David wrote:
"Whatever the merits of any individual book, by the time
Westlake and Block began writing under their own names, they
had their voice, and it was created in the books for hire
they wrote in the early sixties."
And many of them were written AFTER they were already
publishing the early hardboiled novels we so revere now. For
instance, Sheldon Lord's The Sex Shuffle, which Hard Case
recently reprinted as Block's Lucky at Cards, has a copyright
of 8/27/64, by which time Block had already written Mona
(2/28/61), Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos
(8/10/61, later reprinted as You Could Call it Murder) and
Death Pulls a Doublecross (10/30/61, later reprinted as
Coward's Kiss). In fact, all of the Beacon Sheldon Lords
postdate these early books, although he published under the
pseudonyms Liz Crowley and Liz Evans before them.
Similarly, Westlake's pseudonymous work as Edwin West and
Alan Marshall
(roughly 1960-1963) was contemporaneous with his early
hardboiled books: Mercenaries (1960), Killing Time (1961),
361 (1/19/62), the Hunter and Killy (4/15/63).
Mark
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