I read my first Lawrence Block book in 1994. I was living in Ottumwa, a small, dying town in Southern Iowa. I came to work for the newspaper there. My goal was to be gone in a year; I turned in my two-week notice somewhere around my first anniversary. There was little to recommend the town, but if nothing else, I took away a love affair with Block’s work. I found that first book, A Ticket to the Boneyard, on the shelves of the library there. Over the course of the rest of the year, I read 12 more Block books, found at that library, back at the Iowa City library (where I kept a card because my visits occurred just often enough to justify it) and bookstores. Since, I’ve read several Block books every year – only twice have I only read one – and have read at least 60 to date.

The latest on my list is a bittersweet affair. Step By Step, his memoir about his years racewalking, may also be his last. In a wide-ranging interview done for a story to preview an appearance he’ll make Thursday in Cedar Rapids, we talked about the book, prospects for more, his early days and much more. We talked so much that I've split things in two, with the more general discussion about the book over at CorridorBuzz.com, and the more specific information about writing over here. I've spoken with Block a few times, most recently for TIRBD in 2007.

In this most recent interview, I asked about the general malaise he mentions in Step by Step regarding writing.

“I may really not write another book,” he said. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if I’m done writing novels. I may have tapped out that well.”

If that’s the case, Block leaves most of us die-hard fans with a full bookshelf of great books. Step by Step is a worthy addition to that list. It’s a fascinating look at a part of Block’s life that most of us knew little about. Anyone who has followed his newsletter for a while knew about his racewalking, but certainly not the extent – or success – of his efforts.

Of course, it’s not all about racewalking. He spends considerable time talking about his early days, both as a kid and as a young novelist. This is his second stab at a memoir, and if the parts about his earliest stabs at writing are any indication, a true writing memoir would be a goldmine for fans. He tried once, but set it aside in part because he didn’t think he had reached a point where he wanted to rehash his career.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said about revisiting the project. “I was a little young to be writing a memoir, but now, if I’m every going to do it, I’d better do it while I still have some brain cells. The reaction to (Step by Step) may dictate that.”

Block has made it clear on many occasions that he doesn’t go back and re-read his own work. “I have no trouble reading other people’s very early work, while they may,” he said. “A look at one’s early efforts means also a look at an earlier self that I may not welcome a view of. But the simple fact that I didn’t want to read the stuff didn’t mean others shouldn’t.”

That’s one way of explaining why, after years of seeming to shrug off overtures to do so, he has embraced Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime imprint, allowing Ardai to reissue five of his early, long out-of-print titles to date.

Block said he has received better reviews for these reprints than for his own work: “ ‘It’s Block at the top of his form before the slow heartbreaking decline of his later years,’” he joked.

He said that may come to an end, however, because he doesn’t think the other early books he might republish fit Ardai’s imprint.

“There’s various early work that isn’t really crime fiction or noir by any stretch,” he said. “I did over the years seven books under the pen name Jill Emerson. A couple of them were lesbian fiction. One of them was serialized in Redbook. My agent is trying to find a home for those to be reissued by the same publisher. Some of that was work I’m very proud of.”

It’s hard enough keeping up with Block’s output, but anyone who wants to read every word he has written has their work cut out for them. He said in his early writing years he contracted with a publisher to crank out a book a month, and wrote at least 20 books a year for a couple of years. Most of those were under pseudonyms. He might not remember all of them, but he said he can usually figure out if a pseudonymous title is really his.

“I shared my pen names on the earliest work,” he said. “As a result, a lot more books published under some pen names of mine than I actually wrote. With those, I may not have recollections of the book, but can read a couple of pages and know that I wrote it. There are others that even
after a stroke I couldn’t have written.”

I told him that while Step by Step was nonfiction, it was still very clearly his because the voice and tone were so distinctly Block-like.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t trying to write in a voice other than my own,” he said. That wasn’t always the case. “I completed an unfinished Cornell Woolrich novel. Doing that, I purposely was trying to write in Woolrich’s style. A little choppier than my own. I found myself just going into that voice. Yes, I can believe that it might be recognizable, because I can remember very early on when Ross Thomas published his first Oliver Bleeck novel. It was said it was a pseudonym of another writer. I was a chapter into that and just knew it was Ross Thomas.”

There likely are many reasons that Block writes a lot, but one of them is simply because it is his job. He mentions finances a lot in Step by Step, usually in terms of having to finish a book to make sure money keeps coming in the door. I asked him if there is a disconnect between perception and reality in the minds of readers who assume that New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block is surely rolling in dough.

“I once had a conversation with Evan Hunter about the way we’re perceived,” he said. “Evan did quite well as a writer, but he got a letter from some joker at a college somewhere that for a donation of $10 million they’d put his name on a building somewhere. He asked me, ‘How much do they think we make?’

“A fan wrote in and said, ‘If you’re doing these book tours regularly you really should investigate this thing where you can be a part owner of a private plane. So, yes, people get a skewed idea. There are people who have high seven and eight figure writing incomes annually. Because the nature of the business is such that what draws the headlines is indeed money, most of the story in the press about writers is what they make, it’s the numbers in the deal that get the ink. But the figure that’s announced is not always the figure that you get.”

So, he said he will continue to write. That might not mean new novels, he said, but a recent satisfying project to write a screenplay for his Matthew Scudder novel A Ticket to the Boneyard was “demanding and gratifying,” and he’d like to do more of that kind of work.

He hasn’t used those words to describe the films that have been made of his books to date (he writes quite amusingly in Step by Step about seeing a Spanish-dubbed version of “Eight Million Ways to Die” while hiking in Spain. A new language did nothing to improve it.), but is willing to keep trying.

“When I finish writing a book I can do so with the fairly strong expectation that it will be published and that it will find whatever audience it will find,” he said. “A screenplay is not a finished work. On the one hand, I’ve been unhappy with the three films that have been made of books of mine, but on the other hand, so has everybody else. It’s not the author being peckish here. I’ve never been sorry they were made. I’ve been decently paid for my participation in that.
It’s remarkable enough that any project gets off the ground and gets shot.”

Perhaps Step by Step will garner some publicity and help in that regard. Ironically enough, the book is raising his profile in a way his mystery novels have not. Though he is a bestselling novelist, he usually gets a fraction of the ink devoted to folks like John Grisham or Michael Connelly.

“It seems to me I’m getting more interview requests than usual for a book of mine. I did an interview with somebody at the sports department at USA Today, and one with the book department at USA Today,” he says. “The sports department has never had occasion to contact me, and the book department usually finds ways to ignore me.”

Labels: books, Lawrence Block