“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “You know who that was?”

“A friend of yours, and she looked familiar, but—”

“That was Akalitus,” I said. She looked puzzled. “Anna Deavere Smith, she plays Gloria Akalitus on Nurse Jackie.“

“Oh, right. She’s a wonderful actress. I couldn’t place her.”

“Neither could I.”

“I didn’t know you knew her.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“But—”

“But I thought I did, and I waved to her the way you wave in passing to a friend or acquaintance. And, since I thought I knew her, and acted accordingly, she thought she knew me, and waved back the same way.”

After the final curtain, we went home on the subway and watched that evening’s Nurse Jackie episode. As Edie Falco’s boss and hospital administrator, Smith’s character was having memory problems suggestive of dementia.

“There’s your friend Akalitus,” Lynne said. “No wonder she didn’t remember you.”

It was, to be sure, a nice New York moment, but it’s stayed with me more than I’d have expected. I’ve had a special feeling ever since for Anna Deavere Smith, as if we’ve known each other, although I’m not delusional enough to suppose that our relationship exists outside a shadowy chamber in my mind.

Nurse Jackie ended its fourth season two nights ago—Akulitis’s memory problems, I’m pleased to report, turned out to be the temporary side effect of medication—but I may not have to wait as long as the rest of you to renew my acquaintance with Ms. Smith. A friend of mine is the show’s executive producer, and has invited us to visit the set when they start shooting Season Five.

I look forward to my first meeting with my old pal.

And all of this, curiously, reminds me of a story. A Hollywood friend told me quite a few years ago about a woman of a certain age who’d done some organizational work for a benefit at which the actor Jack Albertson, then starring on TV in Chico and the Man, had appeared. Some months later she saw Albertson perform at a theater in Santa Monica, and the friend who accompanied her told her she ought to go backstage and say hello.

“I don’t know if I should do that,” she said. “He won’t remember me.”

“So? I bet he will. The two of you hit it off. And even if he doesn’t, you’ll say nice things about his performance and he’ll be flattered. Where’s the harm in that?”

So she went backstage, where Albertson gave her a big hello. She complimented him on his performance, and they chatted about this and that, and then he said, “And how about yourself? Are you working?”

Not really, she said, flustered. A little volunteer work, of course, and—

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Albertson said. “With your talent, and everything you’ve done in this business? You should be working. Listen, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll find something on Chico for you…”

He knew that he knew her, and assumed that she was an actress. And now she had to explain that all she was was a Hadassah committee member, and not really up to learning lines for a TV role.

“With your talent, and everything you’ve done in this business…”

I’ll have to tell Akalitus that story. If I know her, she’ll get a kick out of it.

“But for practicality, no one can beat Lawrence Block. He dedicated The Topless Tulip Caper (1975) to the Edgar Allan Poe Award selection committee of the Mystery Writers of America, and to three book reviewers – Barbara Bannon of Publishers Weekly, Newgate Callendar (who writes about thrillers in this publication) and John Dickson Carr, whose notices appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”

I know, I know. Shameless beyond words. And did it even work? Well, I’d be hard put to tell you what books got Edgar nominations that year for Best Paperback Novel, but Topless Tulip was not among them. I don’t believe Barbara Bannon or John Dickson Carr reviewed the book. Harold Schoenberg, the music critic who became Newgate Callendar when reviewing crime fiction, did review the book, but he’d given just as generous a review to its predecessor, Make Out With Murder, so I don’t know that flattery got me anywhere.

On the other hand, fifteen years later I wound up in Mr. Hamilton’s essay, and another 23 years down the line I get to blog about it. You say no good deed goes unpunished? Well, no bad deed goes entirely unrewarded, either. So there.

LB

I’ve been away, on a small-ship cruise of the North Atlantic—and, as the proverbial curate said of his breakfast egg, parts of it were excellent. And now I’m back, and I’ve just discovered something on my hard drive that I barely recall writing. It’s an op-ed piece assigned by the Daily News close to twenty years ago, and, well, why take more words to describe it than the thing contains? 

