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Ah, yes.  How to begin?

Why, how else than by wishing you all the joys of the season, and a better and brighter New Year? I’ve had a surprisingly busy 2011, and it’s drawing to a close more with a bang than a whimper—I got to spend a glorious week in the company of my daughter Amy as a juror at the Courmayeur Noir Film Festival in the Italian Alps, and came home to a slew of Best Book of the Year lists.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff, Matthew Scudder #17, published so brilliantly in May by Mulholland Books, has been turning up on one list after another. The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Grift Magazine, January Magazine, bookreporter.com, National Public Radio, and the personal 10 Best lists of no end of generous bloggers and reviewers.

I’m never quite sure what to make of lists like this, the scribbler’s pursuit is rather different from horse races and beauty contests, and what are we saying when we set one book ahead of another? But the hell with the philosophical aspects of the whole business. There’s my book, on a whole lot of those lists, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
 
The honor aside, the lists have had an observable effect on sales, and both the hardcover and eBook editions responded immediately.  Mulholland’s paperback edition will hit store shelves, real and virtual, in February.

While A Drop of the Hard Stuff has been getting most of the limelight, GETTING OFF has made several Year’s Best lists, including those of Julia Rachel Barrett, Ed Kurtz, and bookreporter.com’s Tom Callahan. The book’s erotic intensity has led to its being overlooked by reviewers at most of the traditional print media, but bloggers and online reviewers have had a high old time with Kit Tolliver’s great adventure, and sales are brisk. Hard Case Crime will have a trade paperback edition available sometime in 2012, but I’m not sure just when. But, um, why wait?  (There’s also a yummy audio edition from Recorded Books; the same link will take you there.)
  
Matthew Scudder stars in a second book published this year, The Night and the Music. This collection of Scudder short stories, which I self-published this fall with the good help of Telemachus Press, includes two new stories (“Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen” and “One Last Night at Grogan’s”) along with Brian Koppelman’s introductory essay. It’s done better than I dared to expect in both eBook and trade paperback form, and just the other day I posted thus on my blog: 

 
Do you subscribe to my blog ? You may figure being on this newsletter list is more than enough, but a lot of material from the blog never makes it into the newsletter. True, you can probably live fine without it, or catch up on it when you visit the blogsite, but occasionally there’s time value involved.
 
For example, a couple of weeks ago on Cyber Monday, Open Road Media reduced the price of every title they publish by up to 60%. That included my 40+ backlist titles. There was no time to get this information to you in a newsletter, but my blog subscribers got to load up their eReaders at a remarkable discount from prices that were already a bargain.
 
What does a blog subscription involve? Well, first of all, it’s free. And Wordpress doesn’t even call it a subscription anymore, as that might be suggestive of an obligation.  All you do is go to the blog, where you’ll find (at the very top, way over on the left) a button that says “Follow.” You click on it.
 
See? Nothing to it.
 
And what does it entail? Well, whenever I post something (which I’ve only done 22 times since July, so it’s not as though you’ll let yourself in for a deluge) you get the new blog post as an email. That’s all. And if it does become burdensome, just go to that page again, where the button will say “Unfollow.” Click on it and you’re free.
 
Blog subscribers got my musing on Vaclav Havel, when that great man passed just days ago. It’s about memory, and what is or isn’t real, and it’s the sort of thing that finds a home in the blog. If you like it, well, while you’re there, why not click the Follow button?

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I should tell you a little bit about what’s on tap for the coming year. While I was writing this newsletter, the mailman brought advance reading copies of Hard Case Crime #69, a hardcover double volume published via Subterranean Press. (And you probably know the great work produced by this Michigan-based small press.) Remember the old Ace double volumes? Like them, HCC #69 consists of two early pseudonymous efforts of mine bound back to back (or belly to belly, if you prefer.) The books are Strange Embrace, by Lawrence Block writing as Ben Christopher, and 69 Barrow Street, by LB writing as Sheldon Lord. (You can find my essays on the two books in Afterthoughts.)

