Candy

endowing the books with at least the minimal illusion of a plot.

Candy wound up being very much a crime novel. There are two murders in it, which would seem to satisfy the genre’s entrance requirements. But it never occurred to me to aim it higher than Midwood Tower, and all these years later—fifty of them, astonishingly—I have to wonder why.

It’s hard to know, but I suspect I’d written a substantial amount of the book before the crime element entered the picture. I’d have had to go back and change a lot of what I’d written if I were to aim the book at a higher market, and it would have been ever so much easier to wrap it up and save any ambition for another book.

For all the books I wrote for him, I met Harry Shorten only once.

This was very much in keeping with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency’s view of the author-publisher relationship. Scott didn’t believe in keeping writers and publishers at arm’s length—because that was far closer than he wanted them to get to one another. It was best, as he saw it, that they never meet, and just as well if they never exchanged letters or phone calls, either. The less contact writers and publishers had, the more indispensable was the agent who had established himself as their sole point of contact.

I don’t know how many books I wrote for Bill Hamling. Dozens, certainly, plus dozens more ghostwritten under my name. I never did meet the man, and the only time we were in contact was when I wrote him a letter after Scott and I had ended our author-agent relationship. I had begun a book for Nightstand, which I could no longer submit as the market was a closed shop, and I wrote to find out if I could, in fact, finish this book for him. He called Scott, wanting to know what the hell was going on; no one had told him I’d been dropped from the client list, and I’m sure Scott was prepared to ship him ghosted Andrew Shaw novels forever, leaving Hamling in the dark and me out of the picture.

There was a flap, and Scott called me and offered to resume representing me. I declined—pride? stupidity? The two, God knows, are not mutually exclusive—and I did finish that one book for Hamling but that was the end of it. We never met.

But I did meet Shorten. He wanted to meet Sheldon Lord and learned that I was in New York. My agent Henry Morrison, unable to figure out a way to prevent it, arranged a meeting at Midwood Tower’s midtown office.

I don’t remember much about the occasion. It seems to me Midwood had offices on Fifth Avenue in the Forties, but I could be wrong about that. Wherever it was, I went there, and Harry was a bluff and hearty middle- aged fellow. He asked me a few questions, and I did what I could to answer them. He did contrive to bring up the grease pit scene from Carla and expressed admiration for my having come up with that one. And he wondered how I managed to get so much sex in without having the books come out dirty. That’s not how he worded it, but that seemed to be the gist of it. And I vamped, and said something about writing realistic books about people whose problems and concerns happen to be sexual in nature. I’m not sure what I thought I meant, but I do recall that Harry nodded thoughtfully, and seemed to regard it as a meaningful response.

Harry retired in 1982 and moved to Pompano Beach, Florida. (My Aunt Mim and Uncle Hi lived in Pompano Beach; I wonder if they ever ran into Harry?) He died in 1991, at the age of seventy-six so he must have been around forty-five when we met.

Bob Silverberg, a prolific writer, told me recently that Bill Hamling’s still alive and living in Southern California. Maybe I’ll drop him a line …

—Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

A Biography of Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the- side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

A four-year-old Block in 1942.

Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

Block and his wife, Lynne.