Lawrence Block, Speed Racer

Tucked in the middle of this week’s Artvoice interview with Lawrence Block, which focuses primarily on his screenplay for the Wong-Kar Wai movie MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS, his Buffalo background, and his prolific novel writing career, is the news of his next book – a memoir:

For such a productive scribe, Block is hardly chained to his

typewriter. He and his wife are avid travelers, having moved on to

explore the rest of the world after spending two years in the late

1980s driving around the US to visit different cities named Buffalo.

(Without exhausting the list of possibilities, they made it to 66.) And

he has a passion for walking—not the kind you do to get from point A to

point B, but race walking. It will be the subject of his next book, Step By Step: A Pedestrian Memoir,

to be published in 2009. As he explains, “It’s an Olympic event, though

not the way I do it. The people who do it, aside from some youthful

athletes, are people who ran for awhile and then our knees went.”

Block also comments on the recent spate of republications of older work (including the upcoming Hard Case Crime reissue of KILLING CASTRO) and when pressed as to whether anyone has approached him about work he’d rather stay consigned to permanent out of print status, replies, “Not really. I’ve found that greed is just an enormously powerful

motivator. And if you leave anything to the dustbins of history, some

son of a bitch is going to find it there anyway.” Truer words never spoken…