One Night Stands and Lost Weekends Review

Lawrence Block is one of my favorite crime novelists, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and a four-time winner of the Edgar and Shamus Awards, best known for his series of novels featuring alcoholic private eye Matt Scudder. However, I am partial to his early work, some of which (Mona, Lucky at Cards, A Diet of Treacle) has recently been reissued as part of the Hard Case Crime series.

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends collects his earliest short fiction, published in such magazines as Manhunt, Offbeat, and Guilty, plus three novellas featuring private detective Ed London, Block's first attempt at a series character, and originally brought together in book form in two limited editions published by Crippen & Landru in 1999 and 2001.

In his introduction, Block states that this is material he would be "hard put to read without cringing," but maintains that he consented to its publication because. as he says, "When faced with two courses of action, I try to pack the one that brings money into the house." 

Although Block does not think much of these stories, I have enjoyed reading them quite a bit. I'm a sucker for genre fiction of the '50s and '60s, and that's exactly what this stuff is. These pieces are little time capsules of a long-gone era, and unlike the early stories of other writers (John D. McDonald in The Good Old Stuff for one), they have not been updated for the modern audience. The downside of this is that some of the attitudes and politically incorrect misogyny on display here will be repellent for some readers. 

Block wasn't reinventing the wheel, he was developing his craft by banging out crime quickies in one sitting at a penny a word. "For God's sake," he writes, "When I wrote these, my typewriter still had training wheels on it."

Still, early Block is better than most crime writers in their prime.