Corridor Buzz - The Premier Source of Arts & Entertainment News and Information for the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor

Stepping through Lawrence Block’s career

By John Kenyon

To read more about Lawrence Block's thoughts on his writing career and more, visit John Kenyon's blog here.

First, the bad news: Lawrence Block may have written his last book. That means his Thursday appearance at Theatre Cedar Rapids-Lindale as part of the Out Loud! Metro Library Network Author Series might be your last chance to catch him on a book tour.

Now, the good news, in installments: 1) He’s not done writing. 2) He’s given up things before only to return to them energetically (more on that later). 3) If he is done, he’s left readers with an awfully entertaining final volume.

Block is a mystery writer almost without peer. He’s the author behind popular series featuring Matthew Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner and John Keller, and has won every major award in the genre, some numerous times. Those include being named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and being the rare American to earn the Crime Writers' Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger award, which usually goes to a British crime novelist. Suffice to say, he’s good.

He’s also prolific. While he has more than 60 novels to his name, he has written dozens more, many very early in his career under pseudonyms.

But after nearly 50 years of writing mystery novels, Block says he may have written his last.

“I may really not write another book,” he says. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if I’m done writing novels. I may have tapped out that well.”

His latest and perhaps last book is Step by Step. The subtitle is an apt description: “a pedestrian memoir.” While cranking out a staggering number of books over the past few decades, Block has also been an avid racewalker, participating in dozens of marathons, 24-hour races and other events.

Toward the beginning he writes, “I’ve been a walker all of my life. Well, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. Before I was a walker, I was a crawler, and before that I just sort of lay there like a lump.” You can imagine any of his characters uttering such a line, but this time he puts these and many more words in his own mouth, so to speak.

“The only way I could give myself freedom to sit down and write it was to decide that I really didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened after that,” he says. “I had to take that out of the equation or I would have been frozen or done something with more potential. I wrote it with no certainty that anyone would want to read it.”

The early part of the book deals with his upbringing, adolescence and young adulthood. We find that he didn’t learn to ride a bike until he was practically old enough to drive (which of course means that walking was an important, if unremarkable, mode of transportation), that he was a Boy Scout and that he dropped out of Antioch College because it seemed foolish to head back to school if it meant leaving behind what was becoming a fruitful career as a crime fiction writer.

After that scene-setting first section, the rest of the book is dedicated, for the most part, to walking. Or, at the start, running. Block took it up in 1977, starting on a whim that involved a turn around a park near his apartment in New York. He soon began signing up for races and quickly became a dedicated marathoner.

He injured himself at one point, and dealt with the pain not by stopping, but by slowing down. “I had found my sport,” he writes of racewalking. “And it was an odd one.” Not only that, but an odd subject for a memoir. But it works. It helps that Block kept meticulous records of his races, allowing him to recount each event as if it had happened just months — rather that years — ago.

Things came to a halt in 1982 when he simply stopped. Where the book could have gotten bogged down, it instead gets more interesting. He writes about falling for his wife, Lynn, and their global travels that included a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in Spain. In 2004, the fire returns and he begins racewalking again with the same focus and intent that drove him 22 years earlier. From that point on, the book deals with his return to the sport, his dismay at the toll the years have taken on his abilities and his eventual acceptance of the march of time.

“I’ve been away from it pretty much since the end of the book,” he says of walking. “I’ll go out occasionally, but I’m not in shape. I feel as I embark on the abbreviated book tour here like one of those guys from ‘The Biggest Loser’ who wrote a book and by the time he goes on tour has gained back all the weight.”

While the book is ostensibly about racewalking, Block also shares plenty about the writing life. Local readers may be interested to know that this largely self-taught writer shares his thoughts about university writing programs at several points, taking specific swipes at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in two or three spots.

“In my youth, one of the functions of the novels I read was that of explaining the world to me; as I grew up, I required less in the way of explanation and resisted a worldview helpfully supplied by some bright young thing fresh out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” he writes.

Despite writing an advice column for Writer’s Digest magazine for many years and authoring four books on the subject, Block is of the mind that writing can’t be taught.

“It seems now that an awful lot of people really believe that an MFA from somewhere is an essential prerequisite to writing for a living, which strikes me as strange,” he says. “I don’t know how well that works, maybe it does. People think, perhaps with justification, that in order to go into film you go to film school. And maybe that’s true. There’s a lot of technical stuff and trade craft that, I think if you’re going to direct pictures or something like that, that you have to learn and maybe can’t learn any other way.

“With writing, I don’t think that’s true. A thing about writing as opposed to the other arts, the technique is transparent,” he adds. “Painters will talk and ask, ‘How did you get that effect, how did you get it to be luminous like that,’ and they’ll have things to discuss with each other. With a writer, ‘How did you get that to be like that?’ the answer is, ‘I took those words and put them in that particular order.’”

He is quick to say that there is a place for books written by young writers who are still figuring out the world. “What it amounts to is one’s own response to reading and requirements of reading change as one ages.”

The requirements of writing have changed as well. The man who once cranked out a book a month for a pulp publisher now says he finds he has trouble getting motivated to write novels. He does add that he’s far from through as a writer, however.

“I’m clearly not entirely through with writing. The behavior of the financial markets has guaranteed that,” he says.

Last fall he wrote a screenplay for his novel A Ticket to the Boneyard, and says he enjoyed the process.

“I found it both demanding and gratifying,” he says. “I think I’d like to do more of that.”

Then again, this is the guy who gave up racewalking for 22 years, only to dive back in with gusto. So, we can always hope that Block finds some reserves to tap. He does hedge a bit on that earlier declaration that the end may be near.

“It’s really difficult for me to know what I’m going to do 5 minutes from now,” he says.