Based on Lawrence Block's extremely popular seminar for writers. Discover Block's tips for overcoming writer's block and unleashing your creativity.

Write for Your Life

New York's a tough town. Hard to impress. Shrugs off hype, casts a cold eye on glitz. But once in a blue moon a killer with street smarts and a sense of theater will reach out and take the city by the throat. Maybe he'll write letters to a popular tabloid columnist, proclaiming himself the answer to a failed criminal justice system. Maybe he'll point a finger at the kind of villain the law can't touch. A child killer who got off on a technicality, say. A top mobster with decades of blood on his hands. A rabble-rouser who incites others to murder. Maybe he'll sign himself "Will, " as in "The Will of the People." Then suppose he takes aim at a respectable lawyer, a defense attorney with a roster of unpopular clients. Suppose the lawyer's a friend of Matt Scudder. Scudder is New York to the bone. He's as tough as the big town itself, as hard to impress. And now he's up against the self-styled Will of the People in a city with eight million ways to die, a city where not just the good guys but even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

même les scélérats

Keller is a regular guy. He goes to the movies, works on his stamp collection. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. Then every so often he gets a phone call from White Plains that sends him flying off somewhere to kill a perfect stranger. Keller is a pro and very good at what he does. But the jobs have started to go wrong. The realization is slow coming yet, when it arrives, it is irrefutable: Someone out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him, has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.

Hit List

Cold War superspy Evan Tanner lost the ability to sleep on a battlefield in Korea. So where the heck has he been since the '70s? Frozen. Cryogenically. A Tanner-sicle. Which he never thought would happen when he walked into a basement in Union City, New Jersey, more than a quarter century ago. Now he's unthawed and ready to rumble, and his somewhat addled, former super-secret boss, "the Chief, " is glad his favorite operative's active again. Tanner awoke to a different world, though some bad things have remained the same .

Tanner On Ice

Gulliver Fairborn's novel, Nobody's Baby, changed Bernie Rhodenbarr's life. And now pretty Alice Cottrell, Fairborn's one-time paramour, wants the bookselling, book-loving burglar to break into a room in New York's teeth-achingly charming Paddington Hotel and purloin some of the writer's very personal letters before an unscrupulous agent can sell them. Here's an opportunity to use his unique talents in the service of the revered, famously reclusive author. But when Bernie gets there, the agent is dead .

The Burglar in the Rye

A conman hiding out in Atlantic City lays his life on the line for a shot at a $250,000 payoff  Mona has a millionaire husband, a million-dollar figure, and hair that’s blonde to the roots. She’s just what Leonard K. Blake is looking for. Of course, that’s not his real name. Nor is it David Gavilan—that’s the one he used in Philly, before he skipped out on a $600 hotel bill and jumped a train to Atlantic City. He doesn’t have a name or a profession, but he’s got a knack for storytelling and knows just what Mona needs to hear. He also has a pair of stolen suitcases that he grabbed at the train station. They happen to contain a brick of pure heroin—enough to make him dead or make him rich—and they happen to belong to Mona’s husband. As if a good-looking blonde wasn’t trouble enough. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lawrence Block, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from his personal collection, and a new afterword written by the author.

Y a qu'à se baisser...

Twelve years ago, Matthew Scudder lied to a jury to put James Leo Motley behind bars. Now the ingenious psychopath is free. And the alcoholic ex-cop-turned-p.i. must pay dearly for his sins. Friends and former lovers -- even strangers unfortunate enough to share Scudder's name -- are turning up dead. Because a vengeful maniac is determined not to rest until he's driven his nemesis back to the bottle...and then to the boneyard.

Ticket to the Boneyard

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?

Shadows - The Jill Emerson Novels, #1

Keller, l'illustre tueur à gages, nous revient après une longue absence.
Personne ne s'en plaindra. S'il n'a pas son pareil pour occire tel ou tel, jamais il n'en tire vanité : l'important, c'est que le client soit content et que la victime ne souffre pas inutilement. Une perle. Evidemment, il y a parfois des problèmes compliqués à résoudre - lorsque, par exemple, la victime subodore qu'on lui veut du mal et demande au tueur de renvoyer l'ascenseur au commanditaire. Ne pas s'inquiéter pour si peu : avec Keller, il y aura une solution.
Radicale certes, mais quoi ? Encore une fois, le client est roi. Et les amours là-dedans ? Elles sont brèves, mais d'autant plus fortes. En tout, on sait ne jamais oublier la fin. Qui approche. Mais... l'heure de la retraite sonnerait-elle pour Keller ? Allons, donc !

Write for Your Life

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