of midcentury erotica, an apprenticeship he shared with Donald E. Westlake and Robert Silverberg. The first time Lawrence Block’s name appeared in print was when his short story “You Can’t Lose” was published in the February 1958 issue of Manhunt. The first book published under his own name was Mona (1961); it was reissued several times over the years, once as Sweet Slow Death. In 2005 it became the first offering from Hard Case Crime, and bore for the first time LB’s original title, Grifter’s Game.
LB is best known for his series characters, including cop-turned-private investigator Matthew Scudder, gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, globe-trotting insomniac Evan Tanner, and introspective assassin Keller.
Because one name is never enough, LB has also published under pseudonyms including Jill Emerson, John Warren Wells, Lesley Evans, and Anne Campbell Clarke.
LB’s magazine appearances include American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Linn’s Stamp News, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and The New York Times. His monthly instructional column ran in Writer’s Digest for 14 years, and led to a string of books for writers, including the classics Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and The Liar’s Bible. He has also written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights.
Several of LB’s books have been filmed. The latest, A Walk Among the Tombstones, stars Liam Neeson as Matthew Scudder and is scheduled for release in September, 2014.
LB is a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America, and a past president of MWA and the Private Eye Writers of America. He has won the Edgar and Shamus awards four times each, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon award twice, as well as the Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the Crime Writers Association (UK). He’s also been honored with the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award from Mystery Ink magazine and the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in the short story. In France, he has been proclaimed a Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice been awarded the Societe 813 trophy. He has been a guest of honor at Bouchercon and at book fairs and mystery festivals in France, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Taiwan. As if that were not enough, he was also presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana. (But as soon as he left, they changed the locks.)
LB and his wife Lynne are enthusiastic New Yorkers and relentless world travelers; the two are members of the Travelers Century Club, and have visited around 160 countries.
He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
March 13, 2021
Lawrence Block originally published "Death Pulls A Double Cross" in 1961 and later re-published it as "Coward's Kiss." You wish you had a brother-in-law like Ed London, someone who you can call when times are tough and there's no one else to turn to. Everyone needs a brother-in-law who you can call in the middle of the night when you show up at your mistress's apartment and find her lying in the middle of the living room with a hole in her head and you don't know what to do. London, without even setting a fee, calmly goes and wraps the blonde woman's body up in an oriental rug, and disposes of the damning evidence. He can't find any of her clothes, but the apartment has been ripped apart. Interfering with a police investigation, perhaps playing accessory to a murder, well what pipe-smoking, cognac- drinking private eye wouldn't do the same - particularly for a well-set- up brother-in-law that just spent months making a fool out of your sister.
This story has murder, gunfire, mobsters, and, believe it or not, Joel Cairo. It has many aspects of The Maltese Falcon in it, but instead of Sam Spade, you have the not-so-tough London who takes a beating from hoods who think he has the goods and is caught in the middle between seemingly warring factions all searching for a holy grail that the dead woman may or may not have had, but that everyone seems to think London now has.
The book has some flaws such as the fact that one of the characters you feel as if you met in a movie you know very well and the detective is not as tough or as hardboiled as perhaps you would like. London is simply not Mike Hammer, not by a long shot. But, and the key is this, Block, even early Block in the early sixties, was a great writer and he makes this piece work the way a story is supposed to. In the end, warts and all, it is an enjoyable piece of fiction for anyone who likes hardboiled private eye stories.
This story has murder, gunfire, mobsters, and, believe it or not, Joel Cairo. It has many aspects of The Maltese Falcon in it, but instead of Sam Spade, you have the not-so-tough London who takes a beating from hoods who think he has the goods and is caught in the middle between seemingly warring factions all searching for a holy grail that the dead woman may or may not have had, but that everyone seems to think London now has.
The book has some flaws such as the fact that one of the characters you feel as if you met in a movie you know very well and the detective is not as tough or as hardboiled as perhaps you would like. London is simply not Mike Hammer, not by a long shot. But, and the key is this, Block, even early Block in the early sixties, was a great writer and he makes this piece work the way a story is supposed to. In the end, warts and all, it is an enjoyable piece of fiction for anyone who likes hardboiled private eye stories.
Want to read
October 12, 2017This book being the 1961 first edition first printing by Gold Medal of a book that has been released in many forms and many covers.
