Sinner Man

September 12, 2016
The first crime novel by MWA Grand Master Block (The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes) returns to print, slightly revised, after being lost for 50 years. It’s as lean and compulsively readable as you’d expect from a writer who made his rent writing paperbacks in the 1950s and ’60s. When insurance salesman Donald Barshter of Danbury, Conn., accidentally kills his wife, he senses the chance to reinvent himself and decides to do so as a mobster. His plan takes him to Buffalo, N.Y., where he encounters new women and crafts a new life—and realizes that playing the part inevitably involves dipping his hands in blood. An entertaining afterword by Block traces his memory of the book and the era and how he eventually located copies released under the title Savage Lover. He followed more than one false trail, when “what turned up in the mailbox was a lesbian novel, one of the handful published in America that I hadn’t written.” For fans of the paperback jungle, an original noir is reborn.

August 1, 2016
Early in his career, Block was churning out paperback originals under multiple pseudonymsso many, in fact, that it wasn't uncommon for him to lose track of some of them. But this one disappeared entirely; written in 1960 and abandoned with an agent, it was eventually published eight years later, without Block's knowledge, under a different name and with a different title. Then it vanished for nearly a half-century. A little Internet sleuthing finally turned up the book, and here it is, repackaged with the original title and Block's name on the cover. It's undiluted noireven if, back in 1960, that term was still the property of the film crowdand its narrator, a Manhattan insurance salesman turned killer, makes most antiheroes seem, well, a little genteel. The creepy part about Don Barshter is that he really is just an ordinary insurance salesman until he kills his wife by accident. Opting not to turn himself in, he moves to Buffalo and takes on a new identity as a thug for hire. The new persona fits like a glove. Block's signature stylecareful plotting, sly wit, straight-ahead proseis well in evidence here, even in its rough-edged infancy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)