Well, hello there! It’s my great pleasure to wish all of y’all…

The joys of the season, right? Hanukkah’s underway and Christmas is waiting in the wings, with a brand-new year trailing it by just a week. So what have you got for us, LB?

Well, let’s see. A few months ago, Neil Nyren asked if I had anything good to share with Mystery Writers of America members on the topic of titles. I did, as it happened, and wrote up a recollection some forty years old. It turned up today in Neil’s “Working Titles vs. Titles That Work,” published in The Third Degree, MWA’s members-only newsletter. I thought some of y’all might find it interesting:

Around the time I delivered the sixth Matthew Scudder novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, my editor at Arbor House wanted to know the title for the next one. Now I didn’t know that there would be a next one—and in fact there wouldn’t for three or four years—but Don Fine was still running Arbor House at the time, and he was worse than George Patton when it came to outrunning his own supply lines. He was always announcing forthcoming books that never forthcame. It was easier to tell him something than to explain why I couldn’t, and the Scudder titles were always five words long (which is why Ginmill is one word) so I picked out five words and told him the next book would be Like a Lamb to Slaughter.

And I guess he went ahead and listed it in his catalog, because it wasn’t too long before a monthly men’s magazine turned up with a very nice if somewhat nonspecific review for the new Scudder novel, Like a Lamb to Slaughter.

Huh?

I knew the reviewer, and learned that his publisher had this long lead time, and if he waited until books came out, or even until ARCs were available, the books might already be remaindered before anyone had read his reviews. So, on rare occasions, and only when he knew and trusted the professionalism of a particular writer, he’d go ahead and write a review of a book based on its description in the publisher’s catalog.

Okay. These things happen, and no harm no foul, and so on.

A couple more years go by. I still haven’t written that seventh Scudder novel. Now Eden Collinsworth is running things at Arbor House, and what were the prospects for a new Scudder novel?

Slim, I told her, but I did have enough short stories for a book, so could we fill in with that? Earlier they’d published Sometimes They Bite, which featured a Scudder novelette, and it had done well enough to justify a second volume. Why not bring one out, and call it Like a Lamb to Slaughter?

She was uncertain. A Scudder novel was what she really wanted. Well, I said, the collection could include a Scudder novelette, one I’d published some years back in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It was called A Candle for the Bag Lady, and it could certainly be the book’s keynote or feature or centerpiece, whatever you wanted to call it, and—

Eden sat back and thought. She repeated the novelette’s title and wondered if it would be possible to change it. Could we call the story Like a Lamb to Slaughter?

I told her that was a brilliant idea, and she said in that case we could go ahead with the collection.

“That should work perfectly,” I said. “And, just so you know—we already got a terrific review in Penthouse.”

Well, okay. That’s a story worth telling, and I guess it’s a way for you to plug an old book, but is it even around after all these years?

Like a Lamb to Slaughter was published in 1984 and is no longer in print, though copies are not terribly hard to find. But all of its contents were included in my omnibus short story collection, Enough Rope, which is readily available in print and ebook, while the Scudder novelette in question appears in The Night and the Music with its original title restored. (That’s “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” and it’s individually eVailable for Kindle as well—$2.99, or a free read for Kindle Unlimited members.)

And what else ought I to tell you?

I suppose you could brag about that bit in the Guardian.

I don’t see how I can restrain myself. Matthew Scudder got a huge helping hand from Ian Rankin, who responded as follows when the Guardian asked him to name his favorite fictional detective:

“I was a fairly late convert to crime fiction as a reader, and one of the first characters I remember falling for in a big way was Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. Scudder is a private eye who is an ex-cop. He’s conflicted, driven and an alcoholic. His beat is contemporary New York and his friends include a brutal yet gracious villain called Mick Ballou. I’d say that the gangland boss Cafferty in my novels owes a large debt to Ballou and (especially in his early outings) my hero John Rebus shares DNA with Scudder.

“The novels are all great, but my favourites include When the Sacred Ginmill Closes and A Walk Among the Tombstones. They are the perfect hardboiled mix of grit and poetry: cool jazz with surface noise.”

Cool jazz with surface noise. That’s right on target, isn’t it?

I’d say so. I was hugely chuffed to read this, as you might imagine, and the timing added to the impact; just days earlier I’d finished reading Sir Ian’s new Rebus novel, A Heart Full of Headstones, and at the risk of sounding all quid-pro-quo-ish, I’ll just say it’s brilliant and let it go at that.