Avec son amie homosexuelle carolyn, toiletteuse pour chiens, bernie rhodenbarr, le bouquiniste toujours à court d'argent, projette de cambrioler la demeure du richissime herbert colcannon qui s'est absenté de chez lui.

Malheureusement un autre cambrioleur est passé avant eux.  mais il n'a pas emporté une pièce de cinq cents qui vaudrait, si elle était authentique, une véritable fortune.  l'est-elle ? seul abel crowe, le fidèle receleur de bernie, pourrait le dire, mais il ne l'a pas plus tôt entre les mains que les ennuis commencent : meurtres et questions embarrassantes de la police. 
Notre duo s'en sortira-t-il sans trop attenter à l'ethique de spinoza ? la réponse de lawrence block, grand maître du policier américain, vaut le détour dialectique.

La spinoza connection

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.

Thirty

Bookselling burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr doesn't generally get philosophical about his criminal career. He's good at it, it's addictively exciting-and it pays a whole lot better than pushing old tomes. He steals therefore he is, period. He might well ponder, however, the deeper meaning of events at the luxurious Chelsea brownstone of Herb and Wanda Colcannon, which is apparently burgled three times on the night Bernie breaks in: once before his visit and once after. Fortunately he still manages to lift some fair jewelry and an extremely valuable coin. Unfortunately burglar or burglars number three leave Herb unconscious and Wanda dead .

The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

Longue nuit du sans-sommeil (la)

While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a sixty-year career. His instructional books for writers are leaders in the field, and his self-described pedestrian  memoir, Step By Step, has found a loyal audience in the running and racewalking community. Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linn's Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives. Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails is what he's got left over. The title piece, originally published in American Heritage, recounts the ongoing adventure Block and his wife undertook, criss-crossing  the United States and parts of Canada in their quixotic and exotic quest to find every "village, hamlet, and wide place in the road named Buffalo." Other travel tales share space with a remembrance of his mother, odes to New York, a disquisition on pen names and book tours, and, well, no end of bent nails not worth straightening. Where else will you find "Raymond Chandler and the Brasher Doubloon, " an assessment of that compelling writer from a numismatic standpoint? Where else can you read about Block's collection of old subway cars?Highly recommended.

Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails

Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone legit -- almost -- as the new owner of a used bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village. Of course, dusty old tomes don't always turn a profit, so to make ends meet, Bernie's forced, on occasion, to indulge in his previous occupation: burglary. Besides which, he likes it. Now a collector is offering Bernie an opportunity to combine his twin passions by stealing a very rare and very bad book-length poem from a rich man's library. The heist goes off without a hitch. The delivery of the ill-gotten volume, however, is a different story. Drugged by the client's female go-between, Bernie wakes up in her apartment to find the book gone, the lady dead, a smoking gun in his hand, and the cops at the door. And suddenly he's got to extricate himself from a rather sticky real-life murder mystery and find a killer -- before he's booked for Murder One.

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling

Big-time dope dealer Kenan Khoury is a wealthy man, and it comes as no surprise when his wife Francine is kidnapped and a ransom demanded. Kenan pays up and his wife is duly returned to him - in small pieces left in the boot of an abandoned car, leaving private eye Matt Scudder to speculate on the motives of a very unusual kidnapper. Soon he is on the trail of a pair of ruthlessly sadistic psycopaths whose insanely cruel games have only just begun...

La balade entre les tombes

Résumer un roman policier, c'est un peu comme montrer une stripteaseuse nue avant son numéro d'effeuillage. Alors, mieux vaut ne donner que des indices. Avec ça on pourra recoller les morceaux (en refermant le livre, le lecteur comprendra ce que ça veut dire).
Francine Khoury, la crème des femmes, se fait enlever et ça se passe mal. Si mal que son mari Kenan Khoury, trafiquant de drogue, fait appel à un privé, Matt Scudder, un ancien flic, qui a décroché de la police et de l'alcool et qui renonce à aller avec sa petite amie call-girl en Irlande rejoindre son copain en cavale pour s'occuper de l'affaire. Il est honnête comme pas un, mais plein de ressources. Et puis il a  T.J., jeune black de 15-16 ans, toujours à court de quarters mais jamais d'idées, les Kong, à savoir Jimmy Hong et David King, capables de bidouiller n'importe quel système informatique plus quelques vieux collèges.
Ca n'est pas de trop quand on est face à des ravisseurs particulièrement ignobles et qui n'en sont pas à leur premier coup.
Pour qu'un trafiquant de drogue de Brooklyn engage un Alcoolique anonyme, c'est qu'il n'a pas le choix. Pour qu'un privé s'émeuve, c'est que l'affaire est moche. Si moche que Matt Scudder est sûr que les ravisseurs de Mme Khoury n'en sont pas à leur premier coup. Ni au dernier.

Cendrillon mon amour

Shadows, which was not only the debut of Jill Emerson but my own very first novel, is the story of a young woman, Jan Marlowe, who comes to New York fresh out of college, takes an apartment in the Bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and seeks to find herself-and specifically to come to terms with the puzzling question of sexual identity. Well then... One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: Shadows. At the time I was working as an editor at a shady literary agency, but I'd already arranged for my departure, as come fall I'd be resuming college in Ohio. Sometime in May I gave up my room at the Alexandria and went home to Buffalo, where I turned that outline into a book. My agent sent it to Crest Books, then the country's premier publisher of lesbian fiction. They spent a couple of months reading it and thinking it over, during which time I wrote and sold several lesser books to Harry Shorten's Midwood Books. Then, a couple of months after I'd returned to Antioch and gone through a lot of sturm und drang that needn't concern us here, Crest accepted Shadows. They changed my title to Strange Are the Ways of Love. They also changed my pen name. I'd known a lesbian novel ought to have a woman's name on it, and I picked one. They decided on Leslie Evans instead, so it could be gender-neutral, and then switched it to Lesley Evans, which made it more specifically female. Welcome to publishing, young man. It's clear to me now, some 60 years later, that the book ought to set sail under its original title, and since I'm republishing it myself, that's a decision I get to make. It's also clear to me that Shadows is in fact Jill Emerson's very first novel, as it's far more of a piece with Warm And Willing and Enough of Sorrow than with anything else I've written. So that's how I'll publish it, right? As Shadows, dammit, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. You got a problem with that?

La spinoza connection

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