New on the AFTERTHOUGHTS page…
THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC concludes with an afterword that discusses each story in turn, detailing its publication history and placing all the stories in context. I’ve added it to the Afterthoughts page, to give you all a free peek at it.
Of course you don’t have to read the thing. You can cut to the chase and order now: Kindle – Nook – Smashwords
LB's BLOG 
Got it! I imagine I’ll absorb it in the next couple of days.
(Just finished Getting Off, a wonderful book and quite an unusual one — sad, scary, funny, casual and incredibly serious. The “home-free” moment at the end comes with a slight but real shadow of danger for the lovely couple.)
Thanks, Tom. Yet they’ll surely be okay because their hearts are pure…
And thanks for that! When I but a short story collection I always look at the copyright page up front to see where I may have read these stories originally. No page like that on the Kindle version, and after reading the first story I couldn’t remember if I had read it in AHMM, EQMM, MSMM, or Playboy (had subscriptions to all at the time). Then I remembered AFTERTHOUGHTS, zipped to the back, and there was my answer.
Loved Koppelman’s intro (we’ve traded posts in a screenwriting forum). I was just out of High School, had read Hammett and Chandler and Cain and Woolrich and Norbert Davis and McCoy and a bunch of other Black Mask guys and was looking for something like that… but new. Probably took the BART train to Oakland, CA (biggest city near me) and went to Holmes Books (used) and World News and the big bookstores, browsing. Saw a private eye book with a quote from Cain on the cover and took a chance ($1.50?) and bought SINS… and loved it. The great thing about Scudder is that they are often Why Done Its, and SINS is a great example of that. And so I was hooked.
Can’t wait to read the stories I have not read, but loving the ones I read when Scudder was younger and so was I. Thanks again!
Thanks! I don’t know what made me think of Cain, but I suggested him to Bill Grose, my editor at Dell, and the man came back with a very generous quote. Got him just in time, too; a couple of years later he was gone.