Really, LB? A newsletter? After all these years?

Not years, although it does seem that way. But months, and more than a few of them. People keep signing up for the newsletter, and the indispensable David Trevor keeps entering their data and sending them cheerful acknowledgments, and that’s all that happens. They probably wonder what’s amiss.

I wonder myself.

Well, I would appear to have retired. I wrote two books in 2022, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown and The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder, and I was more than happy with both of them, but once they were polished and published, I realized that I was done. I’d spent well over sixty years as a professional writer, and I’m grateful for every day I was able to devote to writing and every book and story I had the good fortune to produce, but that stage of my life was now over. In recent years I’d often suspected that I might be ready to wrap it up, and each time I’d found out I was mistaken, but this was categorically different; for the first time I no longer had the feeling that writing was what I ought to be doing.

But if a really great idea came along—

Ideas come along all the time. So what? I feel no obligation to entertain them, let alone act on them.

You’re really done.

So it would seem. I turned 86 last month. That’s the atomic number of radon.

I didn’t know that.

Neither did I. Happily, Google did. It’s also high enough as a human age that one is not hugely surprised when a person claiming it is retired.  It’s miracle enough that the old boy is alive at all.

Um…

Never mind. Not writing, and not moping around thinking I ought to be writing, gives me time and energy for other pursuits. I’ve become something of a geriatric gym rat, picking up heavy metal objects and putting them back where I found them. I walk far enough and briskly enough to leave my Fitbit short of breath. I take naps, I listen to music, I watch Nature and Nova and Jeopardy.

And, of course, I devote a certain amount of time to the business of being a writer.

Huh? Hang on, will you? I’ve always been given to understand that the business of being a writer consists of sitting down and writing something.

You know, back in the day that was pretty much all there was to it. For years the only writing-related activity that occupied me was thinking up books and stories and giving my typewriter a workout. Whatever I wrote went to my agent du jour, and he did what he could with it and sent me the rewards of my labors. No book tours. No media, social or otherwise. I did spend a lot of time hanging out with other writers, but that’s who my friends were. God knows we weren’t networking. I can’t recall anyone using the work network as a verb. There were three networks, and not one of them knew that my fellow writers and I were alive. Which was fine, because we were all too busy to care.

So you’re still running around on book tours, and doing podcasts, and hustling for Likes on Instagram and TikTok…

No, none of that. I’m retired.

But—

But I’m the self-publisher of many of my books, and the income they continue to generate helps keep me from having to run through what’s left of my daughters’ eventual inheritance. This doesn’t take a lot of time or effort, but it does seat me at the computer more days than not, and occasionally a project pops up that requires more than day-to-day attention.

Ping!

Ping?

The penny just dropped. That’s where you’re going, and it explains this newsletter’s title and the parade of covers on the righthand side of the page. You’ve done something with the Classic Crime Library. Why don’t you tell us about it, and while you’re at it you can cop to the fact that the CCL is just a sneaky way to make a lot of old books look as though they’ve got something in common.

That’s a little harsh, but there’s some truth in it. The Classic Crime Library contains 21 non-series novels of mine, all of them nestled snugly beneath the broad canopy of crime fiction. The earliest titles first saw print in 1961, and all had been initially published by 1974 (except for one outlier, Ariel, which came out in 1980.)

A mere child of forty-four summers.

A virtual toddler. The CCL titles don’t have much in common beyond my authorship and their crime fiction credentials. Three of them were commissioned by paperback publishers at “TV tie-in novels,” original works of fiction based on the characters and background of an existing television drama. (Coward’s Kiss was based on “Markham,” starring Ray Milland; it turned out well enough that my agent had me change the character’s name and sold it to Knox Burger at Fawcett Gold Medal; You Could Call It Murder was the replacement Markham novel I then had to write for Belmont; Broadway Can Be Murder was based on “Johnny Midnight,” starring Edmund O’Brien. Both series were canceled by the time the books came out. My good friend Gloria Mundy knows what that’s like.)

A sick transit, eh?

You might say that. Two of those titles and several others appeared under my name. Three—Such Men Are Dangerous, The Triumph of Evil, and Not Comin’ Home to You—originally bore the pen name Paul Kavanagh. It’s hard to remember why.

Perhaps you were trying to avoid building a following.