Here you go:

MURDER ON LOCATION

So I ambled over to Barnegat Books on East Eleventh to get Bernie Rhodenbarr’s spin on the proposed real estate legislation. It was lunchtime, and my favorite burglar and his buddy, Carolyn Kaiser, were all set to tuck into the blue plate special from the Laotian joint around the corner. Raffles the Cat was in the fiction section, stalking imaginary mice.

“When I sell somebody a book,” Bernie said, “I’m under no obligation to tell the buyer who owned it last.”

“Sometimes you don’t have to,” Carolyn pointed out. “If there’s a bookplate. Or if it’s from a library.”

“Any ex-library copy in this store,” he said icily, “is stamped WITHDRAWN.”

I didn’t ask him where he kept the stamp. “Some people would argue that real estate’s a little different,” I said. “Nobody lives in a book.”

“Oh?”

“If you were going to buy a house,” I said, “or move into an apartment, wouldn’t you want to know if something horrible happened there?”

“This is New York,” he said. “Something horrible’s happened everywhere.”

“It’s true,” Carolyn said. “This store, for instance. Remember when we found the dead guy in the john?”

“Edwin Turnquist. A guy named Jacobi killed him and left him there.”

“And then we put him in a wheelchair and left him over by the river,” Carolyn recalled. “It was sort of like a granny-dumping, except he was already dead. And how about the carriage house on West18th where Wanda Colcannon was murdered? Or Abel Crowe’s place on Riverside Drive, where the podiatrist killed him?”

“Or East 67th Street, where J. Francis Flaxford was bludgeoned,” he said. “Or Gramercy Park, where Crystal Sheldrake was stabbed with one of her husband’s dental scalpels. Or the Nugents’ apartment on West End, where I found Luke Santangelo dead in the bathtub. Or Gordon Onderdonk’s apartment at the Charlemagne, or Hugo Candlemas’s floor-through at 76th and Lex.”

“Remember Walter Grabow, Bernie? Killed right in your apartment.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it? Even ordinary people like us can point to residences all over town where violent scenes have taken place.”

“Like the argument I had with Randy Messinger at my place on Arbor Court,” she said. “We were yelling at the top of our lungs.” She shuddered at the memory. “But you’re right, and think of the other murder sites we know about. The hotel where Kim Dakkinen was chopped to bits with a machete in Eight Million Ways to Die. The Bethune Street apartment where Wendy Hanniford was knifed in The Sins of the Fathers. The house in Sunset Park where Kenan Khoury caught up with his wife’s killer.”

“And what about the arena in Maspeth, where Matt and Mick Ballou faced off against Borden and Olga Stettner?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Those are all books about Matthew Scudder. They’re novels.”

“So?”

“They’re fiction,” I said. “Don’t you know the difference?”

He shrugged. “Does anybody? Besides, this is New York. Everybody knows New York’s not about fact or fiction. New York’s about real estate. The facts don’t matter.”

“Then what does?”

Raffles the Cat leapt gracefully, demolishing a fictional mouse.

“Three things,” my larcenous friend said. “Location, location and location.”

JWW, you see, is the book’s author. I suppose I might have published it on Jill Emerson’s page, as she’s the dedicatee.

I know, I know.

You may like the cover art, but you’ll have to use the link to get there, as the illustration is arguably Not Save For Work…

LB

I’m not sure the border works. I was going for orange, and this comes close, but it’s spring in New York—finally!—and the template I’ve chosen is positively autumnal. I’ll let it stand for three reasons. (1) it looks kind of nice, (2) it’s autumn for all of y’all in Australia, and (3) I’m too lazy to change it.

And too busy, because there’s a lot to report…

First, a little movie news. A Walk Among the Tombstones, with Liam Neeson as Matthew Scudder, is moving right along. The local weather got in the way, and you can imagine how welcome lightning and thunder are during a night shoot in Green-Wood Cemetery. But last week I watched Scudder and TJ meet over computers in the main library at 42nd and Fifth, and a week from today I get to be in the movie myself, as an extra in a scene at a cop bar. “Wear a suit,” were the instructions I got from writer/director Scott Frank. Hey, I can do that. But I don’t think I’ll wear my orange shirt, Wednesday or no.

