The Crime of Our Lives (Thorndike Nonfiction)

An MWA Grand Master tells it straight: Raymond Chandler: You have to wonder how he got it so right. He spent a lot of time in the house--working reading writing letters. He saw to his wife who required a lot of attention in her later years. And when he did get out you wouldnt find him walking the mean streets. La Jolla it must be noted was never much for mean streets. Evan Hunter: In his mid-seventies after a couple of heart attacks an aneurysm and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his larynx Evan wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on Becca in Jeopardy with every intention of working his way through the alphabet. Dont you love it? Heres a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel and hes perfectly comfortable launching a twenty-six book series. Donald E. Westlakes Memory: Heres the point: Dons manuscript arrived and we had dinner and put the kid to bed and I started reading. And my wife went to bed and I stayed up reading and after a while I forgot I was having a heart attack and just kept reading until I finished the book around dawn. And somewhere along the way I became aware that my friend Don whod written a couple of mysteries and some science fiction and his fair share of soft-core erotica had just produced a great novel. Charles Willeford: Can a self-diagnosed sociopath be at the same time an intensely moral person? Can one be a sociopath virtually unaware of socially prescribed morality and yet be consumed with the desire to do the right thing? That strikes me as a spot-on description of just about every character Willeford ever wrote. How could he come up with characters like that? My God how could he help it? An MWA Grand Master and a multiple winner of the Edgar Shamus and Maltese Falcon awards Lawrence Blocks reflections and observations come from over a half century as a writer of bestselling crime fiction. . Several of his novels have been filmed most recently A Walk Among the Tombstones starring Liam Neeson. While hes best known for his novels and short fiction along with his books on the craft of writing thats not all hes written. THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES collects his observations and personal reminiscences of the crime fiction field and some of its leading practitioners. He has a lot to say and he says it here in convincing and entertaining fashion.