The Collected Mystery Stories Read online

  Lawrence Block was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2004. He is also a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. He is the author of many novels and short stories and has won numerous awards for his mystery writing. He lives and works in New York City.

  www.lawrenceblock.com

  The critics on Lawrence Block

  ‘Bull’s-eye dialogue and laser-image description … any search for false notes will prove futile … [Block’s] eye for detail is as sharp as ever, and characters almost real enough to touch abound’ New York Times Book Review

  ‘What he does best – writing popular fiction that always respects his readers’ desire to be entertained but never insults their intelligence’ GQ

  ‘There with the best … The real McCoy with a shocking twist and stylish too’ Observer

  The Collected Mystery Stories

  ‘This is not only a must-have for Block fans – it’s the perfect introduction for new readers … there is … a feast of stand-alone stories showing the extraordinary sweep of Block’s imagination. It’s no stretch to say that all criminal life is here in what amounts to a short story masterclass’

  Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News

  ‘Awesome blockbuster of an anthology … Featuring all the old favourites including reformed alcoholic ex-cop Matt Scudder, Bernie the Burglar and – best of all – Keller, the professional killer. One of the greatest crime writers at full tilt. Read him and give thanks’

  Philip Oakes, Literary Review

  ‘It is in the “New Stories” and in the Matt Scudder stories that Block’s talent is most graceful and profound’

  Bill Broun, TLS

  BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

  The Matthew Scudder Novels

  The Sins of the Fathers • Time to Murder and Create • In the Midst of Death • A Stab in the Dark • Eight Million Ways to Die • When the Sacred Ginmill Closes • Out on the Cutting Edge • A Ticket to the Boneyard • A Dance at the Slaughterhouse • A Walk Among the Tombstones • The Devil Knows You’re Dead • A Long Line of Dead Men • Even the Wicked • Everybody Dies • Hope to Die

  The Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries

  Burglars Can’t Be Choosers • The Burglar in the Closet • The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling • The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza • The Burglar Who Painted like Mondrian • The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams • The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart • The Burglar in the Library • The Burglar in the Rye

  The Adventures of Evan Tanner

  The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep • The Canceled Czech • Tanner’s Twelve Swingers • Two for Tanner • Tanner’s Tiger • Here Comes a Hero • Me Tanner, You Jane • Tanner on Ice

  The Affairs of Chip Harrison

  No Score • Chip Harrison Scores Again • Make Out with Murder • The Topless Tulip Caper

  Other Novels

  After the First Death • Ariel • Coward’s Kiss • Deadly Honeymoon • The Girl with the Long Green Heart • Hit Man • Mona • Not Comin’ Home to You • Random Walk • Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man • The Specialists • Such Men are Dangerous • The Triumph of Evil • You Could Call It Murder • Hit List

  Collected Short Stories

  Sometimes They Bite • Like a Lamb to Slaughter • Some Days You Get the Bear • Ehrengraf for the Defense • Collected Short Stories • The Collected Mystery Stories

  Anthologies

  Death Cruise • Master’s Choice

  Books for Writers

  Writing the Novel from Plot to Print • Telling Lies for Fun & Profit • Write for Your Life • Spider, Spin Me a Web

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Orion

  This ebook frst published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Lawrence Block 1999

  The moral right of Lawrence Block to be identifed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 2495 5

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  This is for

  SARA and MARISA,

  who like a good story …

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The critics on Lawrence Block

  About the Author

  By Lawrence Block

  Introduction

  BERNIE RHODENBARR

  Like a Thief in the Night

  The Burglar Who Dropped In On Elvis

  The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke

  SOMETIMES THEY BITE

  A Bad Night for Burglars

  Collecting Ackermans

  The Dettweiler Solution

  Funny You Should Ask

  The Gentle Way

  Going Through the Motions

  Like a Dog in the Street

  And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

  Nothing Short of Highway Robbery

  One Thousand Dollars a Word

  Sometimes They Bite

  Strangers on a Handball Court

  This Crazy Business of Ours

  When This Man Dies

  MARTIN EHRENGRAF

  The Ehrengraf Defense

  The Ehrengraf Presumption

  The Ehrengraf Experience

  The Ehrengraf Appointment

  The Ehrengraf Riposte

  The Ehrengraf Obligation

  The Ehrengraf Alternative

  The Ehrengraf Nostrum

  The Ehrengraf Affirmation

  LIKE A LAMB TO SLAUGHTER

  The Books Always Balance

  The Boy Who Disappeared Clouds

  Change of Life

  Click!

  The Dangerous Business

  Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes

  If This Be Madness

  A Little Off the Top

  Leo Youngdahl, R.I.P.