August 15, 2018
I’m a huge admirer of LB and having read just about everything he’s written in the past 40 years I’m now tracking down stuff he churned out in his early days as a pulp fiction hack. The quality of these is hugely variable, some being really first rate and clearly showing signs of the talent he demonstrated years later with his Scudder and Rhodenbarr books, for example, whilst other are…well, like this one.
Coward’s Kiss is so obscure I couldn’t even track down reference to it on the Fantastic Fiction site I use as my reference point for just about all fiction novels. And having read this one I can see why the author would want it to slip into oblivion. Ed London is a New York private eye who is asked to undertake a little job by his brother-in–law. This minor duty is, in fact, the removal of a body from the secret apartment he kept to ‘entertain’ his mistress. So starts this plodding tale. Quite quickly Ed is up to his neck in trouble and being harassed by all sorts of unpleasant characters who believe he’s in possession of a briefcase taken from the scene. He isn’t. But instead of just coming clean and admitting the fact he chooses to string these bad guys along.
I wont go into the rest of the plot – in fact it’s so convoluted I barely understood it – but I will say that despite some good lines it’s one to miss. There’s plenty of brilliant books by Block out there so do yourself a favour and track one of those down instead.
Coward’s Kiss is so obscure I couldn’t even track down reference to it on the Fantastic Fiction site I use as my reference point for just about all fiction novels. And having read this one I can see why the author would want it to slip into oblivion. Ed London is a New York private eye who is asked to undertake a little job by his brother-in–law. This minor duty is, in fact, the removal of a body from the secret apartment he kept to ‘entertain’ his mistress. So starts this plodding tale. Quite quickly Ed is up to his neck in trouble and being harassed by all sorts of unpleasant characters who believe he’s in possession of a briefcase taken from the scene. He isn’t. But instead of just coming clean and admitting the fact he chooses to string these bad guys along.
I wont go into the rest of the plot – in fact it’s so convoluted I barely understood it – but I will say that despite some good lines it’s one to miss. There’s plenty of brilliant books by Block out there so do yourself a favour and track one of those down instead.
June 30, 2023
From 1961
So I read this again, I guess nine years later. I think I liked It better last time. Now I downgraded the rating from 5 stars to 4. Now I mostly thought, why is this book so long? There is a great story here, why water it down with length and filler?
I get that book length is related to where and how a book is sold.. Really, when. Trends shift and you definitely see this in books.
01/2014
I eally liked the three Lawrence Block Hardcase Crime reprints I read from this era (the early sixties), and this was the same. Maybe I should read some of his newer stuff sometime, but it looks cheesy. There's just something charming about these early sixties written for the paperback market books that appeals to me. This was published in '61 as Death Pulls a Doublecross, and that's a more apt title and a better one than Coward's Kiss, which I don't like or get.
So I read this again, I guess nine years later. I think I liked It better last time. Now I downgraded the rating from 5 stars to 4. Now I mostly thought, why is this book so long? There is a great story here, why water it down with length and filler?
I get that book length is related to where and how a book is sold.. Really, when. Trends shift and you definitely see this in books.
01/2014
I eally liked the three Lawrence Block Hardcase Crime reprints I read from this era (the early sixties), and this was the same. Maybe I should read some of his newer stuff sometime, but it looks cheesy. There's just something charming about these early sixties written for the paperback market books that appeals to me. This was published in '61 as Death Pulls a Doublecross, and that's a more apt title and a better one than Coward's Kiss, which I don't like or get.
October 23, 2014
This was quite a twisty tale with a fairly typical Block hero, but I didn't care for it too much. It was a bit too twisty & clever, so never seemed real. If I wanted to point to a text book example of the genre, this would be it - text book, no humanity or realism, not fully engaging.
July 12, 2020
Really liked the way this started off. Private detective helping out his brother-in-law by removing the body of his dead mistress. Such a promising hook. After that, though, it devolved into an imitation of The Maltese Falcon with an exceedingly complex plot that required a lot exposition to explain. Got a bit boring at times because the narrative strategy is tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. We have jewel thieves, gangsters, and an ex-nazi, all being dealt with by Ed London, a well-read, pipe-smoking, cognac drinking, somewhat urbane private investigator. Ultimately not a character Block saw fit to bring back for an encore. Decent mystery in the classic sense, but definitely lacking noir edginess.