God knows I succeeded. Others started out with publishers of erotica—Beacon, Midwood Tower, Nightstand—and thus bore one or another of the pen names I used with those houses. For years I thought of them as Midcentury Erotica—

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

—and eventually it dawned on me that they were crime novels.

And now they’re in the Classic Crime Library.

And happy to be there.

But what makes them newsworthy? Or should I say newsletter-worthy?

A couple of things. For one, Jaye Manus, my goddess of production and design, has given them a makeover. The front covers are essentially unchanged, typically featuring vintage cover art from an early edition, but the back covers now show an up-to-date author photo and a list of all twenty-one CCL titles.

I like the photo. The credit line says Amy Jo Block took it.

She’s a talented young woman. Every CCL book is now available in three states: ebook, paperback, and hardcover. And pricing is uniform across the series. Ebooks are $7.99, paperbacks $11.99, and hardcovers $16.99. That represents a hike of a buck for most of the ebooks and paperbacks, but buyers of the hardcover editions are getting a significant break on the price.

I can understand a higher price for the ebooks and paperbacks. Publishing costs have gone up, just like everything else. But the hardcovers used to cost $19.99 or $20.99, so you’ve actually reduced the price by three or four bucks a book. What gives?

I’m really pleased with the look and durability of the hardcovers, in their handsome library bindings. I know some readers like to collect a full series, and hardcover editions have always been particularly collectible. These days I don’t collect anything but dust, but for most of my life I’ve been a passionate collector of one thing or another, so I’m temperamentally inclined to cut a fellow collector some slack. And please understand that I’m not being entirely altruistic here; if hardcover sales surge, I’ll come out ahead.

Let’s hope.

Indeed. I should note that seven of the books (Borderline, A Diet of Treacle, The Girl with the Long Green Heart, Grifter’s Game, Killing Castro, Lucky at Cards, and Sinner Man) continue to be available as Hard Case Crime paperbacks.

Love those Hard Case editions. I’ve got a bookcase full of them, and it looks great.

I’m sure it does.

But so do your CCL hardcovers. Do you think I’d be going overboard if I picked up those seven titles in paperback from Hard Case and in hardcover from your Classic Crime Library?

I think you’d be showing taste, refinement, and unparalleled good judgment.

I’m not sure that’s how my accountant would see it.

Really? My wife’s an accountant, and she was quick to point out that, if you buy the entire Classic Crime Library in hardcover, the $3-4 a book you’ll be saving will let you grab up a whole bunch of Hard Case paperbacks. Her reasoning may be a little tricky to follow, but she’s got a whole closetful of shoes to show how well it works.

And here, to make it easy for all of y’all to demonstrate your own taste, refinement, and unparalleled good judgment, is a parade of links in alphabetical order:

After the First Death     Ariel     Borderline

Broadway Can Be Murder     Candy     Cinderella Sims

Coward’s Kiss     Deadly Honeymoon     A Diet of Treacle
 
Four Lives at the Crossroads     The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Grifter’s Game     Killing Castro     Lucky at Cards

Not Comin’ Home to You     Passport to Peril     Sinner Man

The Specialists     Such Men Are Dangerous

The Triumph of Evil     You Could Call It Murder

These are early books, the most recent of them more than forty years old, and my inclination is, if not to apologize for them, at least to suggest that you take their age into asccount and cut them some slack. I prefer to believe that I’ve improved over the years, that my more recent work is a good cut above my earlier efforts.

That Matt Scudder’s a step or two ahead of Cinderella Sims?

Or at least that he’s playing in a tougher league. I like to think that’s true, and perhaps it is, but ultimately all such judgments are subjective, and the ultimate rule of criticism is Your Mileage May Vary. There are readers who think that my earliest work was my best work, that books like Grifter’s Game and Deadly Honeymoon have a raw vigor and urgency lacking in my later books. Who am I to say they’re wrong?

And I guess you think enough of them to bring them out in hardcover. Woud you ever do that with the Collection of Classic Erotica?

Hmm.

That’s your answer? Hmm?

I am, as Jack Benny so memorably said, thinking it over. There are well over thirty titles in the CCE, and a lot of people rolled their eyes when I saw fit to publish them in ebook and paperback. But a lot of other people seem to like the books. If hardcover sales of the Classic Crime Library are sufficiently encouraging, I’ll probably test the waters. We’ll see.

And that’s about enough for this long-overdue newsletter.

Cheers,