LB’s Groundhog Day Newsletter—

You know, the year’s first month did hurry by. It’s hard to believe it’s a new month already, and one that’s shorter than January by three days, so it’ll be gone in nothing flat, and—I guess I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?You’re not exactly living in the moment, which happens to be a favorite holiday of mine.

The Moment? It’s Brian Koppelman’s podcast, but I don’t think it’s a holiday.

I’m talking about Groundhog Day, and I mean the day itself, not the movie. Unlike most holidays, instead of keeping both you and your letter carrier home from work, Groundhog Day performs a utilitarian function. It tells you what the weather’s going to be like for the next month or two.

You said that in a book once.

That wasn’t me. That was one of my characters, and a minor character at that, in The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart.

Ah, I get it. This gives you a chance to segue into a pitch for the new Bernie Rhodenbarr book, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, where you get to quote reviews and tell us how well it’s selling. Right?

Not really. It’s getting a very decent reception, and the sales curve shows no sign of flattening. And I will have something to say toward the end, a peek into the mind of an unknown copy editor—Fredric Brown’s, not mine. But I’ve got a dozen other books to recommend to your attention, including eleven classics just released in hardcover and an all-star anthology.

First the anthology. It’s called Playing Games, available in three states, and—

Only three states? Which ones? What about the other 47? Not to mention the rest of the world. And why are you rolling your eyes?

Why indeed? The three states are hardcover, paperback, and ebook. Specifically, Subterranean Press offers a deluxe signed-and-numbered limited hardcover edition for $50. I’ve published the ebook and paperback editions myself, at $9.99 and $14.99 respectively. If the cover’s not large enough on your screen to read the lineup of contributors, well, here they are in alphabetical order: Patricia Abbott, Charles Ardai, S.A. Cosby, Jeffery Deaver, Tod Goldberg, Jane Hamilton, James D.F. Hannah, Gar Anthony Haywood, Elaine Kagan, Avri Klemer, Joe R. Lansdale, Warren Moore, David Morrell, Kevin Quigley, Robert Silverberg, Wallace Stroby, and myself.

Wouldn’t alphabetical order put you third on the list? Why are you all the way at the end?

False modesty, a character defect which won’t prevent me from quoting Publishers Weekly’s starred review:

“One of the most impressive of the 17 crime stories involving games in this stellar anthology from MWA Grand Master Block (In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper) is Block’s own ‘Strangers on a Handball Court.’ It riffs on Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, as the title suggests, and provides a wholly fair plot with a gut-wrenching surprise. Even knowing that multiple twists are coming doesn’t negate their impact in Jeffery Deaver’s devious ‘The Babysitter,’ which opens with a classic trope: the innocent everyperson who stumbles on a deadly secret. When the charges of 17-year-old Kelli Lambert get bored playing Candy Land, Kelli’s search for another board game leads her into peril after the parents of the kids she’s watching suspect she’s spotted their secret plans to torch a casino so they can establish their own casino. David Morrell shines with the subtle and creepy ‘The Puzzle Master,’ in which a couple become addicted to jigsaw puzzles by a particular artist, only to find potentially ominous clues linking disparate bucolic scenes.”

That’s funny—you left out the last line. Ah, here it is: “The wide range of stories and games in them begs for a sequel.”

Huh. Let’s move right along, shall we? A few years back, I developed the Classic Crime Library as a way to bring together my early non-series crime novels, packaging them uniformly with covers that highlight some of their earlier incarnations. Stand-alone novels, especially early titles, tend to get lost in the shuffle, and CCL packaging makes it easier for readers to find them.

And collect them, because they look so nice together. And now you’re trying them in hardcover?

Eleven of them so far—or a Thief’s Dozen, in Don Westlake’s enduring phrase. That’s enough to test the waters, and if the response is good, I suspect the rest will follow.

Here’s what’s presently on offer:

After the First Death. CCL #1, and David Trevor singled it out in a recent newsletter. As he mentioned, its theme and tone have made it often regarded as a precursor to the Matthew Scudder series. It was my second hardcover book, published originally in 1969 by Macmillan.

Deadly Honeymoon. CCL #2, my first hardcover book, also from Macmillan in 1967. The basis, I must admit, of a genuinely bad film.

The Specialists. CCL #5, and I won’t go through this again, but I’ve been known to refer to it as a one-book series. A 1969 Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, with a small-press hardcover edition brought out ages ago by James Cahill.

The Triumph of Evil, CCL #6. Miles Dorn, a world-weary Central European assassin, is enlisted to facilitate a political coup in the US. First published in 1971 in hardcover by World Publishing Company under the pen name Paul Kavanagh.

Such Men Are Dangerous. CCL #7, the first of three Paul Kavanagh books. In this case PK was the name on the cover and also that of of the first-person protagonist. Macmillan published the book in hardcover in 1969; two years later Mr. Kavanagh and I followed along when our editor, Jim Wade, moved over to World.

And, finally, the third Kavanagh title: Not Comin’ Home to You, CCL #8, fiction inspired by the Starkweather-Fugate murder spree. Published in hardcover by Putnam in 1974.