The conventional wisdom holds that a film can boost a book’s sales dramatically. I don’t know that previous films made from my books had that effect, but then nobody went to see them, so what could I expect? But I’ve been monitoring sales of Tombstones, and there’s been a definite uptick in sales for both the eBook and the trade paperback. (The rights reverted a while ago, and I’m the publisher now, so I can track sales as they happen. Neat!) Both editions are in stock at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the eBook is available at all other electronic platforms as well. If you’d rather listen to the book, superbly narrated by Mark Hammer, you can find it at Audible.

Speaking of audio, today’s the on-sale date for 19 of my titles making their audio debut. They’re all ePublished by my friends at Open Road, who’ve arranged for audio versions from Audible, and it’s quite a list: 69 Barrow Street, A Girl Called Honey, A Madwoman’s Diary, A Strange Kind of Love, A Week as Andrea Benstock, April North, Campus Tramp, Candy, Carla, Cinderella Sims, Gigolo Johnny Wells, Passport to Peril, Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, Sin Hellcat, So Willing, The Liar’s Bible, The Liar’s Companion, The Trouble With Eden, and Threesome.

Except for the two writing books, these are all early works, and most were initially pseudonymous. I never expected to see them back in print, and am delighted they’re  reaching a new audience after all these years. But who would have dreamed they’d ever be audioVailable? (Song cue: “It Never Entered My Mind.”)

It was a year and a half ago when I made a single volume of all the Matthew Scudder short stories and novelettes, and published it myself with the help of my friends at Telemachus Press. The Night and the Music was a great success from the start, and some months ago I narrated the unabridged audio version for AudioGo. (And the title story is yours free of charge from Ambling Books.)

Because short stories seem to work well on eReaders, I’ve published selections from The Night and the Music as Kindle singles. Three of them, however, are not exclusive to Kindle, so you Nooksters now have the opportunity to pick up By the Dawn’s Early Light, Batman’s Helpers, and Let’s Get Lost. (These three stories have also been published at Smashwords, and are thus available for Apple, Kobo, and Sony Reader.)

Over the years, short stories have frequently served me as starting points. Keller was born in a short story, “Answers to Soldier,” and a couple of years slipped by before it occurred to me to write anything more about him. Since then his career has been an episodic one, and five of those episodes are individually eVailable.

And so are the first four episodes of Getting Off, my 2011 Hard Case Crime novel about an eccentric young woman named Kit Tolliver. If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Rude Awakening, and You Can Call Me Lucky are Kindle exclusives; Clean Slate, which debuted in the George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois anthology, Warriors, and was selected for Harlan Coben’s Best American Mystery Stories, is available for Kindle and Nook and all other platforms as well.

And that brings us to Orange Wednesday, doesn’t it? Time for me to give something away. How about the first Kit Tolliver story, If You Can’t Stand the Heat—free at Kindle for the next four days.

You say you already bought the story? Shelled out a cool $2.99 for it the minute it went live earlier this month? Hmmm. Okay, how about The Merciful Angel of Death, a Matthew Scudder story from the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. A bittersweet story—it had the engineer holding back tears when I recorded it for AudioGo—and it’s yours free through Saturday.

Now what else can I report? Well, Catch and Release, a joint venture of Hard Case Crime and Subterranean Press, is available for pre-order in advance of its fall release. And a little bird tell me it’ll be getting a starred review in a week or so.

The book’s a collection of my short fiction written since my omnibus collection, Enough Rope—along with a long-lost and long-unpublished story from 1964. I’m crazy about the cover, it’s what we’ve learned to count on from Hard Case, and Subterranean’s unmatched when it comes to quality book production. The only downside is that their books sometimes sell out in a hurry. It’s early days now, but pre-ordering is a way to avoid leaving anything to chance…

Ah, that’s enough for this lovely spring day. (Or autumn, I guess.) Load up on the two free stories, but save some room for those new audiobooks. And, should you find yourself in a generous mood, drop a review on the Amazon page and share your enthusiasm for If You Can’t Stand the Heat and The Merciful Angel of Death.

