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Métamorphose de la « ghost story »: une histoire non pas de fantôme, mais de maladie mentale, de maison malveillante et, surtout, l'étude attentive des réactions provoquées par la maison
haineuse sur ses habitants - sur une, la plus faible, en particulier : Ariel, une enfant de 12 ans. Un roman étrange du maître du polar américain.

Ariel

La balade entre les tombes

Lawrence Block's 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world-along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). And it's Matt Scudder who's been largely responsible for Block's lifetime achievement awards: Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), The Eye (Private Eye Writers of America), and the Cartier Diamond Dagger (UK Crime Writers Association). But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it's all here, from a pair of late-70s novelettes (Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady) through By the Dawn's Early Light (Edgar) and The Merciful Angel of Death (Shamus), all the way to One Last Night at Grogan's, a moving and elegiac story never before published. It was short fiction that kept the series alive on the several occasions when the flow of novels was interrupted, and short stories that took Scudder down different paths and showed us unmapped portions of his world. Some of these stories appeared in such magazines as Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, and Playboy. The title vignette, The Night and the Music, was written for a NYC jazz festival program; another, Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen, has appeared only as the text of a limited-edition broadside. And the final story, putting Matt and Elaine at a table with Mick and Kristin Ballou in a shuttered Hell's Kitchen saloon, has its first appearance in this volume. Several stories look back from the time of their writing, with Scudder recounting events from his former life as a cop, first as a patrolman partnered with the legendary Vince Mahaffey, then as an NYPD detective leading a double life. In Looking for David, Matt and Elaine are on vacation in Florence, where they encounter a man Matt arrested decades earlier; now Matt finally learns the motive behind a brutal homicide. Along with the eleven stories and novelettes, The Night and The Music includes a list of the seventeen novels in chronological order, and an author's note detailing the origin and bibliographical details of each of the stories. Brian Koppelman, the prominent screenwriter and director (Solitary Man, Ocean's Thirteen, Rounders) and a major Matt Scudder fan, has sweetened the pot with an introduction.

The Night and the Music - Matthew Scudder, #18

Cool, fiable et efficace, John Keller est le tueur à gages préféré de tous. L'épouse qui gêne, la star du sport vieillissante, l'associé en affaires véreux, aucune victime ne le fait reculer. Pour lui, il ne s'agit pas de liquider tel ou tel, mais de résoudre un problème, qui, évidemment, n'a rien de personnel. Un contrat après l'autre, Keller sillonne les États-Unis et travaille avec honneur. Mais, aussi bon soit-il, il n'en est pas moins homme et se sent parfois bien seul et en proie au doute. Tuer le psychologue, le chien, la femme... à la longue, c'est un peu lassant et la retraite semble attrayante. Jusqu'au jour où, hélas, il doit se faire une raison : la retraite coûtant cher, il faut gagner de l'argent... et donc recommencer à tuer, tuer et tuer. Intelligence des histoires, écriture d'une malicieuse férocité et humour à la hache, ce nouvel épisode de la saga Keller est tuant d'humanité.

Le blues du tueur à gage

Matt Scudder, qui n'est plus tout jeune, rumine de sombres pensées quand une amie lui demande d'enquêter sur un curieux personnage qu'elle a découvert par Internet: l'homme lui plaît beaucoup, mais pas moyen de savoir où il réside, ni ce qu'il fait. Intrigué, le vieux privé accepte... et comprend soudain qu'un serial-killer s'est lancé à ses trousses et à celles de sa compagne. Renoncer? Pas question. Matt Scudder n'est pas de ceux qui renoncent.

