A Trawl Among The Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020

By Terry Zobeck

A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020 will delight Lawrence Block's many fans and collectors with its exhaustive and authoritative detailing of his work, much of which will be new to even the most ardent of collectors. And it includes a delightful afterword by Lawrence Block in which he recounts a long-lost and forgotten erotic novel which led to its discovery and documentation in the Bibliography.

Block is one of crime fiction's most popular and honored authors. He's won nearly every conceivable award the mystery field has to offer. A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020 documents the many novels and short stories that have earned him this acclaim, and all of the other publications—memoir, books-for-writers, essays, erotic novels and sexual advice books, nonfiction, and magazine columns—he's written in a career spanning more than 60 years. More than 800 titles in all.

A Trawl Among the Shelves is the most comprehensive and authoritative documentation of Block's writing ever due to his full cooperation with its compilation. He provided essential assistance in identifying long forgotten books, articles and essays. Block is well-known for writing under many pen-names. A Trawl Among the Shelves identifies nearly a dozen previously undocumented pseudonyms used by him early in his career.

Readers will find the definitive listing of Block's erotic paperback novels from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fans have long sought to sort fact from rumor about the authorship of these highly collectible titles. Block reviewed his files and memory and confirmed his authorship of a dozen Andrew Shaw titles he had long been suspected of having written and rejected a few others. In addition, he recollected several books, articles, essays and columns no one ever suspected existed.

A Trawl Among the Shelves is sure to become the standard bibliographic reference for Lawrence Block's publications and an indispensable guide for fans, collectors and scholars interested in genre literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry Zobeck
• Release date: Mar 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781386763192

Book preview

Cover, A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020

A Trawl Among The Shelves:

Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958–2020

by Terry Zobeck

With an Afterword by Lawrence Block

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Copyright © 2020, Terry Zobeck

All Rights Reserved.

A Kat Production

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For Sandy, with Love

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Table of Contents

Introduction

A. Separate Publications

B. First-Appearance Contributions to Books

C. First-Appearance in Periodicals

D. Ephemera

E. Music/Films/Television/Radio/Stage

F. Unlocated

G. Juvenilia

The Man Who Wrote Too Much: An Afterword by Lawrence Block

Appendix (List of Titles Currently in Print and/or eBook)

Introduction

The first book I read by Lawrence Block was A Ticket to the Boneyard in 1990. I was instantly hooked on Matt Scudder. In short order I obtained copies of all the earlier entries in the series. Then I began to read Block’s short stories that appeared at a steady pace in anthologies and periodicals such as Playboy and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. But for years I was resistant to the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels. I favored hard-boiled detective stories; I didn’t care for crime fiction leavened with humor.

One day, however, my resistance crumbled when I read Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. I was won over completely by Block’s voice, style, characters, plot, and, dare I say, humor. It wasn’t long before I was collecting everything by the man that I could find. There are a handful of writers for whom I am a compulsive completist in my collecting—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, James Lee Burke and Patrick O’Brian are a few; Lawrence Block was added to that list. Despite the quality of his work, I might have had second thoughts embarking on that collecting journey had I known how much of it there was.

Initially, I relied upon A.S.A.P. Publishing’s Lawrence Block Bibliography: 1958–1993. It didn’t appear to be too daunting a task to try and collect it all. The bibliography was notable for its documentation of his early magazine appearances that were subsequently collected in One Night Stands, and for the deliberate exclusion of his pseudonymous sex novels, of which I knew nothing and was content in my continued ignorance if the author didn’t think them worthy of claiming.

Within the year I had all of those early magazine appearances and was building quite a large collection of books and magazines. A few years ago, when Larry decided to reprint some of those sex novels I decided the original editions had to be added to the collection. It recently struck me that the earlier bibliography, with the passage of time and Larry’s newfound willingness to reclaim early work, was woefully incomplete and out of date. So, I decided an updated Lawrence Block bibliography was needed.

• • •

Lawrence Block has been a professional writer for more than 60 years. In all of that time not a year has gone by that he hasn’t published at least one book, short story, column, article, or essay; frequently, more than one of each. The first fiction for which he was paid was You Can’t Lose in the February 1958 issue of Manhunt, the digest-sized successor to such pulps as Black Mask and Dime Detective. Later that year, his first novel, Carla, was published by Midwood, one of the many paperback publishers exploiting the burgeoning market for soft-core sex novels. The author was identified as Sheldon Lord*, the first of many pseudonyms that Block was to use as a professional writer.