You Could Call It Murder, CCL #12. The assignment came via the Scott Meredith agency. Could I write a tie-in novel for Belmont Books based on Markham, a TV series starring Ray Milland? I could and did, but I felt what I’d written deserved better treatment, and my agent sent it to Knox Burger at Fawcett Gold Medal, whence it emerged as what would become CCL #13. But that meant I still owed Belmont a Book, and this is the one they got. They published it in 1961 as Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos. Ray Milland’s series, alas, had already been canceled by then. I changed the title when Lou Kannenstine at Countryman Press reprinted it in 1986. Aside from a long-ago large print edition, I believe the new CCL printing is the book’s first appearance in hardcover.

Coward’s Kiss, CCL #13. For Gold Medal, I changed the protagonist’s name from Roy Markham to Ed London, and someone there came up with Death Pulls a Doublecross for a title. I restored my own title for various paperback reprints, and a 1999 hardcover edition published by Five Star. I never managed a second novel about Ed London, but it was not for lack of trying. Later this year, Men’s Adventure Library will be publishing a collection of stories and articles of mine that ran in male adventure magazines over a half-century ago, and the handsome volume will include three longish stories—novelettes, I suppose—that I wrote about Ed London.

Cinderella Sims, CCL #14. This book started out as a crime novel with a counterfeiting background, and somewhere in the course of writing it I decided it wasn’t working and finished it up as an erotic novel from Nightstand Books, who published it as $20 Lust by Andrew Shaw in 1961; then a dozen years later they repackaged it as Cinderella Sims. Ed Gorman, the Sage of Cedar Rapids, championed the book, forever urging me to allow Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press to reprint it. I gave in, and it came out as a handsome hardcover book in 2003. When the time came, I tucked it into the Classic Crime Library.

Passport to Peril, CCL #15. Lancer wanted a work of romantic suspense with an espionage slant, all in the tradition of Helen MacInnes. I made the heroine an American folksinger, set the book in the west of Ireland, and produced my only book so far as Anne Campbell Clark. Lancer published it as a paperback original in 1967, and I don’t believe it ever appeared anywhere else prior to its inclusion in the Classic Crime Library. This is its first hardcover edition.

Ariel, CCL #16. I wrote this story of an adoption gone wrong at the behest of Herb Katz of M. Evans and Co. This was in 1975, and I was going through a bad patch at the time, and when I started work on the book I set it in Charleston, where I was holing up for a few weeks. My roots go deep in Charleston, and a major thoroughfare, Sam Rittenberg Boulevard, is named for a great-great-uncle of mine. At the time, however, I was living in a rooming house for twenty dollars a week, and wondering how long I could afford it.

Never mind. I finished it, though I’d moved on from Charleston by then, and Herb Katz turned it down, and a couple of years later a new agent showed it to Donald I. Fine at Arbor House, who published it in hardcover and made a nice deal for paperback rights. Over the years, Don Fine hoped I would write another book like Ariel, but I never could. The genre it best fits is probably horror, although I don’t suppose it’s particularly likely to induce either palpitations or nausea.

Whew. I went on longer than I planned. Sorry about that.

Not a problem. Parts of it were interesting.

That’s a comfort. This probably won’t be, but all the same I probably ought to describe the CCL hardcover editions. Like our hardcover Jill Emerson titles, they’re what are called Case Laminate editions, also often referred to as Library Bindings. Instead of removable (and fragile) dust jackets, each has the cover art printed on the hardbound book itself. They’re at once attractive and durable—which I suspect is what makes them a favorite of librarians.

Speaking of librarians, could you tell us more about the Men’s Adventure Library?

When the time comes. Believe me, y’all will get ample notice. But I want to wrap this up, and first I have to deliver the Fredric Brown tidbit I promised earlier. So why don’t I just show you the email I received last month from Marilyn Schapiro?

“I very much enjoyed Bernie’s latest adventure in a parallel universe. Ihave long been an SF fan as well as a detective fiction (especially
Lawrence Block) addict. Thank you for introducing me to Fredric Brown and What Mad Universe, but I wonder if you can clear up this question for me: in WMU Fredric Brown refers several times to Kennedy airport and/or spaceport.

“It seems he wrote the novel and  first published it in 1949. The major
New York airport known as Idlewild opened in 1948. It was not renamed for JFK until after the 1963 assassination, at least in our universe as we know it.

“Did FB (or Bantam Books) revise this point in the novel after 1963? Or did he temporarily slip into a different universe involving a different Kennedy or what?”

I checked the copy on my Kindle, and the airport is given throughout as Idlewild. So I can only conclude that some curiously dim editor at Bantam, readying the book for a later printing, decided that the name Idlewild was obsolete and that of course everyone knew the airport as JFK. And evidently some wiser soul changed it back some years further down the line.

But that such a glitch should occur in a book that presupposes an infinity of parallel universes strikes me as singularly appropriate. And isn’t it even sweeter that the whole business should surface now, in response to my own homage to Fredric Brown?

Cheers,

PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you yourself have received the newsletter from a friend and would like your own subscription, that’s easily arranged; an email to lawbloc@gmail.com —with LB’s Newsletter in the subject line—will get the job done.

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