Borderline is what's being called these days "mid-century erotica," returned to print by Hard Case Crime. It was originally published as Border Lust in 1962 by Don Holliday, one of the pseudonyms that appeared now and then on books published by Nightstand and others of Bill Hamling's imprints. This book is obviously from early in Block's career, but it's so well done that it's likely to make many veteran novelists (or at least one: me) envious.
The new title is perfect for the book, not that the other one didn't fit. It certainly did. But this one is better because the book is about people who are crossing borders. The setting is El Paso and Juarez, which were different cities in 1962 from what they are now. (By coincidence, I just read Sam Hawken's Tequila Sunset, and if you want to see the cities now, check it out.) The reason the new title fits so well is that the borders people cross in this book aren't just the physical one that separates Texas from Mexico. They're crossing them in lots of other ways. '
Meg, recently divorced from a boring husband, crosses the border to Mexico and crosses the border from wanting sex of all kinds to having lots of it. Weaver is a killer. He's killed one girl, and now he's decided that since they can only execute him once, he might as well kill as many has he can before they get him. He crosses the borderline easily, and it's scary how well Block was writing about a serial killer before such killers became a crime fiction cliche. Marty's a gambler who lives an ordered life. He keeps to himself and does things his own way. He meets Meg and crosses the border into irrational behavior. Lily is a runaway. She'll do what she has to as long as it pays. She crosses the border into using whoever is handy. They think they're using Lily, but they're all wrong.
Naturally these four characters are going to come together, and I was reminded of John D. MacDonald's The Damned, which is set farther south in Mexico but which also has a cast of disparate characters. In fact, the opening chapters in both books are quite similar, except in the MacDonald book the point of view is a man's, while in Block's novel it's Lily's.
But Macdonald's novel isn't noir, and Block's certainly is. Things aren't going to end well for Block's characters, not any of them. If you can take graphic sex and even more graphic violence, this one's well worth a look. And there's bonus material as well, two short stories and a novella. Ed London's the narrator of the novella, a nicely done p.i. yarn. The first story's narrated by a rapist. Very violent. Be prepared.
At some point Judith Merril's anthologies originated in hardback, but they were reprinted by Dell, where the series started. This one is typical in that Merril didn't confine herself to looking for stories in the usual suspects and in fact didn't confine herself to fiction. A John W. Campbell editorial and a newspaper article are included.
I read a lot of these stories when they were first published, and it's surprising how much of them I remembered when I started rereading them. Some of them seem just as fresh now as they did 50-something years ago, though of course some are quite dated. I'm pretty sure Jack Finney couldn't get away with "The Other Wife" now, though in 1960 it was published in The Saturday Evening Post, which in those days must have sold well into the millions of copies. Time changes everything.
"Make a Prison" is, I believe, Lawrence Block's only SF story. It's short and clever, but it has a point to make. So do a lot of these stories, and I suspect many of you are familiar with them. "Flowers for Algernon," for example, and "The Man Who Lost the Sea." I'm a Clifford D. Simak fan, so of course I liked "A Death in the House," which is a bit different from some of his work, but still the same in others. And Leiber's "Mariana" is another good one. Well, they're all good.
And then there are Merril's introductions to the stories, which are distinguished by the strength of her animus for Kingsley Amis, whose New Maps of Hell had recently been published. She makes many catty remarks about him as she goes along.
Copies of the book are available cheap from the usual Internet sources if you want to read some of the good old stuff.
CONTENTS: “Introduction” by Judith Merril;
“The Handler” by Damon Knight (1960);
“The Other Wife” by Jack Finney (1960);
“No Fire Burns” by Avram Davidson (1959);
“No, No, Not Rogov!” by Cordwainer Smith (1958);
“Shoreline at Sunset” by Ray Bradbury (1959); “The Dreamsman” by Gordon R. Dickson (1959);
“Multum in Parvo” by Jack Sharkey (1959);
“Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (1959);
“’What Do You Mean...Human?’” by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1959);
“Sierra Sam” by Ralph Dighton (1960);
“A Death in the House” by Clifford D. Simak (1959);
“Mariana” by Fritz Leiber (1960);
“An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth’s Surface” by Roger Price (1958);
“Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller (1959);
“Hot Argument” by Randall Garrett (1959);
“What the Left Hand Was Doing” by Darrel T. Langart (1960);
“The Sound-Sweep” by J. G. Ballard (1960);
“Plenitude” by Will Worthington (1959);
“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon (1959);
“Make a Prison” by Lawrence Block (1958);
“What Now, Little Man?” by Mark Clifton (1959);
“Me” by Hilbert Schenck, Jr. (1959);
“The Year’s S-F: A Summary and Honorable Mentions” by Judith Merril.
Friends,
Bit by bit, we're getting closer to the re-launch of Hard Case Crime with our new publisher, Titan Books. Our backlist titles are already available for pre-order from bookstores and online booksellers such as Amazon.com and BN.com; copies will start shipping in February. And we've got new books on the way, too -- if you go to our Web site, www.HardCaseCrime.com, you'll find cover art and sample chapters for four upcoming titles, all of them brand new:
* GETTING OFF: A Novel of Sex and Violence by Lawrence Block (writing as Jill Emerson) -- The story of a beautiful young woman who sets off on a mission to kill every man she's ever slept with (and she's slept with quite a few). For this book, Lawrence Block is reviving a pseudonym he hasn't used in almost 40 years, under which he wrote seven particularly sexy books back in the day. When he saw how sexy this new one was coming out, he thought...that's the Jill Emerson in me coming out again...
