Here’s what Michael Dirda had to say in this morning’s Washington Post about A Trawl Among the Shelves, Terry Zobeck’s exhaustive (not to say exhausting) bibliography of my work:
“One could make a similar claim”—that it’s indispensable, and lots of fun—“for Terry Zobeck’s compulsively readable A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020. Among the grandest and most masterly of the Mystery Writers of America’s Grandmasters, Block is best known for his Matt Scudder novels, about a recovering alcoholic ex-cop turned private investigator, and for the Bernie Rhodenbarr capers, featuring a bookseller who is actually a professional burglar. Yet those series comprise only a small number of the writer’s 200 or so books.
“Over a 60-year career, Block has basically done it all, from soft-core erotica as Sheldon Lord to nonfiction about coin and stamp collecting to several chatty but valuable how-to manuals for would-be writers. He’s also assembled imaginative original anthologies, most recently From Sea to Stormy Sea: 17 Stories Inspired by Great American Paintings. To round out Zobeck’s bibliographic labor of love Block himself contributes a characteristically genial afterword, ‘The Man Who Wrote Too Much.’”
Terry, who’d been a casual acquaintance for years, a frequent attendee at signings and mystery conferences, became a friend during the development of this book. The hares he started led me to track down long-lost work and remember early efforts I hadn’t thought of in decades. His inquiries and discoveries prompted me to develop two books I’d put off for far too long—a collection of miscellaneous nonfiction pieces (Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails) and a complete edition of my columns for Linn’s Stamp News (Generally Speaking). That both books have been well received, and are available in hardbound and paperback editions as well as ebooks, is a source of considerable satisfaction to me—and I might never have done the work but for the stimulus Terry provided.
Terry has published A Trawl Among the Shelves himself. (I was able to steer him to the incomparable Jaye Manus, my Goddess of Design and Production, who gets all credit for the book’s excellent, um, design and production.) It was a labor of love for Terry—no one puts in thousands of hours on the bibliography of an oblivion-bound scribbler in the expectation of financial reward—but the book’s reception has been such that I’m hopeful he’ll get some sort of return on his labor.
If you’ve enough interest in me and my work to visit this website, you’re part of this book’s natural audience. So why don’t you click here and buy it?