March 18, 2020
I love Lawrence Block, always have. This novel was his usual - engaging characters within an interesting plot — the best of mystery with a side of romance. Well performed by Peter Berkrot, his many tonal inflections helped me enjoy the characters more - kudos.
January 29, 2024
Loved this more or because I listened to it in audio format and Peter Berkrot was the perfect narrator for this. In both style and tone it was fabulously old school. Being an insomniac never was so good!
October 6, 2017
A hard boiled, sexy detective story in New York City. He has to dump the body of a girl his brother in law was sleeping with on he side. Then people start showing up looking for a brief case, like they do. They are always looking for a brief case in these stories. They are never looking for a recyclable envelope or a murse, its always the brief case that is the belle of the ball. Anyway, the mystery was not much, but the atmosphere and the description of 1960s New York was terrific.
November 10, 2013
Not a bad story and fun to read. I have been reading detective stories one after the other. Many,as does this one, seem to be a parody of the "Maltese Falcon". In the afterword, the author says there will be no sequel. This is volume one of one. The author goes on to describe this story's genesis as an offshoot of a Ray Millard detective TV show from 1959/1960. From the author's discussion, it looks like the book was cobbled together. Dialogue is stereotypical old fashioned private eye. As in, "Dawn was a gray lady with red-rimmed eyes and a cigarette cough". The story occurs prior to Starbucks and mobile phones when there was still a Standard Oil, Polaroid, and Ma Bell on the the stock exchange as well as an East and West Germany. Smoking had not yet become a social taboo.
June 1, 2017
8/10
224 pages
Book # 31 of 2017
Great Block page turner set in 1960's New York, featuring private eye Ed London. Our detective's brother in law has contacted him, looking for answers to the murder of his lover. As London investigates, a mysterious briefcase becomes the center of attention.
Solid plot and crisp writing from Block make this a solid, if not unspectacular noir thriller.
224 pages
Book # 31 of 2017
Great Block page turner set in 1960's New York, featuring private eye Ed London. Our detective's brother in law has contacted him, looking for answers to the murder of his lover. As London investigates, a mysterious briefcase becomes the center of attention.
Solid plot and crisp writing from Block make this a solid, if not unspectacular noir thriller.
October 3, 2019
Jewels and No Falcon
Block has written over fifty mysteries, but only one about private investigator Ed London. "Coward's Kiss" was one of the first mysteries in Block's career, originally commissioned as a tie-in to a 1950s television series. The book evolved into it's own unique direction. Block's afterword explains the background and suggests nobody go looking for sequels because, frankly, Block himself was not too crazy about this early work. It isn't too hard to see why.
The PI, Ed London, is pipe-smoking, cognac-drinking, life-contemplating on a dark and stormy night when his doctor brother-in-law asks London to go to his Manhattan love-nest, remove the body of his mistress, and get rid of it. I guess friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies, and a PI brother-in-law helps you disappear dead girlfriends. Yeah, London does it. I wouldn't disappear his dead mistress, and I like my brother-in-law, which London doesn't. I guess London takes out the trash so his sister and her kids won't have to.
Then "Coward's Kiss" spends the next 100 pages aping "The Maltese Falcon;" missing jewels from concentration camp victims, disappearing briefcases, ne'er-do-wells roaming the globe looking for other ne'er-do-wells, exotic clues to the boodle, tangled threads of who is working with and for whom, who is double-crossing whom, and who shot the blonde. Sam Spade did a whole lot better hunting Falcon than London does chasing the mysterious briefcase, key to Nazi stolen jewels.
London finally tires of being followed, lied to, beat up, shot at, and just kills the four least likable characters (shooting one with the Beretta in his coat pocket, which was required for 1950s PIs). London extracts enough confessions to see he was doing in the right wrong guys. And then the denouement, which is about as untidy and derivative as the rest of the story, and no more believable. At least Sam Spade got to bed the cutest of the ne'er-do-wells and then send her down for murdering his partner.
None of the characters in "Coward's Kiss" are drawn clearly or colorfully enough to really "see" them going through these busy motions, except one of the miscreants, who is so like Joel Cairo that I could smell the mint cigarettes while Block was still describing him. The few "slow" scenes of London fooling around with his actress girl-friend are a relief from the rest of the implausible plot. And London and his girlfriend liked the Joel Cairo guy too, so I guess he was Block's favorite. Since it is London's first and last case, we can imagine him and his girl happily ever after.
