Tough Guys, Burglars and Lesbians
Lawrence Block wrote sex scenes to get started. Then Bernie Rhodenbarr spent his protagonist career stumbling over dead bodies.
Lawrence Block is best known for mixing it up and writing about tough guys like Matthew Scudder and then more sophisticated burglars like Bernie Rhodenbarr. But he got his start writing a novel about something totally different. Lesbians.
His first novel, Strange Are the Ways of Love, was written under the pseudonym, Lesley Evans. “It was not erotica,” he says. “It was a sensitive novel of the lesbian experience, published in 1959 by Crest, then the country’s premier publisher of lesbian fiction.”
Why begin your writing career with sex scenes instead of car chases and bombs in midair?
“It was the writing equivalent of Manhattan real estate,” he told an audience at Otto Penzer’s Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan years ago. “You really couldn’t screw up.”
Block later wrote erotica in his early years before he became famous for Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr. Like he told his Manhattan audience, it paid the bills.
My favorite series is Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr books. Rhodenbarr fronts as a used bookstore owner but in reality burgles Manhattan apartments for a living. What I love about his books is each time he goes to burglarize someone’s home, he stumbles upon a murder victim inside. He then spends the rest of the book proving he didn’t do it by finding who did. And oh, Bernie Rhodenbarr’s best friend is Carolyn Kaiser, a lesbian poodle groomer whose shop is a few doors down from his. Well, of course.
Block and many other authors will appear in an upcoming anthology I’m writing about how famous authors got their start. CrimeReads.com has been serializing my stories monthly. You can also read those stories on my website, Rick.Pullen.com. They, and much more, will show up in book-form in the future.
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Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice.
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