Les fleurs meurent aussi

Le blues du libraire

DER EINBRECHER, DER WIE MONDRIAN MALTE »Der umtriebige Lawrence Block jongliert fast gleichzeitig mehrere Serien und wendet sich inDer Einbrecher, der wie Mondrian malte einmal mehr Bernie Rhodenbarr zu. Bernie ist derEinbrecher des Titels - und einer der geschicktesten in New York. Doch trotz seines Geschicksgerät er unverschuldet immer wieder in Schwierigkeiten. Es ist, als würden die wuchtigenSchläge des Golfers Jack Nicklaus ein ums andere Mal in einem Erdhörnchenloch auf demFairway landen. Der Kater von Bernies Freundin wird entführt und die Täter verlangen zunächst eineViertelmillion Dollar Lösegeld. Für einen Kater? Es stellt sich heraus, dass Bernie für dieBefreiung des Tiers einen Mondrian stehlen soll. Bevor ihm das gelingt, gerät er unterMordverdacht, und schließlich kommt es zu einer schönen, altmodischen Konfrontation, bei derBernie all die üblichen Verdächtigen und die Polizei versammelt, damit sie unserem Heldendabei zuzusehen, wie er etwas aus dem Nichts herbeizaubert. Versuchen Sie nicht, die Handlungim Detail nachzuverfolgen, das wird Sie nur verwirren. Aber der Schreibstil ist brillant undraffiniert, mit einem Hauch von Donald Westlake, und das Buch macht eine Menge Spaß.« ~ Newgate Callendar in The New York Times »Im fünften Bernie-Rhodenbarr-Krimi bekommen wir es mit seinem bisher kompliziertesten Fallzu tun. Bernie sucht einen Mr. Onderdonk auf, der ein abstraktes Gemälde von Mondrian imWert von einer Viertelmillion Dollar über dem Kamin hängen hat. Das ist aber zunächst ehernebensächlich, denn Bernies eigentlicher Grund für den Besuch war, in das Gebäude zukommen, um dort teure Briefmarken aus einer anderen Wohnung zu stehlen. Am nächsten Tagwird der Kater seiner Freundin Carolyn entführt und die mysteriöse Frau, die dafürverantwortlich ist, will, dass Bernie einen ähnlichen Mondrian aus einem New Yorker Museumstiehlt. Bernie findet keine Möglichkeit, dies zu tun, und beschließt, dass das Gemälde inOnderdonks Wohnung ein angemessener Ersatz wäre. Also bricht er dort ein, nur umfestzustellen, dass das Gemälde mittlerweile von jemand anderem gestohlen wurde. Verwirrend? Das ist nur der Anfang. In dieser verwickelten Geschichte gibt es ungefähr so vieleMondrians wie Carolyns unglückseliger Kater Leben hat. Dazu kommen noch eineBriefmarkensammlung, zwei Leichen, ein exzentrischer Maler, ein auf Bibliothekenspezialisierter Bücherdieb, ein korrupter Polizist, ein Versicherungsbetrug und drei attraktiveFrauen mit falschen Identitäten. Außerdem muss sich Bernie nicht weniger als viermal unerlaubt Zutritt zum uneinnehmbarstenWohngebäude von New York City verschaffen ... oder fünfmal? Ehrlich gesagt, mir ging derÜberblick verloren. Als ich das Ende las, dachte ich zuerst, ich hätte einige Lücken in der Handlung entdeckt, abernachdem ich einige der wichtigen Kapitel noch einmal durchgegangen war, wurde mir klar, dassBlock alle losen Enden perfekt zusammengefügt hat. Was ein ziemliches Kunststück darstellt.« ~ Craig Childs

Der Einbrecher, der wie Mondrian malte - Bernie Rhodenbarr, #5

THIRTY, as intensely erotic a book as I'd ever written, is what happened after I stopped writing erotica. Beginning with CARLA in 1958, I spent half a dozen years laboring in the vineyards of Midcentury Erotica, writing no end of books for Midwood, Nightstand, Beacon, et.al. It was a wonderful training ground, a comfortingly forgiving medium, and I've never regretted the timer I spent there, although for a time I wanted to disown the work I produced. (That changed with the passage of time, and now I've been eagerly reissuing much of that early work in my Collection of Classic Erotica. I like to tell myself this represents great progress in self-acceptance, but I have a hunch Ego and Avarice play a role here.)Never mind. I went on writing for Bill Hamling's Nightstand Books until a break with my agent deprived me of the market, and I can't regret that, either, because it's safe to say I'd stayed too long at the fair, and would have stayed longer still if given the chance. Instead, I took a job editing a numismatic magazine in Wisconsin and went on writing fiction in my free time. I placed some stories with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART with Gold Medal, and then I wrote THE THIEF WHO COULDN'T SLEEP, which turned out to be the first of a series about a fellow named Evan Tanner. This was the first book in a voice that was uniquely mine, and the most satisfying work I'd ever done. I went on to write a total of seven books about Tanner (an eighth would follow after a 28-year interval) along with a couple of other crime novels, and then one day I got a call from my agent, Henry Morrison. Berkley Books wanted to launch a line of erotic novels, but on a different level from the old Midwood/Nightstand/Beacon ilk. It was 1968, censorship had essentially vanished, and American letters from top to bottom was embracing the sexual revolution and the new freedom. As Cole Porter might have put it, some authors who'd once been stuck with better words were now free to use four-letter words. Meanwhile, I was going through a period of discontent with the whole notion of fiction. I had nothing against the idea of making things up, but the artificiality of the novel suddenly rubbed me the wrong way. Narration, whether first person or third person, was a weird voice in one's ear. Who are you? Why are you telling me this? And why should I believe you?What appealed more were books that presented themselves as documents. Fictional diaries, fictional collections of letters, whatever. Yes, of course they were novels, we knew they were novels, but they took the form of actual documents. Thus THIRTY, which would be a diary kept by a woman in her thirtieth year. I had just reached that age myself, and while I recognized it as a landmark, it seemed to me that turning thirty was rather a bigger deal for a woman than for a man, that it was very much a turning point. So I plunged in, and I strove throughout to write what Jan would have written in an actual diary, leaving things out, skipping days altogether, and letting characters come into and go out of her life, and events pile one on the other, the way they really do, with less pattern and logic than one typically demands of fiction. I just read the book prefatory to writing this book description, and I was surprised how much I liked it. (And how little of it I recalled.) I decided from the jump to put Jill Emerson's name on it, a name I'd shelved after WARM AND WILLING and ENOUGH OF SORROW. So Jill was back in business, and she'd go on to write two more books for Berkley's sexy series, both of them pseudo-documents like THIRTY. This ebook edition of THIRTY contains, as a bonus, the first chapter of the fifth Jill Emerson novel, THREESOME.

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