You get the feeling towards the end that Block wanted to put down London and "Coward's Kiss," and just go off to noodle with an interesting dame, like his PI. I suggest you do the same. There are many better chips off the old Block.
Block has written over fifty mysteries, but only one about private investigator Ed London. "Coward's Kiss" was one of the first mysteries in Block's career, originally commissioned as a tie-in to a 1950s television series. The book evolved into it's own unique direction. Block's afterword explains the background and suggests nobody go looking for sequels because, frankly, Block himself was not too crazy about this early work. It isn't too hard to see why.
The PI, Ed London, is pipe-smoking, cognac-drinking, life-contemplating on a dark and stormy night when his doctor brother-in-law asks London to go to his Manhattan love-nest, remove the body of his mistress, and get rid of it. I guess friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies, and a PI brother-in-law helps you disappear dead girlfriends. Yeah, London does it. I wouldn't disappear his dead mistress, and I like my brother-in-law, which London doesn't. I guess London takes out the trash so his sister and her kids won't have to.
Then "Coward's Kiss" spends the next 100 pages aping "The Maltese Falcon;" missing jewels from concentration camp victims, disappearing briefcases, ne'er-do-wells roaming the globe looking for other ne'er-do-wells, exotic clues to the boodle, tangled threads of who is working with and for whom, who is double-crossing whom, and who shot the blonde. Sam Spade did a whole lot better hunting Falcon than London does chasing the mysterious briefcase, key to Nazi stolen jewels.
London finally tires of being followed, lied to, beat up, shot at, and just kills the four least likable characters (shooting one with the Beretta in his coat pocket, which was required for 1950s PIs). London extracts enough confessions to see he was doing in the right wrong guys. And then the denouement, which is about as untidy and derivative as the rest of the story, and no more believable. At least Sam Spade got to bed the cutest of the ne'er-do-wells and then send her down for murdering his partner.
None of the characters in "Coward's Kiss" are drawn clearly or colorfully enough to really "see" them going through these busy motions, except one of the miscreants, who is so like Joel Cairo that I could smell the mint cigarettes while Block was still describing him. The few "slow" scenes of London fooling around with his actress girl-friend are a relief from the rest of the implausible plot. And London and his girlfriend liked the Joel Cairo guy too, so I guess he was Block's favorite. Since it is London's first and last case, we can imagine him and his girl happily ever after.
You get the feeling towards the end that Block wanted to put down London and "Coward's Kiss," and just go off to noodle with an interesting dame, like his PI. I suggest you do the same. There are many better chips off the old Block.
March 22, 2022
Originally titled Death Pulls a Doublecross, the tag line on the cover of this 1961 Gold Medal paperback original reads:
"She was a beautiful girl with a talent for two-timing: She led two lives, tormented two men--but the one thing she couldn't doublecross was murder."
The novel opens with PI Ed London dumping the nude corpse of a young lady in Central Park in the wee hours of the morning. He did not kill her. She had been the mistress of his brother-in-law, his sister's husband, and he is hiding the body to buy time to find the real killer:
"I looked at him and tried to hate him. He married my sister and cheated on her and that ought to be cause for hatred. It didn't work out that way. You can't coin an ersatz double standard and apply it to brothers-in-law. He fell on his face for a pretty blonde; hell, I'd taken a few falls for the same type of thing myself. He was married and I wasn't, but the state of matrimony doesn't alter body chemistry."
Two separate people contact Ed the following day trying to blackmail him and convince him to turn over a valuable suitcase that was in the dead lady's possession. Soon he is dodging beatings and bullets, trying to piece together her final days and hunt down a dangerous murderer…
While this is not Lawrence Block's greatest book, it is everything you could want from an early '60's Gold Medal paperback. The pace is breathless and the plot engaging. In one of his writing columns, the author discusses how he made the introductory scenes work by switching around the first two chapters he wrote. This is why the book begins with the hero disposing of a body, and then the subsequent chapter relates in flashback the relationship between the deceased and the brother-in-law.
The resolution of the mystery is satisfactory although all the clues do not fall into place as tightly as, say, The Burglar Who Liked Spinoza or A Drop of the Hard Stuff. One of the villains (there were multiple!) does not always act consistently or rationally, which convolutes the unraveling of the case, but it feels more real to life than stories in which every character acts with calculated self-interest. Real people can be messy in times of crisis.
