I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m most often identified as the creator of series characters. My two active series, concerning a bookselling burglar named Rhodenbarr and a sober drunk named Scudder, are the ones people are most likely to know about. Readers with a wider range may be familiar as well with a series of seven novels about an insomniac named Tanner. And there have been four novels each about a horny kid named Harrison and an introspective killer named Keller. Hardly anybody, asked to name all of my series, would come up with The Specialists. A fat lot they know. As far as I’m concerned, The Specialists is unequivocally a series novel. As it happens, the series is only one book long. But I figure it’s a series just the same. In the spring of 1966 I moved into a big old house on a small old lot smack in the middle of New Brunswick, New Jersey. I set up an office for myself on the third floor. I had a massive old desk, and the movers couldn’t get the thing up the last flight of stairs. It wouldn’t fit. Most desks of that vintage disassemble, but not this sucker. They had to cut the hind legs off it. I propped up the back of the desk with two short stacks of paperback novels, plopped a typewriter on the top of it, and went to work.Three and a half years later, when we moved to a place in the country, I left the desk right there, and I left the books to keep it from tilting. By that time the desk didn’t owe me a dime, because I’d sat at it and written a whole slew of books. I’d already written the first Tanner book in Racine, Wisconsin, but I wrote the other six in New Brunswick, along with After the First Death and Such Men Are Dangerous and more pseudonymous work than I’ll admit to at the moment. I also wrote The Specialists at that desk. My then agent (and still friend) Henry Morrison suggested I might try to come up with a series, and he liked the idea of a troupe of guys working together, in the tried-and-true manner of A League of Gentlemen. I hadn’t read the book in question, but I got the idea. And I wrote a couple of chapters and an outline and pitched the idea as a series to an editor at (I think) Dell. Whoever she was, and wherever she was, she thought it sounded good, and I went home to my desk to finish the first book. I finished the book without a problem, and Henry liked it, and he sent it over to Dell. While I’d been breezing along on the book, the editor who’d liked the idea had gone somewhere else, and her replacement didn’t like the idea, or the book, either. Henry took it back and sent it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal, who liked it just fine. I signed a contract, and then I got a call from Henry. “Knox was wondering,” he said, “if The Specialists is the first volume of a series. Shall I tell him yes, and that you’re already hard at work on the next installment?” “God, no,” I said. “Huh?” “Tell him it’s complete in and of itself,” I said. “But I thought—” “So did I,” I said, “and it turns out we were both wrong. Because I like the book, and I sort of enjoyed writing it, but when I finished it I realized something. I don’t want to write about those guys again, ever. I liked them as characters, and it’s the kind of book I like to read, but it turns out it’s not the kind of book I like to write.” There was a pause. Then Henry said, “That’s really strange.” “I know it is.” “I was sure it was going to turn out to be a series.” “So was I, and we were right. It’s a series. But it’s a very short series.” “Just one book long.” “Just one book long,” I agreed. “But a series nonetheless.” And that’s what it is. I hope you enjoy it. And who knows? Maybe someday I will want to write about these guys again. . .

VIGILANTE? VICTIM? VILLAIN?Where is your breaking point? Would you defy the law in pursuit of justice? How far would you have to be pushed before you got…blood on your hands?Nineteen gripping crime and mystery stories reveal the transgressions ordinary people commit when they feel they have no other choice. What should be a marriage of wealth and privilege contains only dark secrets of the heart. A long-ago crime of passion on the lake returns to haunt everyone involved. A widow plots a unique revenge against the man who indirectly killed her husband. And an amateur detective tries to solve the murder of two exotic dancers…and finds a killer hiding in plain sight.Edited and with a new foreword by New York Times-bestselling author and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block, Blood On Their Hands features these and other tales of men and women who have crossed that line between law and lawlessness. Read on to find...

SUMMARY: In the era before he created moody private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, sleepless spy Evan Tanner, and the amiable hit man Keller—and years before his first Edgar Award—a young writer named Lawrence Block submitted a story titled "You Can't Lose" to Manhunt magazine. It was published, and the rest is history. One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master—an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

Keller’s a hit man. For years now he’s had places to go and people to kill. But enough is enough. He’s got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, and guess what? One more job. Paid in advance, so what’s he going to do? Give the money back? In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning he’s picking out stamps for his collection (Sweden 1–5, the official reprints) at a shop in Urbandale when somebody guns down the charismatic governor of Ohio. Back at his motel, Keller’s watching TV when they show the killer’s face. And there’s something all too familiar about that face… Keller calls his associate Dot in White Plains, but there is no answer. He’s stranded halfway across the country, every cop in America’s just seen his picture, his ID and credit cards are no longer good, and he just spent almost all of his cash on the stamps. Now what?

In his brilliant follow-up to In Sunlight or In Shadow, Lawrence Block has gathered together the best talent from popular fiction to produce an anthology as inventive as it is alluring, including Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, David Morrell, and Jeffery Deaver.Even before Lawrence Block could rest on his laurels from In Sunlight or In Shadow, a question arose. What would he do for an encore?Any number of artists have produced evocative work, paintings that could trigger a literary response. But none came to mind who could equal Hopper in turning out canvas after canvas. If no single artist could take Hopper's place, how about a full palette of them? Suppose each author was invited to select a painting from the whole panoply of visual art—From the cave drawings at Lascaux to a contemporary abstract canvas on which the paint has barely dried.And what a dazzling response! Joyce Carol Oates picked Le Beaux Jours by Balthus. Warren...

LAWRENCE BLOCK'S FIRST CRIME NOVEL — LOST FOR NEARLY 50 YEARS!To escape punishment for a murder he didn't mean to commit, insurance man Don Barshter has to take on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. But can he find safety in the skin of another man...a worse man...a sinner man...?