To The Last Page

The signs of what is to come are all there in Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle , although it ought to already be obvious from the suitably lurid cover on the Hard Case Crime paperback with the tagline 'She Went Looking For Thrills - AND FOUND MURDER'. To be fair, you don't even need to look beyond the author's name to know what to expect, but Block's 1961 crime thriller has plenty of lowlife pulp and seediness in the opening chapters to alert you to the nature of the trouble ahead. It's the counter-culture alternative living, hip drug taking community of Greenwich Village that houses characters like Joe Milani and his friend Shank. Right from the start Block describes them as being blissfully high in the middle of the day in a bar, neither of them with anything better to do but ponder their next move, or rather their next bout of inactivity. This day, Joe decides his confidence is running high enough to pick up a square chick who has come into the bar, but...

Lawrence Block's 1969 thriller After the First Death is a taut little murder mystery that revolves around a case of memory blackout. To all intents and purposes though, and certainly to any outside observer, it looks like Alex Penn has done it again; he's murdered another woman. The problem is he can't remember doing it. Alex suffers from blackouts when he has been drinking and all the evidence that he has committed a murder the night before is right there in front of him; a prostitute with her throat cut lying on the floor of a hotel room. He has murdered before or at least that's what he did time for, four years until he got released on a technical appeal against an unsound conviction. Trouble is the woman he killed that time was also during a blackout, so he doesn't know what he is capable of. As he goes on the run, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to, Alex reluctantly tries to recall how this happened again and as fragments of memory come back he realises ...