4 stars.
"She was a beautiful girl with a talent for two-timing: She led two lives, tormented two men--but the one thing she couldn't doublecross was murder."
The novel opens with PI Ed London dumping the nude corpse of a young lady in Central Park in the wee hours of the morning. He did not kill her. She had been the mistress of his brother-in-law, his sister's husband, and he is hiding the body to buy time to find the real killer:
"I looked at him and tried to hate him. He married my sister and cheated on her and that ought to be cause for hatred. It didn't work out that way. You can't coin an ersatz double standard and apply it to brothers-in-law. He fell on his face for a pretty blonde; hell, I'd taken a few falls for the same type of thing myself. He was married and I wasn't, but the state of matrimony doesn't alter body chemistry."
Two separate people contact Ed the following day trying to blackmail him and convince him to turn over a valuable suitcase that was in the dead lady's possession. Soon he is dodging beatings and bullets, trying to piece together her final days and hunt down a dangerous murderer…
While this is not Lawrence Block's greatest book, it is everything you could want from an early '60's Gold Medal paperback. The pace is breathless and the plot engaging. In one of his writing columns, the author discusses how he made the introductory scenes work by switching around the first two chapters he wrote. This is why the book begins with the hero disposing of a body, and then the subsequent chapter relates in flashback the relationship between the deceased and the brother-in-law.
The resolution of the mystery is satisfactory although all the clues do not fall into place as tightly as, say, The Burglar Who Liked Spinoza or A Drop of the Hard Stuff. One of the villains (there were multiple!) does not always act consistently or rationally, which convolutes the unraveling of the case, but it feels more real to life than stories in which every character acts with calculated self-interest. Real people can be messy in times of crisis.
4 stars.
May 23, 2018
At only 23 years old, Lawrence Block was already penning hardboiled mystery novels that rivaled those of genre veterans like Erle Stanley Gardner. COWARD'S KISS is an unbelievably assured piece of writing for someone so young, and the plot contains plenty of clever twists and surprises (though the ultimate twist can be seen coming a mile away). A lot of reviewers seem very lukewarm on this, and I imagine the reason is because COWARD'S KISS is shorter and pulpier than most of Block's later work. The prose is consistently clever but lacks the literary flair of something like A WALK IN THE TOMBSTONES. And while it fires on all cylinders, COWARD'S KISS is in no way groundbreaking. It's simply a great entry in a well-trod genre. I have a couple minor quibbles with secondary aspects of the plot (like why the hero wasn't frisked before being allowed an audience with the crime boss), but overall it delivered exactly the sort of thrills I was hoping to get from it.
May 26, 2022
Classic Block! It's one of his earlier books that's sort of a simulacrum of the private eye stories like Hammett or Chandler's. Having already read a bunch of the author's books, you can see hints of Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenberr in Ed London. If I hadn't known the author's name I might have guessed Donald Westlake, especially the trip out to Long Island, except the dark-haired girl is sort of a trope in earlier Block novels.
December 9, 2022
I have to say I'm surprised that (as far as I know; please correct me if I'm wrong) Block didn't write any other books with the character of Ed London; he's an interesting character, and his relationship with Maddy certainly deserved to be followed up on. My only guess is that he had so many other irons in the fire, and multiple other series with other continuing characters, that he just didn't find time to continue with this one.
December 22, 2023
Very early Block. The classic Block style is there , & that's about the most to recommend it. The plot starts off great, but eventually becomes a bit convoluted & confusing. A good editor could have tightened & straightened this out, but I don't think these pulp novels written by relative unknowns were high on the budget list of publishers to hire editors
June 12, 2018
It's certainly a book of it's period, but with a minimal cast he kept us parsing the motives and the roles of each through most of the book.
September 28, 2019
Very dark noir writing from one of the finest authors in this genre.
January 17, 2020
Listened with my guy via car ride and it so reads as a gritty film noir but the time frame is unknown. We kept trying to place the year.
April 27, 2020
Audiobook performed by Peter Berkrot.
October 27, 2020
I enjoyed it! Very stereotypical PI in the 60s story! Fun and kept me entertained!
November 20, 2020
Intolerably ridiculous.
