Cale Hanniford, la cinquantaine, vient de perdre sa fille, Wendy, tuée par Richard Vanderpoel, le jeune homme avec lequel elle vivait à New York. Couvert de sang et incohérent, celui-ci a été arrêté et jeté en prison, où il s'est pendu. Pour la police le dossier est clos, cependant Hanniford veut le rouvrir : il est sûr que Richard est coupable, mais, rongé par le remords de ne pas avoir fait assez pour sa fille, il aimerait savoir pourquoi elle a fini par se prostituer et mourir assassinée.

Matt Scudder comprend vite qu'Hanniford lui ment sur un point capital. Pressé de répondre, celui-ci finit par lâcher que Wendy n'était sa fille que par adoption. Flairant l'arnaque, Scudder décide d'enquêter : la police est-elle allée trop vite en accusant le fils d'un pasteur élevé dans le strict respect de la loi divine ?

Les péchés des pères

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

Jill Emerson, whose first three works were gentle explorations of the lesbian experience, took a sharp turn toward candor in THIRTY, her first book for Berkley. As I've explained in the book description for that novel, around the time Berkley came calling (via my agent) I'd become disenchanted with the whole notion of fiction recounted by some disembodied third- or first-person narrator. It struck me as artificial, and my response was to pile artifice upon artifice and produce a novel in the guise of an actual document. In THIRTY, the novel pretended to be a diary. That worked fine, and the resultant narrative proved at once challenging and effortless to sustain. I enjoyed writing it, Berkley enjoyed publishing it-and they wanted something else. What they got in THREESOME was a novel pretending to be a novel. The premise, as you'll see, is that the book has been written by its three main characters, Harry and Rhoda and Priss, in the form of a lightly fictionalized chronicle of their own life as a menage a trois. They set about writing alternate chapters-and, reading one another's work as they go along, they learn things they hadn't known, and one thing leads to another, and-I think the phrase we want is tour de force, and how nice to be able to use it in the same book description as menage a trois. The book was also about as much fun as I've ever had while sitting at a typewriter. I've written before about THREESOME, but there's something I've never recounted, and I'm old enough now to just go ahead and do it. Back in the early 1970s I had come in from rural New Jersey to hole up in a New York hotel and work on a book-this one-and one evening after the day's work was done I drifted down to the Village and wound up in an establishment called the Kettle of Fish, on Macdougal Street. (It has since relocated to Christopher Street.) They serve strong drink there, and that night God knows they served more than enough of it to me. When I left I took a few steps and found myself in conversation with some folks in a car, a large station wagon, and they turned out to be six adolescent girls from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut, a very classy Catholic prep school. Their favorite teacher was driving, and the next thing I knew I was in the back of the vehicle with them. I guess they thought I was interestingly exotic, a drunk Bohemian writer indigenous to Greenwich Village. I in turn thought they were adorable. The teacher (an affable chap, but God only knows what he was about, and I'm sure in due course the school must have let him go) drove us back to Connecticut, and the rest of the evening was lost in nacht und nebel, as it were. I passed out on somebody's couch, woke up the next morning, and wound up taking the train back to the city with two of the young ladies. We went to my hotel room, where we may have smoked an illegal herb, and, um, necked a little. One of them saw my typewriter and asked what I was working on. I said it was a novel about a sexual relationship of two women and a man. Thoughtful pause. "I had no idea, " she said, "that you researched these things so thoroughly."They left and I never saw them again, and if the incident rings a muted bell, it's probably because I used it as the opening of another novel, RONALD RABBIT IS A DIRTY OLD MAN, which masquerades as the collected correspondence of its protagonist. And which I'll be republishing fairly soon, but in the meantime we have THREESOME. It's a personal favorite of mine; that's no reason why you should like it, but I hope you do. This ebook edition of THREESOME contains as a bonus the opening chapter of the fifth Jill Emerson novel, A MADWOMAN'S DIARY.

Threesome - The Jill Emerson Novels, #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.

Thirty

Bernie Rhodenbarr is actually trying to earn an honest living. It's been an entire year since he's entered anyone's abode illegally to help himself to their valuables. But now an unscrupulous landlord's threat to increase Bernie's rent by 1, 000% is driving the bookseller and reformed burglar back to a life of crime -- though, in all fairness, it's a very short trip. And when the cops wrongly accuse him of stealing a priceless collection of baseball cards, Bernie's stuck with a worthless alibi since he was busy burgling a different apartment at the time .

The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

Pourquoi diable la belle Ilona décide-t-elle un jour d'entrer dans la librairie du bouquiniste-cambrioleur Bernie Rhodenbarr plutôt que dans une autre ? Et pourquoi l'invite-t-elle ensuite au cinéma où l'on passe une rétrospective Bogart ? Pour qu'il tombe amoureux d'elle ? Et si, plus prosaïquement, elle couvrait des opérations bancaires louches destinées à financer une cause nationaliste perdue d'avance ?

Tel est le dilemme auquel est confronté Bernie lorsqu'il fait le lien entre cet émoi qui le trouble et la visite d'un certain Hugo Canlemas qui, moyennant finances, l'a prié de voler un porte-documents frappé d'une couronne royale.

C'est alors que de bien sinistres personnages surgissent d'un passé, certes d'opérette, mais où l'assassinat et la corruption étaient monnaie courante...

Le Bogart de la cambriole

The Cold War's boiling over. Global tensions are near the breaking point. So what's the perfect assignment for a super-spy who hasn't slept since the Korean conflict? A fun-filled trip to the Montreal World's Fair!The adorable little girl he's escorting-who, under different circumstances, would be sitting on the Lithuanian throne-can hardly contain her excitement, but it isn't all playtime for Evan Tanner. Some mysterious disappearances, apparently linked to the fair's Cuban exhibition, need to be looked into. Keeping his mind on business, however, won't be easy after an insatiable lovely in a tiger skin falls into Tanner's arms, and a mother lode of dangerous drugs falls into his lap. But the biggest, deadliest suprise is the terrorist plot Tanner's tumbling into, and he'll have to think and act quickly to prevent the visiting queen of England from being blown to smithereens.

Tanner's Tiger

C’est à une réunion des Alcooliques Anonymes que Matt Scudder et Jack Ellery se retrouvent en 1980. Enfants, ils rêvaient d'être flics, mais seul Matt l’est devenu, Jack ayant à l'inverse effectué plusieurs séjours en prison pendant ce temps. Huit mois passent. Scudder retrouve , qui ne boit toujours plus mais présente un visage tuméfié. Puis plus de nouvelles, jusqu’au jour où Gregory Stillman, le parrain AA de Jack, lui apprend que ce dernier a été assassiné et que, dans un écrit, il a raconté tous ses crimes, de sang pour certains.Que faire ? Transmettre cette confession aux flics enquêtant sur le meurtre pour qu’ils aillent questionner des gens qui n’ont rien à voir avec cette histoire ou la cacher et courir le risque de laisser filer un assassin ? Scudder prend les choses en mains et de fil en aiguille, non seulement découvre la solution, mais aussi – et c’est ce qui fait toute la beauté de ce grand livre plein de nostalgie –, retrouve tous les carrefours de sa propre existence.

Entre deux verres (Matthew Scudder, #17)

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.

Les péchés des pères

Résumé

Plus de livres de Lawrence Block

Critiques

Ce livre n'a pas encore de critiques