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Loading... The Crime of Our Livesby Lawrence Block
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) datrappert | Oct 26, 2023 |  After that beginning, which is basically an interesting forward, the author explains how the whole writing thing began all those many years ago in “My Life In Crime.” Along with explaining his past, Mr. Block goes on to consider the past of the mystery field and well as how he sees things today. In essence, he gives a sort of “the state of the mystery” and finds our union to be in very good shape. That section segues into a detailed list of his sixteen favorites. As mentioned before, if you made his list it means that not only were you an author (a good thing), you are most certainly dead (not such a good thing). You may not be a deceased parrot, but you are most certainly dead. (gratuitous Monty Python reference.) For each of the sixteen authors listed, Mr. Block has a few paragraphs covering a favorite book or two and why they made the cut beyond being dead and all. While the list it is something to aspire to in a future updated version of the book, it certainly is not something one wishes to rush into considering the consequences. Then it is on to the introduction that Lawrence Block wrote for various books over the years. The introductions not only reference the book it was written for, but put the work and author into context through a variety of means and mediums. The result is a book of introductions that serve, if you will, as a crash course in movies, books, and history over the years that every mystery/crime reader should be aware of. In fact, the same can be said for the entire book. One could easily develop quite the reading list, a movie list, and a couple of other lists based on the inferences and works cited in The Crime Of Our Lives. While some of the authors mentioned in the introduction section are still alive and producing new works such as Mary Higgins Clark, Ed Gorman, among others, the majority of the authors mentioned are no longer with us. Fortunately, their books still are so, after you read this one, you have a lot of reading and watching to do. The Crime Of Our Lives Lawrence Block http://www.lawrenceblock.com Self-Published March 2015 ASIN: B00V9EEBDI E-Book (also available in print) 221 Pages $9.99 In recent months I have been honored to receive unsolicited e-book review copies of the author’s work. Such is the case here as I received this some time back for my use in an objective review. Kevin R. Tipple ©2015 (  )1  kevinrtipple | Jun 21, 2015 | no reviews | add a review
An MWA Grand Master tells it straight: Fredric Brown: "When I read Murder Can Be Fun, I had a bottle of bourbon on the table and every time Brown's hero took a drink, I had a snort myself. This is a hazardous undertaking when in the company of Brown's characters, and, I've been given to understand, would have been just as dangerous around the author himself. By the time the book was finished, so was I." Raymond Chandler: "You have to wonder how he got it so right. He spent a lot of time in the house-working, reading, writing letters. He saw to his wife, who required a lot of attention in her later years. And when he did get out, you wouldn't find him walking the mean streets. La Jolla, it must be noted, was never much for mean streets." Evan Hunter: "In his mid-seventies, after a couple of heart attacks, an aneurysm, and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his larynx, Evan wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on Becca in Jeopardy, with every intention of working his way through the alphabet. Don't you love it? Here's a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and he's perfectly comfortable launching a twenty-six book series." Donald E. Westlake's Memory: "Here's the point: Don's manuscript arrived, and we had dinner and put the kid to bed, and I started reading. And my wife went to bed, and I stayed up reading, and after a while I forgot I was having a heart attack, and just kept reading until I finished the book around dawn. And somewhere along the way I became aware that my friend Don, who'd written a couple of mysteries and some science fiction and his fair share of soft-core erotica, had just produced a great novel." Charles Willeford: "Can a self-diagnosed sociopath be at the same time an intensely moral person? Can one be a sociopath, virtually unaware of socially prescribed morality, and yet be consumed with the desire to do the right thing? That strikes me as a spot-on description of just about every character Willeford ever wrote. How could he come up with characters like that? My God, how could he help it?" An MWA Grand Master and a multiple winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Maltese Falcon awards, Lawrence Block's reflections and observations come from over a half century as a writer of bestselling crime fiction. . Several of his novels have been filmed, most recently A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson. While he's best known for his novels and short fiction, along with his books on the craft of writing, that's not all he's written. THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES collects his observations and personal reminiscences of the crime fiction field and some of its leading practitioners. He has a lot to say, and he says it here in convincing and entertaining fashion. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.0872Literature English (North America) American fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Mystery fictionRatingAverage: (3.5)
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