LB

LB’s Bookstore on eBay
LB’s Blog and Website
LB’s Facebook Fan Page
Twitter:  @LawrenceBlock

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.

Some time back while I was in Antigua, Guatemala I ran into a retired U.S. Air Force, West Point graduate who when sent to Columbia University to get his Doctorate in Economics told me that he knew you and had spent drunken weekends in New Jersey with you and others.  His name was (he is now deceased) William.  Last name forgotten.  Is there any truth to this?

And my reply:

Doesn’t ring a bell. And if he’s dead, and we don’t know his last name, who cares?

“LB’S NEWS OF ALL MEDIA”

Well, that’s an exaggeration, isn’t it?

There’s a medium or two of which I have no news to report. Skywriting, for example. T-shirts with cute slogans, for another. And there may be more.

Nevertheless, consider the following—

Film:  Last night I paid my third visit to the set of A Walk Among the Tombstones, currently filming with Liam Neeson starring as Matthew Scudder. My first visit was to a Delancey Street diner, where I watched them film Scudder in conversation with TJ. Then Friday I went to a crumbling mansion in the Whitestone section of Queens—Yuri’s house—for a phone call between Matt and bad-guy Ray. And last night we were in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery for Matt’s confrontation with Ray and his equally unpleasant pal.

I’ve been to film sets before, and I’ve always found the process as riveting to observe as, say, photosynthesis. Hard to say why this was different. Maybe I’ve become more easily amused with age, but I’ve  seen little evidence of this in other areas. All I can tell you is last night I watched them shoot the same brief scene over and over again, and I hung on every word. I, who knew how it would come out, still found the tension considerable.

It’s early days; the shooting should wrap sometime in May, with a final cut months away and a release date sometime in 2014. If you can’t wait, well, you can always read the book again. And, to make sure you experience it in context, you can start with The Sins of the Fathers and read the whole 18-book series in order. (A Walk Among the Tombstones is #10.)

TV: Thanks to all of you who watched me on Craig Ferguson’s late-night show last week. This is the sixth or seventh time Craig’s had me on, and it’smore enjoyable each time—for me, at any rate, if not for all of y’all. If you missed it, this link will take you directly to my segment. (Geoff’s Liam Neeson impression is worth the click all by itself.)

My appearance had the predictable effect of lifting sales of both the new book (Hit Me) and the movie book (Tombstones). But it also gave a shot in the arm to Generally Speaking, my eNthology of stamp columns, perhaps because of our banter about (dare I say the word) Philately. And Craig’s mention of my tweeting brought a rash of new followers for @LawrenceBlock. (Though I’m not sure “rash” is le mot juste…)

Audio: While I rarely listen to audiobooks—I can read more effectively with my eyes than my ears—I’ve been an enthusiastic booster of the medium for years, and have been delighted to have so much of my body of work available in this form. I’m thus thrilled to report that 19 of my backlist titles are scheduled for audio release on April 24, just three weeks away as I write these line. The wonderful people at Open Road, ePublishers of a slew of my early works, have made a deal with the wonderful people at audible.com, and look what you can listen to: the pseudonymous works of my other self, Jill Emerson; midcentury erotica by Sheldon Lord and Andrew Shaw; a pair of writing books, The Liar’s Bible and The Liar’s Companion; the three books I wrote in collaboration with Donald E. Westlake; noir classics like Cinderella Sims and 69 Barrow Street; and the unclassifiable Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man. (Isaac Asimov called Ronald Rabbit “either the funniest dirty book or the dirtiest funny book ever.” When I asked if I could use the line as a blurb, he said, “Over my dead body.” So there you have it…)  I believe there’ll be a few more to come, and you may be assured I’ll let you know about them.