October 5, 2021
Six-word Review: Hard-boiled detective solves realm puzzler.
Full review later.
Full review later.
July 28, 2025
I thought that this was a fairly ordinary read. It did pick up as it went along but I thought it showed its age in terms of style. It was an interesting plot.
August 16, 2025
Dated mystery. Written in 1961.
December 26, 2011
Another Lawrence Block winner (are there any losers?) Called to get rid of a body by his friend Jack Enright (who happens to be married to his sister,) P.I. Ed London retrieves the body from Jack’s love-nest and dumps it in the park. Soon he begins a search for a briefcase loaded ostensibly with stolen diamonds, is attacked by several goons, and manages to sort out multiple double-crosses.
A sample: “I felt only halfway ridiculous holding the gun in one hand while I opened the door. I felt completely ridiculous when the big one knocked it out of my hand. There were two of them—a big one and a small one. The big one was very big, a little taller than I am and a hell of a lot wider. He had a boxer's flattened nose and a cretin idiot's fixed stare. His jacket was stretched tight across huge shoulders. His eyes were small and beady and his forehead was wide and dull. The small one wasn't really that small—he looked small because he was standing next to a human mountain. He wore a hat and a suit and a tie. He had his hands in his pants pockets and he was smiling. "Inside," he said. "Move." I didn't move.”
Please note this was originally published as Coward’s Kiss.. Early Block, but already the signs of his genius are apparent.
A sample: “I felt only halfway ridiculous holding the gun in one hand while I opened the door. I felt completely ridiculous when the big one knocked it out of my hand. There were two of them—a big one and a small one. The big one was very big, a little taller than I am and a hell of a lot wider. He had a boxer's flattened nose and a cretin idiot's fixed stare. His jacket was stretched tight across huge shoulders. His eyes were small and beady and his forehead was wide and dull. The small one wasn't really that small—he looked small because he was standing next to a human mountain. He wore a hat and a suit and a tie. He had his hands in his pants pockets and he was smiling. "Inside," he said. "Move." I didn't move.”
Please note this was originally published as Coward’s Kiss.. Early Block, but already the signs of his genius are apparent.
February 10, 2015
Coward's Kiss by Lawrence Block.
I have been a big fan of L.B. for a number of years especially in regards to the Matthew Scudder & Bernard Rhoddenbarr books. Love them.
This was a good story but not one of my favorites by L.B. by a long shot. Ed London a P.I. is trying to keep his brother in law out of trouble. What trouble? Trouble that's spelled with a capital D for death. A body, not just any body, of his bill's mistress has been found murdered. Now Ed has to move that body as far away from his friend/relative as possible. what better place to dump a murder victim than Central Park!
Some fun, some interesting dialogue...not on the same level as the other books by L.B. I've enjoyed.
I have been a big fan of L.B. for a number of years especially in regards to the Matthew Scudder & Bernard Rhoddenbarr books. Love them.
This was a good story but not one of my favorites by L.B. by a long shot. Ed London a P.I. is trying to keep his brother in law out of trouble. What trouble? Trouble that's spelled with a capital D for death. A body, not just any body, of his bill's mistress has been found murdered. Now Ed has to move that body as far away from his friend/relative as possible. what better place to dump a murder victim than Central Park!
Some fun, some interesting dialogue...not on the same level as the other books by L.B. I've enjoyed.
August 14, 2010
Written in 1961 when he was 23, this may have been Block's first novel. If not, than definitely one of his first.
Protaganist PI Ed London may have been the precurser to Block's Matthew Scudder, whom Block featured in 16 novels over 25 years, starting in the late 70's.
The motley cast of crooks in Coward's Kiss reminded me of the crew in the Maltese Falcon; only their quest was for a stash of long lost jewels, rather than the diamond-encrusted Black Bird.
Not as good as his later works, but Coward's Kiss is a must read for all Block fans. You won't be disappointed.
Protaganist PI Ed London may have been the precurser to Block's Matthew Scudder, whom Block featured in 16 novels over 25 years, starting in the late 70's.
The motley cast of crooks in Coward's Kiss reminded me of the crew in the Maltese Falcon; only their quest was for a stash of long lost jewels, rather than the diamond-encrusted Black Bird.
Not as good as his later works, but Coward's Kiss is a must read for all Block fans. You won't be disappointed.
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