Two events last week led to this blog’s headline. The first was reading A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block, the bestselling author of more than 50 mystery novels. This self-published memoir tells the story of his writing career up to the point where he published his first hardcover novel in 1966.
It’s a tale of his beginnings in the 1950s, when he was honing his writing chops by contributing short stories and novellas to pulp fiction magazines. They were known as such because they were printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, Nothing to do with the Quentin Tarantino movie of that name. Block, the 1994 recipient of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, sold his first short story in 1957 to Manhunt, a crime pulp magazine. Continue reading “Pulp Fiction, Mystery Author Lawrence Block – And Me”