Authors: Lawrence Block
April North (18 page)
“I read nothing else,” I replied.
Well, it got a good laugh. In point of fact I do sometimes reread books of mine. But I find it virtually impossible to look over my very early work. I’m not sure what it is that puts me off. It may be that my writing ability has—thank God!—increased over time, and that the work of my less skillful earlier self seems amateurish, clumsy, and wooden. It seems just as likely that it’s the young author I don’t want to look at, that the glimpses of my younger self that the work affords embarrass me with revelations of callowness and vapidity. Or perhaps I’m just afraid to open those several closets for fear of what I might find there.
Never mind. I’m not going to reread
April North
just so I can natter on about it to you. I mean, you’ve already read the book. And it’s not
Finnegan’s Wake
. You don’t need to have me explain it to you.
Which won’t put me at a loss for words.
You know what I’ve always liked about
April North?
The title.
Which is to say that I like the protagonist’s name. Beacon must have liked it, too, because the company didn’t change the title. As a publisher, the company could be a pain in the ass, not so much because their editors changed titles but because they were apt to change everything else. A team of editorial hirelings went through every manuscript Beacon bought, and if they didn’t make changes on just about every page—just arbitrary rewording to no apparent purpose—then they weren’t doing what they’d been hired to do and risked losing their jobs. But I didn’t realize they were doing this until I’d already published three books with them and had moved on to other things.
One thing we agreed on, though, was the title. I still like it. It sounds, I dunno, classy. And I came up with it while trying to work a variation on a theme.
My friend and colleague Hal Dresner wrote several books for Nightstand Books as Don Holliday. (Only a few, after which he leased the name to ghostwriters.) One of the ones he wrote and showed to me featured a blowsy dame whom he called June East—as a play on Mae West.
Hence April North, who had nothing else in common with either June East or Mae West. But I have to say I still like her name better than either of theirs.
The other thing I can tell you about
April North—
still without my having to read it—is that because of it I was threatened with a lawsuit.
By this time—late 1962, early 1963—I’d moved back from New York City to Buffalo, or more specifically to 48 Ebling Avenue, in the township of Tonawanda. The house had a full finished basement attractively paneled in knotty cedar, and I’d tricked out an alcove down there as an office where I wrote a little of this and a little of that, but nothing at all for Beacon. A couple of other writers were playing Sheldon Lord for me, and in return for the entrée my name afforded to Beacon Books, I was getting a little off the top. Two hundred dollars a book, if memory serves.
My agent found these writers. I never knew who they were and I’m not sure they knew who I was. But one fellow who ghosted one or two books for me was my friend Peter Hochstein, who had been my occasional college roommate. He was between jobs in the advertising business, which he professed to loathe, so he set up shop in a hotel on Broadway and Sixty-Ninth Street and knocked out a couple of books as Sheldon Lord. Then he decided he missed office life and gabbing at the water cooler, and went back to Madison Avenue.
But in the interim he did one thing he wasn’t supposed to do, which was tell the world about our ghostwriting deal. The word got around to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where we had both gone to school and where
April North
is essentially set. (The town in the book is given as Antrim and Yellow Springs is mentioned as being nearby, but although Antrim’s fictional, it might as well be Yellow Springs.)
Well. There’s a character in the book called Danny Duncan. And in Yellow Springs a Martha Duncan learned of the book, got hold of a copy, and was outraged that her son’s name had been used in the book. Now I didn’t know Martha Duncan, or Danny Duncan, either. I’d once met a Judy Duncan, who turned out to be Martha’s daughter, but the meeting was brief and unmemorable—I think I sold her a guitar—and I didn’t know she had a brother or a mother or, really, anything in the world but a thirdhand guitar.
But evidently Peter had known Martha Duncan, although not all that well, just well enough that Martha felt betrayed because Peter had gone and put her son in a book—and a marginally obscene book at that. So she wrote a letter to Peter, whom she of course believed to be the book’s author, and she sent a copy of that letter, along with a letter from her lawyer, to the folks at Beacon.
Who sent the letter to my agent, who sent it to me.
I was rattled. What concerned me most was that Beacon would now know that I’d run in a ghost. That knowledge, plus the threat of a lawsuit, might well prompt them to wash their hands of Sheldon Lord altogether. I wrote to Martha Duncan at length, telling her that I’d written the book myself, and that I didn’t know her or her son, and that the description of the book’s Danny Duncan (“a tall rangy senior who played first base on the baseball team and second-string end on the football team”) didn’t seem libelous to me.
I probably pointed out that the book was published in 1961, when Peter was still finishing up at Antioch and her son had not yet become either tall or rangy. In any event, I heard nothing further of or from Martha Duncan. And, mirabile dictu, my relationship with Beacon remained as it had been, with various ghosts writing various books. When they did, I got my two hundred dollars.
I still like the title.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.
Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in
Manhunt
, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including
American Heritage
,
Redbook
,
Playboy
,
Cosmopolitan
,
GQ
, and the
New York Times
. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including
Enough Rope
(2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.
In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in
No Score
,
Chip Harrison Scores Again
,
Make Out with Murder
, and
The Topless Tulip Caper
. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.
A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.
A four-year-old Block in 1942.
Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.
Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.
Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”
Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.
