Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block (born June 24, 1938) is an American crime writer best known for two long-running New York-set series about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Block was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994. Lawrence Block was born June 24, 1938 in Buffalo, New York, where he was raised. He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, but left before graduating. Block's earliest work, published pseudonymously in the 1950s, was mostly in the soft-porn mass market paperback industry, an apprenticeship he shared with fellow mystery author Donald E. Westlake. Block describes the early sex novels as a valuable experience, noting that despite the titillating content of the books (rather mild by later standards of adult fiction) he was expected to write fully developed novels with plausible plots, characters and conflicts. He further credits the softcore novels as a factor in his prolific output; writing 15 to 20 sex novels per year to support himself financially, Block was forced to learn to write in a manner that required little revision and editing of his first drafts. His first novel was a lesbian fiction titled Strange Are The Ways of Love, written under the name Lesley Evans. In 2016, Block reissued this novel with a new title Shadows, under another of his pseudonyms, Jill Emerson.