Library's review
I've long been a fan of Lawrence Block's writing. He is astoundingly prolific, and remarkably versatile. Three of his series are among my favorites, and they are very different in tone: The [Matthew Scudder] series about an alcoholic ex-cop turned private eye is dark and gritty; the [Bernie
Alex Penn is serving a life sentence for murdering a prostitute when he is released on a technicality. He's lost everything from his previous life — his wife, his job as a history professor, his purpose. So it's not surprising that he goes on a drunken bender, but when he wakes up in a seedy hotel room with a dead prostitute lying on the floor even he can hardly believe it. He has no memory of killing her but he's sure he must have, based on his history and the similarity to his original crime. It isn't until after he's fled the scene and is trying to figure out what to do next that he remembers snippets of the night and realizes that there was someone else in the room. He's been framed — but by who? Who hated him enough to frame him the first time to get sent to prison, and then do it again when he's released? He doesn't know, but he knows his only chance of staying out of prison is to find out.
Block is one of those writers who makes it look so easy. His style is breezy and effortless. There are few if any soaring flights of poetic language, but there is a conversational tone and compulsive readability to his work that reminds in some ways of Stephen King (though without all the supernatural hoo-ha). Unlike King, there's nary an unnecessary word or sidebar to bloat the book into an exercise in reader frustration. Block is lean, mean, and clean.
This early example of crime noir isn't Block's best work, but it's nothing for him to be ashamed of, either. If you like crime fiction of that era, I suspect you'll like this one quite a bit.
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Rhodenbarr] series about a bookseller/burglar is lighthearted and comical; and the [Hit Man] series about neurotic hired killer Keller is somewhere in between. You'd think writing three successful series (actually, he has two other series that I have not yet tackled) would be enough for any one man, but Block also wrote a plethora of standalone noir crime novels when he was starting out in the 1950s and 1960s. He's begun re-issuing these in e-editions under the umbrella title of Classic Crime Library and that's where I picked up this one.Alex Penn is serving a life sentence for murdering a prostitute when he is released on a technicality. He's lost everything from his previous life — his wife, his job as a history professor, his purpose. So it's not surprising that he goes on a drunken bender, but when he wakes up in a seedy hotel room with a dead prostitute lying on the floor even he can hardly believe it. He has no memory of killing her but he's sure he must have, based on his history and the similarity to his original crime. It isn't until after he's fled the scene and is trying to figure out what to do next that he remembers snippets of the night and realizes that there was someone else in the room. He's been framed — but by who? Who hated him enough to frame him the first time to get sent to prison, and then do it again when he's released? He doesn't know, but he knows his only chance of staying out of prison is to find out.
Block is one of those writers who makes it look so easy. His style is breezy and effortless. There are few if any soaring flights of poetic language, but there is a conversational tone and compulsive readability to his work that reminds in some ways of Stephen King (though without all the supernatural hoo-ha). Unlike King, there's nary an unnecessary word or sidebar to bloat the book into an exercise in reader frustration. Block is lean, mean, and clean.
This early example of crime noir isn't Block's best work, but it's nothing for him to be ashamed of, either. If you like crime fiction of that era, I suspect you'll like this one quite a bit.
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Fiction. Mystery. It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why, before the police do.
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Original language
English