Some Days You Get the Bear: Short Stories - Hardcover

Block, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688108202 ISBN 13: 9780688108205

Publisher: William Morrow & Company, 1993

Synopsis

The Edgar Award-winning author of A Dance at the Slaughterhouse now publishes a collection of stories that can be compared to the works of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. Some stories feature New York P.I. Matt Scudder, and others star attorney Martin Ehrengraf, but all resound with Block's dark humor and razor-sharp sense of characterization.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Lawrence Block, best-selling author of A Walk Among the Tombstones and A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, now presents his third and finest collection of stories in the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. Block's characters are special people. Here are a few of the folks you're about to meet: Bernie Rhodenbarr, burglar and bookseller, who's hired by a tabloid to break into Graceland and hunt down the King himself...Martin Ehrengraf, a dapper little lawyer who never loses a case - and never has to go to trial...The Merciful Angel of Death, who turns up at AIDS hospices to visit the sickest of the sick - just before they die...Paul, film critic and man-about-town, who wears a safari jacket and eats in ethnic restaurants and sleeps with a teddy bear...and, in three appearances here, Block's award-winning detective Matthew Scudder. Tales of mistaken identity, ambiguous truth, and twisted justice make Some Days You Get the Bear a complex and fascinating wall of windows on today's world. Alternately terrifying, humorous, and thrilling, these are stories to speed the pulse and chill the blood.

Reviews

Twenty-one stories by the winner of last year's Edgar for Best Novel (A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, 1981), demonstrating his versatility, productiveness, and growth as a writer. Though this is Block's third collection (after Like a Lamb to Slaughter and Sometimes They Bite), focusing on tales written after 1984, it includes four pieces published in the 60's in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Each Hitchcock yarn concerns murder and packs a final twist but no emotional resonance: practice scales, really, played diligently by a writer learning his craft. The later stories show the development of Block's more mature themes. Three series characters appear in them: Bernie Rhodenbarr, a thief who steals nothing of value and is a veteran of five novels (The Burglar Who Liked Mondrian, etc.); Martin H. Ehrengraf, an attorney whose ruthless methods get his clients (accused murderers) off the hook and who appears only in stories; and popular p.i. Matt Scudder. Rhodenbarr's turn, in ``The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis''--a witty puzzler in which the thief is hired to break into and photograph Elvis's sequestered bedroom at Graceland--highlights Block's lighter vein, which has been drying out lately. The two Ehrengraf stories--which show the lawyer crucifying innocents to defend his clients--demonstrate how Block's earlier irony grew into a sharper mordancy. And the two Scudder tales, as well as several others, reflect his more recent concern with ever-darker subjects. ``Answers to Soldier,'' for instance, tells of a hit man who regularly warms up to his intended victims but inevitably reverts to his cruel ways; and ``The Merciful Angel of Death,'' a powerful exploration of compassion, relates Scudder's tracking of a woman who may be sending AIDS victims to a gentle death. A mixed bag ranging from the hack to the sublime--and, for its best work, a must for Block/Scudder fans. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688108202
• ISBN 13: 9780688108205
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302