Each books gets its own cover, and Hard Case enlisted the legendary cover artist Robert McGinnis; because the books don’t have to worry about chain store censors, McGinnis took the wraps off, so to speak, and his models are more provocative than ever. The book’s not due until May, but this might be one you’ll want to pre-order. You may recall Hellcats & Honey Girls, Subterranean’s triple volume of the three books Donald E. Westlake and I wrote in collaboration; it hit some specialty store bestseller lists, sold out its first printing in a hurry—and the publisher never went back to press. (Good luck finding a reasonably-priced copy now.) I don’t know that the same thing will happen with Strange Embrace / 69 Barrow Street, but it’s possible, and if you order now you’ll make sure you don’t get shut out.

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It’s been apparent for a while now that I’ve made an absolute dog’s breakfast of retirement. It seemed to me two or three years ago that I might be done writing books, and just look at 2011: six new books appeared, including two books for writers (The Liar’s Bible and The Liar’s Companion), a piecemeal memoir (Afterthoughts), a collection (The Night and the Music), and two new novels (Getting Off and A Drop of the Hard Stuff.) 
 
In addition, 2011 was the year Open Road brought out all those backlist titles in eBook form. And I ePublished two dozen short stories, most of them unavailable in book form.
 
Some retirement.
 
Nor have I had the good sense to quit while I’m ahead—or behind, or wherever I am. And I’ve completed another book, the fifth about Keller, which Mulholland will publish in February of 2013.  (That gives you fourteen months to brace yourselves. And, while you’re waiting, to make your way through my seemingly endless backlist.)
 
The Keller titles, as you may have noticed, grew longer by a character or two as they went along:  Hit Man, Hit List, Hit Parade, Hit And Run. Well, this time we decided to embrace concision, and the new book will be called HIT ME. I won’t tell you much about it now, I have after all got over a year to whet your appetites, but I will say that plans are moving forward for a Special Philatelic Edition.
 
As you may recall, Keller has been a committed stamp collector since the last chapter of Hit Man. Then Hit and Run came out, I prepared a numbered and limited philatelic edition, adorning  first edition copies with a special imprint, adding a custom-made postage stamp of the book’s cover, tying that stamp to the title page with a special canceling device, and (duh) signing everything. 
 
It went well, but this time around we’re going to improve on it. Instead of building on a copy of Mulholland’s trade edition, the Philatelic First Edition will have its own press run, with a better grade of paper, a finer binding, and the production values only a small press can impart. It will also have some noteworthy philatelic enhancement. And, while the price will be higher than with Hit and Run, I don’t think you’ll find it out of line, or out of reach.
 
That’s as much as I can tell you now, because final details have yet to be worked out. There’ll be more as soon as I know more (and you’ll be the first to get the news if you subscribe to my blog). I suspect we’ll be able to take orders well in advance of publication, and there’ll be an incentive for ordering early, though exactly what form it will take is another thing I don’t yet know.

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The March 2012 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine contains a story of mine, “Part of the Job.” It was in fact written with AHMM in mind, but I wrote it in the early 1960s, and this marks its first appearance in print.  There is, as you may imagine, a story that goes with it, and the real story is probably of more overall interest than the fiction that accompanies it.  Both the story and the story behind the story are coming up in the magazine, and I hope you enjoy either or both of them.

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Hard to say what else the future may hold.  That, after all, is why they call it the future. There are some short stories I’ve agreed to write, and I hope to get to them without further delay. (Well, not too much delay, anyway.) Sometime in the course of the year I’ll probably start work on a new book, because that seems to be a difficult habit for me to break, but please don’t (a) ask me what it is, or (b) tell me what you think it should be, because (a) I don’t know, and (b) I don’t care. 
 
Ah, that’s enough for now.  More than  enough, really. Let’s hope for the best for 2012, shall we?  For all of us.

LB 

A FEW MORE WORDS FROM DAVID TREVOR:  Yes, LB’s Bookstore   is open, and the sale continues.  LB’s been posting daily affirmations on his Facebook page, and that’s led to inquiries; his “Affirmations for Writers” tape is available from us as an MP3 file.  (Because we deliver it electronically, it’s an exception to our US-orders-only policy.) 
 
If there are books of The Great Man’s that you can’t find in our listings, we may have them on a shelf or in a cupboard;  if you write to me directly (dt@lawrenceblock.com) I’ll see what I  can do.
 
And that 99¢ offer really is a good deal on THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART.  But it turns into a pumpkin on June 15^th, so jump on it!