Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

I’m around when they get arrested. And then I’m all over the place. People are talking about me — my friends, people from the neighborhood — and I’m there.

But I don’t really care what they say. I stop listening, and I’m somewhere else.

I’m at the trial. Powerful circumstantial evidence, the prosecutor says. He reads her notebook, and it’s all there. Everything they did, so they could steal my house. Who kills a person so they can steal her house?

Nothing but circumstantial evidence, the defense says. How can you convict without a body? How can you know for certain that a crime has been committed?

But I have a body. Listen to me. If I could talk to you I could tell you where to look. If I could take your hand I could lead you there.

Guilty, the verdict comes, guilty of everything. Oh, she can’t believe it. How could they convict her? There’s no body, there’s no DNA, so how on earth could they convict her?

Over a hundred years for each of them. I’m here, floating, seeing, hearing, and the sentence comes and the gavel comes down and they take them away in handcuffs.

It feels like I’ve been holding my breath all this time. That’s ridiculous, I don’t have lungs to hold a breath with, but that’s how it feels. And now I let it out, this breath that I haven’t been holding.

And now? They’re done, they’ll be in prison as long as they live, but what about me? Am I stuck with these two forever?

Oh.

Oh, there’s the tunnel. It’s like a whirlpool, an eddy, but not down. Through, it goes through. And there’s the white light they all talked about, and it’s so bright. I never saw anything so bright. It should hurt your eyes, but it doesn’t.

It’s beautiful. And, oh my God, look who’s here...

I have to say it was worth the wait.

Writing the stories is, if not necessarily easy, at least relatively simple and straightforward. The tricky part is putting them in sequence.

Well, not always. My most recent collection prior to this volume was The Night and the Music , comprising all the Matthew Scudder short fiction, eleven pieces in all, and it seemed obvious that they ought to appear chronologically.

But here we’re dealing with a great variety of material, including not only traditional fiction but also a one-act play and a newspaper op-ed piece. For a while I struggled to find a way to make one work lead into the next, and then I remembered the sterling example of a favorite author, John O’Hara, in one of his later collections of short stories. ( Waiting for Winter , I think it was, but maybe not.) I bought the book as soon as it came out, opened it to the table of contents, and was struck by the fact that O’Hara had let alphabetical order determine the sequence of the stories.

At the time I couldn’t decide whether I was looking at a brilliant solution or an abdication of responsibility. I’ve since decided that the two are not mutually exclusive, and that what was good enough for the Bard of Gibbsville is good enough for me. And I have to say the sequence serves the stories well.

“A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed” appeared in the newspaper Newsday in July 2002. I believe there was some news event that prompted an editor to commission the piece, which takes the form of my interviewing Bernie Rhodenbarr, my favorite burglar. Five years later, Mark Lavendier used the text in a limited-edition broadside.

“A Chance to Get Even” was written after Otto Penzler requested a story for a poker anthology. He liked it but asked for some changes which I didn’t want to make, and for some reason we were both uncharacteristically stubborn. I took the story back, and it was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2007.

“A Vision in White” is another Otto-inspired story, and another which he didn’t publish. I’d written a story (“Terrible Tommy Terhune”) for his anthology, Murder is My Racquet , but included it in my omnibus collection, Enough Rope . Otto pointed out that stories for his anthology had to be previously unpublished, and so I wrote “A Vision in White”; I sent it to Otto, and he thanked me for it, but then the whole thing slipped his mind and he wound up using “Terrible Tommy Terhune” in the book after all. When I realize this, I dusted off “A Vision in White” and sent it to Janet Hutchings, who published it in EQMM in 2008.

“Catch and Release” was also written for an anthology, in this case the cross-genre Stories , edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, published in 2010. A number of reviewers singled out the story, several praising it, and one objecting to it because she found it too troubling. Unless there’s another that I’m forgetting, it’s one of two stories I’ve written about fishing, and it’s interesting (well, to me, anyway) that they’ve both wound up as the title stories of collections. (The other is “Sometimes They Bite.”)

“Clean Slate” first appeared in Warriors , the cross-genre anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin and published in 2010. And thereby hangs a tale.

Earlier, I’d written three stories about a then-unnamed young woman for whom the pursuit of happiness consists of picking up men, going home with them, enjoying sex with them, and then killing them. When Gardner and George requested a story about a warrior, I thought of my girl, and by the time I’d written the story I knew far more about her than I’d previously known, and realized that I was, not for the first time, writing a novel on the installment plan. The book, of course, is Getting Off , published in 2011 by Hard Case Crime, “by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson.” “Clean Slate” is a pivotal chapter, and got further recognition as a short story in its own right when Harlan Coben selected it for Best American Mystery Stories of 2011.

“Dolly’s Trash and Treasures,” inspired by the reality shows about hoarders, was an interesting tour de force, in that it was commissioned for a 2010 UK audiobook anthology edited by my friend Maxim Jakubowski; thus it was written specifically to be read aloud. (I’d done something like this once before; “In For a Penny” was commissioned by the BBC to be read over the radio.) EQMM subsequently published it in 2011.

In 1997, EQMM published my short story, “How Far It Could Go.” A while later a theatrical producer in Los Angeles inquired about adapting it for the stage, and I looked at it and realized it was already a stage play in prose form. I offered to adapt it myself, and did so, and nothing happened. (That’s mostly what happens in the theater.) It’s since been performed by an amateur company in Australia, and may be included in an evening of off-off-Broadway one-act plays, but I’m not holding my breath. I rather like “How Far” as a play, and it certainly lends itself to low-budget production — two principal characters, one simple set. I’ve made it eVailable for $2.99, more in the hope that someone will want to stage it than in the hope my share of the $2.99 will make me rich, and I’m pleased to include it here for whatever enjoyment it might bring you.

“Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen” was written as the text for a 2007 Mark Lavendier broadside; in 2011 I included it in The Night and the Music . And you’ll note that, as a happy alphabetical accident, it’s followed immediately by “One Last Night at Grogan’s,” which was written for The Night and the Music and has appeared nowhere else.

And now for something completely different. “Part of the Job” is a lost story, written in 1963-4, published (though I never knew about it) in 1967, and discovered over four decades later by the indispensable Lynn Munroe. The story that goes with it is better than the story itself, and you’ll find both included here.