. . .and for those of you who subscribed within the past ninety days, I trust I’ve laid to rest any worries you may have had that I’d fill your mailbox to overflowing. Quite the reverse, and I apologize for the long silence. I can but hope you had a better time than I did; I spent many of those days in hospital, where I followed a hip replacement with bypass surgery. I’m fine now, and back to buying green bananas, so not to worry.

And there’s a lot going on. Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, which Isaac Asimov proclaimed “Either the funniest dirty book or the dirtiest funny book I’ve ever read,” is newly available in ebook and paperback form, and some of you have found it on your own—perhaps with an assist from blogger Andrew Monge, who chose it as one of his five favorite reads of 2017, and raised my spirits with these uplifting words: “In all my years of reading I have never – and I mean never — read a book that made me laugh out loud as much as Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man.”

Some of you have been asking for more about Keller, the wistful hitman and philatelist who, as a five-star review on Amazon observed, does tend to overthink things. I initially published his most recent appearance, Keller’s Fedora, as a Kindle Single; then Subterranean Press brought it out in a superb hardcover edition, which sold out in a heartbeat and won’t be reprinted. (Used copies are listed from $91 on up, with one overly optimistic bookseller offering the book for $3214.79. I think that might be a little high.) I narrated the audiobook, and it’s still available, as is the ebook. But anyone who wanted the physical book has been out of luck.

Until now. I’m happy to announce that Keller’s Fedora is newly available as a handsome paperback volume. Note that it’s a novella, not a full-length novel, running to a mere 116 pages. The price is $9.99, and if that strikes you as excessively upscale, consider that you’re saving over $3200 by buying it instead of that high-ticket hardcover. $3200! Just think how many books you can buy with the money you’ll have saved!

There’s more. Luigi Garlaschelli translated the Scudder short stories, then turned his attention to the light-fingered and light-hearted Bernie Rhodenbarr. The Burglar who Counted the Spoons, at #11 the most recent book in the series, is now available for the first time in Italian as Il Ladro che Contava i Cucchiai. (A tip: to find all of Luigi’s skillful translations of my books, just do an Amazon search for “Luigi Garlaschelli Lawrence Block”.)

There’s more on the way in other languages, too. Stefan Mommertz and Sepp Leeb are nearing the end of the Matthew Scudder series, and before the week’s out expect to be publishing Der zweite Tod, Sepp’s translation of Hope to Die. It’ll be the book’s first appearance in the German language. And my thanks to Maria Carmen de Bernardo Martinez, whose Spanish translation of the first Keller book, Hit Man, continues to move nicely as El Sicario. Maca’s at work on the second book in the series, Hit List, and while its Spanish title is as yet undetermined, El Sicario #2 will appear prominently on the cover.

I was still home in early December, when Alive in Shape and Color: 17 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired hit bookstore shelves—and, to a large degree, flew right off of them. The timing didn’t hurt a bit, as no end of free-lance Santa Clauses saw it as the perfect holiday gift book. (The same thing happened a year earlier with In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper. You can still get hardcover editions of both of these books at a sharply discounted price—which may go up at any time, though probably not all the way to $3214.79.)

And that’ll do for now, don’t you think? One unlikely effect of the surgery was that I lost much of my ability to type. It’s come back, but I still make more typos than I used to, and can only hope I will have caught them before sending this to you. And if I’ve missed some, well, sotwldoih gezor#g enpl97uatz.

Cheers,

LB