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* Typically, Block’s pseudonyms were of his own devising; they were not house names for the various publishers. On occasion he loaned them out to others to ghostwrite novels under them, collecting a fee for the privilege. Other times, publishers used them without his permission for other writers, which explains why additional titles by Andrew Shaw and Sheldon Lord continued to appear long after Block ceased using them.

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More than 60 years later Block is still in the game, writing new novels, novellas and short stories, editing highly-praised anthologies, compiling collections of some of his fugitive non-fiction pieces, and reclaiming many of his early pseudonymous works via established publishers and his own LB Productions imprint.

American hard-boiled/noir fiction has become one of the most influential and popular genres of literature since its emergence in the 1920s and Lawrence Block is one of its premier current practitioners, following in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, while expanding upon what they created. His reputation in this genre rests especially upon his novels and stories featuring unlicensed private investigator Matthew Scudder and several stand-alone novels, including Small Town, Getting Off and The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes.

His imagination and talents, however, stretch beyond the confines of the hard-boiled and noir to include the humorous exploits of Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookseller by day, burglar by night; the cases of defense lawyer Martin Ehrengraf, whose crimes are more numerous and deadly than those of his clients; the thrillers of Evan Tanner, the spy who never sleeps; and the adventures of John Keller, the introspective hit man who invests his earning in rare stamps. Then there are his sensitive lesbian novels and numerous soft-core sex novels, non-fiction sex advice books, and mainstream, speculative fiction, thriller, and adventure novels. And, there are his stints working as a columnist for writer’s, numismatist, philatelic, men’s and mystery magazines.

Block has won nearly every conceivable award for his writing, including four each of the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, the Cartier Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement from the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain, and a Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America. But, as he has noted on several occasions, while the awards are appreciated and gratifying, it is really all about the work itself. And that is what this bibliography is all about, the work.

From the age of 18, it is about the only job that he has had. Other than a few short-term jobs as a youth, there were the several months in the late 1950s when he worked at the Scott Meredith agency reading the slush pile, the year-and-a-half in the mid-1960s he worked in the corporate world for Whitman Numismatic Journal, and the brief period following the Whitman job when he worked in advertising.

But these jobs were still within the writing game. Block has written that he learned more about how to write from all the bad writing he read while at the Scott Meredith agency. At Whitman, in addition to his duties as Associate Editor, he wrote book reviews, articles, and a regularly appearing column on English coins. As an adman his skill with words was certainly an advantage.

The present bibliography follows from A.S.A.P.’s 1993 volume. It’s been more than 25 years since that publication. Not only has Block published a tremendous amount of work—novels, short stories, articles, columns, essays—since then, but the earlier bibliography focused almost exclusively on his crime fiction—novels and short stories—and, at Block’s insistence, ignored his sex novels. In his essay, Pen Names and Other Subterfuge written for the A.S.A.P. bibliography, Block explained these books were not of the quality that deserved to be preserved and that he preferred them to remain orphaned. He offered the following response to fans who brought their tattered paperbacks to his in-store signings, And you expect me to sign this crap?

But time, avarice and a delayed recognition of the merits of some of these books, persuaded Block to begin reprinting them. The advent of print-on-demand and the relative ease of self-publishing in the modern digital age aided in his decision to make them available again. Up until 2020, 40 of these early volumes had been claimed and republished by Block. Recently, Larry has decided to donate his papers to the University of South Carolina’s Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. In preparation for sending them the papers, he searched through his equivalent of the battered tin dispatch box and located files that helped him confirm which of the remaining unclaimed Andrew Shaw titles were indeed his. Subsequently, he decided to claim and reprint them in 2020 in his Classic Erotica series.

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The genesis of the current bibliography was in a phone call I received in the spring of 2012 from Ed Kaufman, the former proprietor of the M Is for Mystery bookstore in San Mateo, California. Ed had retired and closed the bookstore but he was still keenly interested in the field. He had contacted Block about his interest in updating the A.S.A.P. bibliography. Block, knowing that I was a completist collector of his work, suggested Ed contact me, which he did. Over the next several months, Ed and I