Once a week I’d go to New York, generally getting a ride in from Henry. I’d participate in a poker game that four or five of us had kicked off in 1960—and that continues to this day, albeit monthly rather than weekly. And sometimes, after the game broke up, I’d pursue other interests in and around Times Square, catching a train home the following afternoon.
Around this time a lot of criminals drew “Get Out of Jail Free” cards, courtesy of some Supreme Court decisions. Because their confessions had been improperly obtained, because they’d been denied counsel, because in one way or another their rights had been violated, they got to walk out and go home—at least until they got picked up for doing the same thing over again.
That was something to think about.
Around the same time, I was having the occasional blackout after the occasional long night of heavy drinking. I didn’t get drunk every time I drank, nor did I have a blackout every time I got drunk, but once in a while I’d come to with no recollection of having gone to bed. Sometimes I’d have spotty memories of a couple of hours. Sometimes I’d have no memory at all.
In time I’d learn that blackouts are almost invariably a marker of alcoholism. While not all alcoholics experience them, anyone who does may be said, at the very least, to have something problematic about his drinking. I didn’t know that then, and simply regarded blackouts as an unfortunate consequence of having had too much to drink. My blackouts generally consisted of an inability to recall a tedious hour or two at the end of an extended evening, when no one was likely to have said anything worth remembering in the first place. They were, I was fairly certain, something I could learn to avoid.
A fellow I’d worked with a decade ago at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, a merchant seaman-turned-writer named John Dobbin, told me how he’d go on a toot on shore leave and wake up a couple of days later. In Cuba, he said, he came to in a bed with six prostitutes. I sort of envied him. Hey, nothing like that had ever happened to me.
Suppose a man woke up in a Times Square hotel with a splitting headache and no recollection of going there. Suppose he wasn’t alone. Suppose there was a woman there, one he’d never seen before.
Suppose she was dead.
Suppose this had happened before. Suppose he went to jail for it, and a Supreme Court decision got him through the revolving door and back on the street.
Suppose he did it again.
Well, there was the premise. I wrote the first chapter of what would turn out to be After the First Death and showed it to Don Westlake. “There’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” he told me. “Nobody who reads this chapter will be able to keep from going on to the next one.”
After the First Death was unquestionably the most personal book I’d written. The pseudonymous soft-core erotic novels were, for the most part, derivative fantasies; the lesbian fiction, however earnest and well-intentioned, was the projection of some sort of alter ego. The various crime novels and, certainly, the Tanner books had characters with whom I could identify—but they weren’t me, and their life experiences were not mine.
This book came closer. The blackouts, the hookers—there was a lot of my life that found its way into Alex Penn’s life. He was not me nor I him, but we had a few things in common.
And his girlfriend, I should say, was drawn from life. Her long speech, about an affair that didn’t work out, is pretty close to verbatim.
Macmillan published the book. It was my second hardcover, appearing two years after Deadly Honeymoon. It didn’t set the world on fire, but then I never expected to touch off a global conflagration. It’s been in and out of print over the years, and I’m pleased to have it available now in ebook form.
Quite a few years passed and a great many books written before I wrote again about drinking and blackouts. The Sins of the Fathers came out in 1976, and was the first of seventeen novels about one Matthew Scudder. Some people see After the First Death as a precursor to the Scudder books, and there’s certainly a thematic connection. And again to state what should be obvious: I’m not Matthew Scudder, and he’s not me. But we have a few things in common.
—lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block (
[email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
A Biography of Lawrence Block
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.
Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”
Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.
Block and his wife, Lynne.
Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”
Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1969, 2002 by Lawrence Block
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0894-6
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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Lawrence Block, After the First Death
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