Print: I know, I know. Printed books are right up there with spats and typewriters. But you can still find them if you put your mind to it. Some of you have done a nice job of finding Hit Me in hardcover, along with trade paperback editions of A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off.  If you do decide to re-read the whole Scudder series, or fill in the ones you missed first time around, printed books are not too hard to find.

May I recommend you look for them in LB’s eBay Bookstore? We’ve got 28 Matthew Scudder listings at last count—hardcovers and paperbacks, first editions and reprints, a dozen of them under $10. Some are one of a kind, but many (including our trade paperback editions of A Stab in the Dark, A Long Line of Dead Men, The Night and the Music, and—yes—A Walk Among the Tombstones) are in good supply, and priced at $9.99. And everything’s autographed.

eBooks: Do I have to mention that all of my books are abundantly eVailable? No, you already know that, and may indeed be sick of hearing it. So I’ll just tell you of two titles that can be had (exclusively on Kindle, I’m afraid) at no cost whatsoever. I mean, this is Wednesday, right? And I tend to give things away on Wednesdays, don’t I? So why should this Wednesday be different from all other Wednesdays?

Well, it’s not. Starting today, and through Saturday, Sweet Little Hands is yours free of charge. It’s a savage little story, and a darkly erotic one, initially written for a Jeff Gelb/Max AllanCollins anthology. If you haven’t read it, or if you’d like to read it again or just archive it on your Kindle, be my guest.

And I’m also giving away The Taboo Breakers, one of my 17 John Warren Wells titles. Whether you regard JWW as a provider of human behavior case histories or a purveyor of tasteful erotica, you might find something here of interest.

Both of these freebies come with no strings attached—but I do have a request. If you like what you read, it would be good form to return the favor by dropping a brief review on the title’s Amazon page. Sharing your enthusiasm may lead others to the work, for which they’ll have reason to thank you. As will I.

That’s media enough, I trust. Maybe more than enough. I’d have had this newsletter to you several hours ago, but for the fact that I didn’t get home from Green-Wood until well past 2am. (And I left early. I suspect they were at it until the sun came up and sent everybody home.)

Well. Grab the freebies, buy the rest, and enjoy the spring.

LB

LB’s Bookstore on eBay
LB’s Blog and Website
LB’s Facebook Fan Page
Twitter:  @LawrenceBlock

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.

So program the DVR. Or pop a Red Bull and watch the show live. I mean, like, whatever…

LB

As a public service, let me provide you with a list of my own eligible titles:

1. All the John Warren Wells books: Beyond Group Sex, Come Fly With Us, Different Strokes, Doing It!, Eros & Capricorn, Love at a Tender Age, The Male Hustler, The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome, The New Sexual Underground, http://tinyurl.com/9bfmmdd, The Sex Therapists, Sex Without Strings, The Taboo Breakers, 3 is not a Crowd, Tricks of the Trade, Versatile Ladies, Wide Open, The Wife-Swap Report.

2. Four Keller stories: Keller on the Spot, Keller’s Adjustment, Keller’s Horoscope, Keller’s Therapy.

3. Ehrengraf for the Defense. (This is the complete collection; the individual stories are also available, but why waste a month’s borrowing privilege on one story when you can get all eleven?)

4. These Matthew Scudder stories: A Candle for the Bag Lady, Looking for David, The Merciful Angel of Death, A Moment of Wrong Thinking, One Last Night at Grogan’s, Out the Window.

5. These Stories from the Dark Side: Catch and Release, A Chance to Get Even, In for a Penny, Who Knows Where It Goes, Welcome to the Real World, Like a Bone in the Throat, Dolly’s Trash and Treasures, You Don’t Even Feel It, Headaches and Bad Dreams, Three in the Side Pocket, Sweet Little Hands.

It’s getting late, and as you can see I got tired of making links somewhere in the middle. Besides, I know what a resourceful lot y’all are. Remember, what you don’t borrow you can always (gulp!) buy. The books are $4.99, the shorter works $2.99. Have fun!

And if you forgot to say “Rabbits, rabbits” first thing this morning, well, I’m sure you’ll make it through the month just fine. Still, you might want to mark your calendar for April 1. What could it hurt?

LB