Cinderella Sims, page 16
“It’s not that bad,” she said. My heart sank.
“It’s not,” she said, just in case I hadn’t heard her the first time. “It’s not Shakespeare, but I don’t think it’ll do you any harm to publish it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s politically incorrect,” she pointed out. “Sexist, racist, homophobic, at least in today’s terms. But so’s everything else written that long ago.”
“Not to mention Shakespeare,” I pointed out.
“Who mentioned Shakespeare?”
“You did.”
“Oh,” she said. “I did? I wonder why. Anyway, I think you should read it.”
“Do I have to?”
She gave me a look, and she gave me the book, and I didn’t exactly read it because reading very early work of mine makes me sick to my stomach. But I skimmed enough of it to realize that it was a far cry from pornographic and really didn’t have much sexual content at all. I’d evidently gotten fairly far with it before I gave up on it and finished it for the sex novel house.
I wonder what made me do that.
Hell, who knows? Who knows why the kid that I was did any of the things he did?
What I had to decide was whether to republish the book. I weighed various considerations, and was reminded of Mae West’s observation. When she had to choose one of two evils, she said, she made it a point to pick the one she hadn’t tried yet. Similarly, when I have to pick a course of action, I tend to choose the one that brings money into our house. And, while I don’t suppose Cinderella Sims will wrap Lynne in sable, it should provide a few coins for that polyester handbag.
So there you are. Subterranean Press turned out a fine-looking, well-made volume, and it’s now my pleasure to see it reissued as an ebook.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
An Appreciation by Ed Gorman
I wrote the following as a way of setting up a Larry Block novelette I was reprinting in an anthology of pulp stories. I don’t see any reason to change a word. Not because they’re such graceful or pithy words but because they convey my feelings about Lawrence Block the writer.
Lawrence Block writes the best sentences in the business, that business being crime fiction. No tortured self-conscious arty stuff, either. Just pure, graceful, skilled writing of a very high order.
No matter what he writes—the dark Scudder private eye novels; the spunky Bernie Rhodenbarrs about the kind of thief even a mom could love; or his latest creation, John Keller the hitman, an existential figure full of quirks and kindnesses rare in his profession—no matter what he’s telling us, he always makes it sweet to read. He’s just so damned nimble and graceful and acute with his language.
By now, his story is pretty well known. Wrote a lot of erotica in the late fifties and early sixties, all the while writing his early crime paperback originals and stories for magazines of every kind. Started becoming a name in crime fiction in the seventies, really broke out in the nineties and is now posed, one would think, for superstardom.
Block has always reminded me of a very intelligent fighter. He knows what he’s good at and sticks to his own fight, unmoved by popular fads and critical fancies. He writes about women as well as any male writer I’ve ever read (though since I’m a guy, I may just be saying that he perceives women the same way I do) and he deals with subjects as Oprah-ready as alcoholism and failed fatherhood realistically yet without resorting to weepiness.
One senses in him sometimes a frustrated mainstream writer. He’s always pushing against the restrictions of form and yet never failing to give the reader what he came for in the first place. No easy trick, believe me.
For some reason, I’ve always hated the word wordsmith (probably because it’s popular among pretentious young advertising copywriters who don’t want to admit that they’re writing hymns to beer and dish soap), but that’s what Block is. A singer of songs, a teller of tales, a bedazzler.
I read three of his erotic novels, and I’ll tell you something. They’re better written (and we’re talking 1958–61) than half the contemporary novels I read today. He was pushing against form even back then, creating real people and real problems, and doing so in a simple, powerful voice that stays with you a hell of a long time.
I always say that I’m glad to see writers make it up from the trenches and into the sunshine of national prominence. Few writers spent so long in the trenches. Larry sold his first story in 1958. He first hit big in the middle 1990s. That’s a long time to breathe the dusty, sometimes dank air of literary obscurity.
Larry began his career, as most of us know by now, selling short stories to the crime magazines of the time and to the sort of paperbacks that local religious groups were always trying to drive from the newsstands. The motley crew of outcasts I hung with in my early college years called these books, as I recall, right-handers—suggesting that this type of book inspired one to a certain kind of action few other books did. Except maybe for Peyton Place and its imitators. The underlined passages.
In those days I read a lot of novels published by Midwood Tower and Beacon Books and Nightstand Books. I quickly came to realize that some of the writers were much better than others. Max Collier, for example, wrote some of the most perverse books I’ve ever read. As I remember them, he frequently paired up his bitter hunchbacked heroes with heiresses. Clyde Allison was usually thin on plot but great with patter. Orrie Hitt sometimes got too perverse for my tastes but usually supplied a kind of second-rate James T. Farrell–like blue collar take on the standard “sexy” plots.
And when I say sexy, I mean sexy in the way of the movie comedies of the 1950s and early 1960s. Short on actual details but long on suggestion. And metaphor. Orgasms were frequently portrayed as “searing volcanoes” or some such.
A few of the right-handers were written reasonably well. No great masterpieces slipped through, you understand, but some of the books were actually . . . kinda, sorta actual novels rather than just the usual monthly tease.
Which brings us to some guy named Andrew Shaw.
This was one of Larry Block’s pen names circa 1959–61. Other writers would share the name later on (someday somebody will do an article on how contracts secretly get handed off from writer to writer, a particular form of “ghosting” that goes on at the lower levels of publishing even today), but the early Shaws, at least those I’ve read, read like Larry Block.
Not the Larry Block of today. The Shaw prose isn’t especially polished; the Shaw stories don’t always escape cliché; and the Shaw attitude is not unlike the hard-boiled crime fiction magazines of the day—i.e., too tough for its own good.
And yet.
Yet you can see in glimpses—and sometimes sustained for long stretches—the Larry Block of today. The idiosyncratic take on modern morality; the dour irony that hides fear and loneliness; and the seeds—just planted—of the style that would become the best of his generation.
Cinderella Sims was originally published as $20 Lust. The editor obviously spent a long time coming up with that one.
I’m not sure what else Larry was writing at that time. I suspect he was upgrading for an assault on Gold Medal and better paying markets. I say this because Cinderella Sims seems to fall between his sexy books and his early Gold Medal books. Not quite worthy of that little gold medallion but damned close.
One thing Larry Block always had was the ability to move a story forward while giving you detailed character sketches. He has a fast eye for the unusual, the quirks in us, and he makes us come alive with these details. That skill is already apparent in the novel you’re holding. And so is his skill in giving you journalistic snapshots of urban America. Rereading Cinderella Sims today is like traveling back in time to that pre-hippie sixties when crew cuts were still the style on college campuses and free love was something only the ridiculous Hugh Hefner experienced.
I’m not going to tell you that this is a great book because it isn’t. But it’s a damned interesting look at the artist-in-making. I think you’ll agree with me, that from the very beginning of his career, Larry Block was a vital and powerful storyteller.
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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 © 1958 by Lawrence Block
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0864-9
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Lawrence Block, Cinderella Sims