  The Most Unusual Snatch

  Passport in Order

  That Kind of a Day

  Weekend Guests

  With a Smile for the Ending

  You Could Call It Blackmail

  KELLER

  Answers to Soldier

  Keller’s Therapy

  Keller on the Spot

  SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR

  As Good as a Rest

  A Blow for Freedom

  Cleveland in My Dreams

  Death Wish

  Good for the Soul

  Hilliard’s Ceremony

  How Would You Like It?

  Like a Bug on a Windshield

  Someday I’ll Plant More Walnut Trees

  Some Days You Get the Bear

  Some Things a Man Must Do

  Something to Remember You By

  The Tulsa Experience

  CHIP HARRISON

  Death of the Mallory Queen

  As Dark as Christmas Gets

  NEW STORIES

  Headaches and Bad Dreams

  How Far It Could Go

  In for a Penny

  Like a Bone in the Throat

  Three in the Side Pocket

  MATTHEW SCUDDER

  Out the Window

  A Candle for the Bag Lady

  By the Dawn’s Early Light

  Batman’s Helpers

  The Merciful Angel of Death

  The Night and the Music

  Looking for David

  INTRODUCTION

  I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here …

  Bernie Rhodenbarr, burglar and bookseller, has been saying that in recent books, after having rounded up all the unusual suspects prefatory to unmasking a murderer. The phrase does have a nice ring to it, but just now there’s a certain ambiguity. Am I talking to you, Dear Readers? Or am I addressing the seventy-odd (some of them very odd) stories herein assembled?

  I can explain, but I’m not sure that I should. Short stories, as I’ve remarked in the past, should speak for themselves; writers, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t. Writers nattering on about their own work are not quite as embarrassing as those introductions painters write for show catalogues (“To me, time is a neoplastic construct. It is texture and, above all, color, that I employ to distinguish between physical reality and incorporate unreality …”), but we’re still pretty bad.

  Knowing this, I nevertheless persist.

  These stories constitute the first collection of my short fiction to be published in the United Kingdom. In the States, William Morrow has brought out three collections, Sometimes They Bite, Like a Lamb to Slaughter, and Some Days You Get the Bear. In addition, one small publisher (ASAP Press) has published the Ehrengraf stories, and another (Crippen & Landru) has issued On
e Night Stands, a collection of my earliest stories from the late fifties that might as easily have been called “Pieces of String Too Small to Save.”

  I have chosen not to include stories from One Night Stands in the present volume; while they might be of interest to collectors and specialists—my rationale for republishing them at all—I can see no justification for inflicting them on the general reader. They’ve been omitted, as have all but three of the chapters from my recent episodic novel, Hit Man, of which more later.

  With these two exceptions, and the additional possible exception of some story I might simply have forgotten, this book contains my complete short stories to date.

  And how to arrange them?

  The obvious order is chronological, but I don’t know how well that would serve here, or that I could even manage it. It’s hard to recall just when each story was published, and they were not all published in the order they were written. Moreover, much of my work over the years has been with series characters, and it seems to me the reader would prefer to find all the stories about a particular character clumped together. Within each clump, the stories appear in the order they were written.

  Of the three Bernie Rhodenbarr stories, the first is atypical in that the story is told in the third person, and Bernie is not the principal character. This was not Bernie’s debut—he’d already starred in Burglars Can’t Be Choosers and The Burglar in the Closet. The third story, “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke,” was a collaborative effort, with my wife, Lynne, coming up with the key plot element and providing research assistance; it is collected here for the first time.

  Martin H. Ehrengraf, the little lawyer who rarely sees the inside of a courtroom, has appeared only in short stories, all of which appear here. Frederic Dannay (aka Ellery Queen), whose magazine published the first Ehrengraf story and all but one of the others, saw Ehrengraf as the natural heir to Randolph Mason, a criminous lawyer created by Melville Davisson Post. (Randolph Mason was almost certainly the inspiration for Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, who was none too respectable himself in his first appearances, but I can’t say he was a wellspring for Ehrengraf; I had never read any of Post’s stories, or even heard of them, when I began writing about Ehrengraf.) Of the nine stories, two appeared in each of my three Morrow/Avon collections, two others were included in ASAP’s Ehrengraf for the Defense, and the most recent, “The Ehrengraf Affirmation,” has not heretofore appeared in book form.

  Keller has thus far appeared only in the ten episodes which comprise Hit Man, a sequel to which is currently underway. All ten chapters of Hit Man could legitimately be included here, as each does constitute a complete short story, but why make readers who already own the novel buy it all over again? At the same time, I found myself reluctant to leave it out entirely. As a compromise, I’ve included three stories. All three were shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America, and two of them—“Keller’s Therapy” and “Keller on the Spot”—went on to win the award.

