One Night Stands and Lost Weekends - Softcover

Block, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006158214X ISBN 13: 9780061582141

Publisher: Harper, 2008

Synopsis

In the era before he created moody private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, sleepless spy Evan Tanner, and the amiable hit man Keller—and years before his first Edgar Award—a young writer named Lawrence Block submitted a story titled "You Can't Lose" to Manhunt magazine. It was published, and the rest is history.

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master—an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Block is one of the most widely recognized names in the mystery genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He received the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association—only the third American to be given this award. He is a prolific author, having written more than fifty books and numerous short stories, and is a devoted New Yorker and an enthusiastic global traveler.

From Booklist

These short stories and novellas were originally published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in magazines with names like Manhunt, Guilty, and Trapped. In his entertaining introduction, Block, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, freely admits he hasn’t read them since—he is afraid to. Should you be? That depends. Even on training wheels, Block dropped hints at the writer he was to become. The cognac-drinking, pipe-smoking, Mozart-loving Ed London, Block’s first PI, becomes more interesting when considered as a prototype for the complex Matt Scudder. And it’s fun to read Nor Iron Bars a Cage (originally titled To Althea from Prison), Block’s first (and, thankfully, only) try at science fiction. But with the pulp-fiction revival going great guns, hard-boiled rarities are increasingly common, so this may be best suited for Block completists—although true collectors will have already hunted down the limited-edition hardcovers One Night Stands (1999) and The Lost Cases of Ed London (2001). Better Block abounds, but you could do far worse for bathroom reading. --Keir Graff

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 006158214X
• ISBN 13: 9780061582141
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 366