* THE CONSUMMATA by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins -- In the late 1960s, Mickey Spillane announced he was writing a new novel featuring the star of his bestseller THE DELTA FACTOR, but after writing half the book, he set he manuscript aside. Twenty years later, he handed the unfinished manuscript to his friend Max Allan Collins, suggesting that Max might finish it someday. And twenty-some years after that...it's finally done. It's the story of one thief going after another against the backdrop of Miami's Cuban-American community, and it's classic Spillane. Anyone who misses the Good Old Stuff will find plenty to love here.
* QUARRY'S EX by Max Allan Collins -- This is one I know you've been waiting for a long time, the next story in the saga of the hit man known as Quarry (star of THE LAST QUARRY, THE FIRST QUARRY, and QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE). This time, Quarry sets out to protect a movie director who's been marked for murder...only to discover that the director is married to Quarry's ex-wife, the woman whose infidelity pushed him into a life of crime in the first place.
* CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust -- Another long-awaited title, this is the follow-up to Christa's Edgar Award-nominated MONEY SHOT. Ex-porn star Angel Dare is back; when a old co-star is gunned down in front of her, it's up to her to get his 18-year-old son, a hotheaded MMA fighter, to Las Vegas in one piece while two separate groups of killers are gunning for them.
Lots to look forward to! Do check out the covers -- and if you're hungry for some great reading now, you can prepare for the new books coming out (which doesn't happen till September/October) by ordering any of the old ones you've missed. If you haven't met Quarry or Angel Dare yet, you're in for a treat -- grab yourself a copy of MONEY SHOT or the earlier Quarry books. For Spillane fans, there's DEAD STREET, Mickey's last novel. And we have five other books by Lawrence Block you can enjoy while waiting for GETTING OFF to come out: GRIFTER'S GAME, THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART, LUCKY AT CARDS, A DIET OF TREACLE, and KILLING CASTRO.
Other news...
Things are moving forward on the film adaptation of LITTLE GIRL LOST -- I spent an afternoon with the screenwriter who's penning the adaptation, showing him around some of the real-world locations where scenes from the book take place. (And scenes from its sequel, SONGS OF INNOCENCE. We checked out the tunnels under Columbia University, and the all-night tempura joint on Broadway, and FAO Schwarz...) No guarantee the movie will go before the cameras, but...every step we take makes it that much more likely.
And HAVEN, the TV series based (loosely) on our 13th book, Stephen King's THE COLORADO KID, is gearing up for its second season on SyFy. The writers are working in a white-hot storytelling heat, with filming scheduled to begin in a few months. I'm biased, but I think the show really hit its stride in the second half of the season last year, and there are some great stories coming up. We don't have a premiere date yet for the second season, but I'll let you know as soon as we do.
One final bit of news (if you'll forgive a bit of boasting by a proud father): the Ardai/Novik clan saw an addition in December, a baby girl named Evidence ("Evi" for short).
We'll add a photo of her to the Web site just as soon as she's old enough to wear a fedora.
Best,
Charles
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Charles Ardai
Editor, Hard Case Crime
The other day I commented on Lawrence Block's $20 Lust, reprinted as Cinderella Sims. Block started out to write a Gold Medal crime novel, figured this one didn't quite cut the mustard, and published it as soft-core porn. Now Hard Case Crime has reprinted another of Block's old soft-core novels, Lucky at Cards (aka
The Sex Shuffle). This one comes a lot closer to being a Gold Medal book, I think, than Cinderella Sims.
For one thing, there's a lot less sex. Cinderella Sims has a lot of sex, and the scenes are considerably longer and more explicit than those in Lucky at Cards. Another thing is that the background in Lucky is a lot more carefully worked out and believable than the one in Cinderella. All the stuff about poker and gin sounds exactly right, and the setting is as convincing as in anything Block has done.
With a little tweaking, especially toward the end, this book would have fit right into the Gold Medal line. I wonder if Block tried it there and it just didn't fly for some reason. At any rate, it's great to have this new edition on the shelves. Check it out.
Since James Reasoner reviewed the new Hard Case Crime edition of one of Lawrence Block's old softcore novels (Lucky at Cards), I thought I'd chime in. The Original Nightstand book was reprinted in hardcover by Subterranean Press a couple of years ago. I like the paperback cover better, but that's just me.
The book, by whatever name, is certainly a crime novel. In the Afterword, Block says, "I set out with the intention of writing a Gold Medal-type crime novel, and somewhere along the way I decided it wasn't good enough and finished it up as a sex novel."
The narrator, Ted Lindsay, loses his wife and goes downhill fast. He quits his job as a reporter and moves to New York to forget. He takes a job as a waiter in a greasy spoon and just lives one day to the next until he sees a woman named Cindy, Cinderella Sims. He knows she's the one, and he meets her. That's when things get complicated because Cindy has a past, and quite a past it is, involving killers and counterfeiters and lots of money. She wants Ted's help, and he's glad to give it, even though it means they're going to have to to some Very Bad Things.
There's lots of sex along the way. It's nothing special now, but it would have seemed plenty hot back in 1960. After all, as Block says, the book was written "to be read with one hand." The book isn't very long, and it would be a lot shorter if the sex were removed.
When all's said and done, I think Block was right. The book's not Gold Medal material. But it comes close enough to be a lot of fun to read, even now. Check it out.
Meanwhile, I guess I'll read Lucky at Cards.