  Chip Harrison has appeared in four novels, the first two comic erotica, the third and fourth mystery novels that are very much an homage to Rex Stout, with Chip playing Archie Goodwin to Leo Haig’s Nero Wolfe. There have been only two Chip Harrison short stories, and both are apt to be more amusing to readers with an insider’s perspective on the world of crime fiction. The second story, “As Dark as Christmas Gets,” is previously uncollected; it was written for private publication as Otto Penzler’s Christmas gift to friends and customers—his, you’ll note, is the bookshop where the story takes place—and had subsequent magazine publication in Ellery Queen.

  The first two Matthew Scudder stories—novelettes, really— were written during the several years between the third and fourth Scudder novels, and helped keep the series alive for me. The second was originally entitled “A Candle for the Bag Lady.” The title was changed so that it could be the title story in Like a Lamb to Slaughter. I’ve changed it back. “By the Dawn’s Early Light” was expanded tenfold and became When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a favorite novel of many Scudder fans, and I was accordingly tempted to leave it out of this book, but that doesn’t seem right; the story won an Edgar and a Shamus award, and marked my first appearance in Playboy. “Batman’s Helpers” was a first chapter of a preliminary version of the book that became A Dance at the Slaughterhouse; I scrapped almost everything else from that draft, but the opening seemed complete in itself, a day-in-the-life vignette, and Bob Randisi used it in a Private Eye Writers of America anthology. “The Merciful Angel of Death” was written for an International Association of Crime Writers anthology and won a Shamus award. “The Night and the Music” is a brief vignette, written for the program book of a New York jazz festival; I’ve wound up using it as a selection at readings. This marks its first appearance in a collection, and the first appearance as well of the Edgar-nominated “Looking For David,” which turned up in a UK anthology of the Crime Writers Association prior to magazine publication in Ellery Queen.

  The remaining fifty non-series stories are gathered in four clumps—one each for the three collections in which they appeared, and a fourth clump of five stories previously uncollected. As I’ve said, it’s hard to recall in what order they were written, and what difference does it make? I’ve arranged them in alphabetical order.

  Speaking of which, has anyone ever stopped to think of the enormous debt we owe to whoever came up with the idea of alphabetical order? Think about it. When alphabets evolved, the letters didn’t naturally order themselves. It seems purely arbitrary that M should precede N, that Y should follow X. And yet, in a world in which it’s difficult to find two people who agree on anything, some genius put the letters in order and everyone— everyone!—has seen fit to go along with it.

  Imagine trying to find a book on a bookshelf without alphabetical order. Or a word in a dictionary. Or damn near anything damn near anywhere. I’m filled with admiration for our unknown benefactor. Staggering, the debt we owe him.

  I don’t think there’s a story in it. But you never know …

  BERNIE

  RHODENBARR

  LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

  At 11:30 the television anchorman counseled her to stay tuned for the late show, a vintage Hitchcock film starring Cary Grant. For a moment she was tempted. Then she crossed the room and switched off the set.

  There was a last cup of coffee in the pot. She poured it and stood at the window with it, a tall and slender woman, attractive, dressed in the suit and silk blouse she’d worn that day at the office. A woman who could look at once efficient and elegant, and who stood now sipping black coffee from a bone-china cup and gazing south and west.

  Her apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a building located at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, and her vista was quite spectacular. A midtown skyscraper blocked her view of the building where Tavistock Corp. did its business, but she fancied she could see right through it with x-ray vision.

  The cleaning crew would be finishing up now, she knew, returning their mops and buckets to the cupboards and changing into street clothes, preparing to go off-shift at midnight. They would leave a couple of lights on in Tavistock’s seventeenth floor suite as well as elsewhere throughout the building. And the halls would remain lighted, and here and there in the building someone would be working all night, and—

  She liked Hitchcock movies, especially the early ones, and she was in love with Cary Grant. But she also liked good clothes and bone-china cups and the view from her apartment and the comfortable, well-appointed apartment itself. And so she rinsed the cup in the sink and put on a coat and took the elevator to the lobby, where the florid-faced doorman made a great show of hailing her a cab.

  There would be other nights, and other movies.

  The taxi dropped her in front of an office building in the West Thirties. She pushed through the revolving door and her footsteps on the marble floor sounded impossibly loud to her. The security guard, seated at a small table by the bank of elevators, looked up from his magazine at her approach. She said, “Hello, Eddie,” and gave him a quick smile.