Strange Embrace (Audible Audio Edition) Lawrence Block Kurt Elftmann Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Strange Embrace (Audible Audio Edition) Lawrence Block Kurt Elftmann Audible Studios Books
When his leading lady winds up dead, a Broadway producer goes searching for a different kind of hit.
In just a few hours, Johnny Lane's newest Broadway creation begins previews, and he cannot find his leading lady. Elaine is a nobody, but his show A Touch of Squalor will make her a star, and Johnny won't let her miss it. There are only a few miles between his penthouse and Alphabet City, but the short cab ride to Elaine's apartment is enough to carry this producer into New York's hellish depths.
On the top floor of a decrepit tenement, he finds the would-be diva dead on her bed, her throat slashed by a straight razor. Before he can debut his production, Johnny will avenge his murdered star. In the dark alleys of Alphabet City, he will blaze a searchlight brighter than any marquee on the Great White Way.
Strange Embrace (Audible Audio Edition) Lawrence Block Kurt Elftmann Audible Studios Books
Strange Embrace is a 1962 novel by Lawrence Block, originally published under a pseudonym, Ben Christopher. Block explains that it was published by Beacon and Beacon was a particularly chessy publishing house of softcore stuff so no one put their real names on Beacon books at that time.It was originally intended as a tie-in to a tv series, Johnny Midnight, starring Edmund O’Brien as a theatrical producer with a wisecracking Japanese butler, Ito. The series ran for a full season of 39 episodes, but was then not renewed.With the name of the title character changed to Johnny Lane, the book was off and running. Although it is packaged by Hard Case Crime with 69 Barrow Street, Strange Embrace is the better of the two novels and the more complete novel. What the two works have in common is a connection to the East Village of Manhattan in 1962 where the hippies, beatniks, and other purveyors of alternative lifestyles gathered and engaged in drugs, orgies, and other behavior, sometimes violence like murder, at least in novels portraying the alternative generation. But, the connection between the two novels doesn’t go much further than that. Unlike 69 Barrow Street, Strange Embrace is a solid pulp whodunit mystery novel that is focused more so on the mystery of who is doing the killings than on the East Village itself.
The basic plot to Strange Embrace is that Johnny Lane is a Broadway producer who has a play that is about to hit the road the next morning: “A Touch of Squalor.” Lane is a little concerned about the fact that his lead actress, Elaine James, is not returning his calls. Elaine is twenty-two “with all the requisite curves in their proper places.”
Since Elaine is about as straight-laced, small-town, virginal as could be, Johnny becomes concerned and goes to her apartment, a run-down tenement building in the East Village. Finding her door unlocked, he goes in and looks around and, as any purveyor of pulp mysteries can guess, he finds her nude body sprawled across her bed with her throat slashed. Here, it never occurs to Johnny that he could end up being the chief suspect and, even though his fingerprints are everywhere in the apartment, he calls a friendly homicide detective, Haig. “Elaine James was a lovely girl, she was lovely from the neck down. She was also lovely from the neck up. But her neck was not lovely at all, because somebody had slashed a hole in it.”
Everyone in the play is a suspect and it is puzzling who has a motive to kill the lead actress and even more puzzling when a secondary actress in the play, Jan Vernon, tells Johnny that both she and Elaine have been getting threatening telephone calls, telling them that the play cannot go on. Jan Vernon is described as having a “sleepily voluptuous figure, the pouting mouth, the lay-me look that never left her eyes, not even when she was doing something as prosaic as counting her lines.” She was rumoured to have participated in orgies and marijuana parties on the West Coast. “Obviously, Jan’s position in life was basically a horizontal one and Johnny struggled with a strong urge to haul her off to the bedroom and ravish her.” As she disappears with the coats at a gathering, Johnny sees “her pert little behind twitching impressively, her hips rolling like a boat in rough water with every step she took.”
Even as the police are trying to solve the puzzling crime, Johnny investigates on his own, interviewing actors in the play, throwing out accusations, and talking to Elaine’s neighbors, including those who are bearded beatniks, those who hang out in marijuana-filled coffeeshops and aren’t sure if they are attracted to men or women. As he explains, Elaine hung out with a “pretty strange crew of Village types. Grils who don’t comb their hair and boys who don’t shave. I think they call them beatniks this year.” He visits one neighbor who won’t get up from his full lotus position and talks about being on a Zen kick and turning on to visions of hallucinatory reality. In the coffeeshop, he sees young men with beards who look like actors on the skids with “torn sweaters, uncut hair, unshaved faces – sprawled over chairs, their eyes shut and their mouths hanging open.” When he finds Sondra in the coffeeshop, she sat “glassy-eyed and inert” and had “violet eyes” that were “unfocused, blank, opaque.” She fits every stereotype of the alternative lifestyle hippies and drug-addled beatniks known to inhabit the East Village.
In some ways, the plot bears a little resemblance to Violence in Velvet by Mike Avallone as both stories focus on murders in a Broadway play.
This tale is solidly in the hardboiled world and is a pleasure to read from the descriptions of the characters to the beatings that Johnny takes when told to lay off the case. When he gets beaten: “He had just enough time to see a broad, dull forehead and a pair of piggish little eyes. Then a hand the size of a leg of lamb slammed into his chest. He went down.”
In fact, there is a scene in which Johnny channels his inner-Spillane and gives back to the hoodlums as good as he gets.
There is a bit of humor thrown in as well as Ito the butler makes comments poking fun at stereotypes about Asians. He constantly refers to himself as an inscrutable Oriental who spends his evenings watching Charlie Chan movies: “You know, we Orientals are wonderfully industrious,” he deadpans. “And inscrutable,” he adds. Ito jokes about being the humble servant when answering the telephone.
All in all, it is one terrific novel, solidly hardboiled, solidly humorous, and just plain filled with damn good writing. As a reader, you don’t want to put it down until the mystery is solved. Good stuff, indeed.
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Strange Embrace (Audible Audio Edition) Lawrence Block Kurt Elftmann Audible Studios Books Reviews
Hard Case Crime seems to be on a major kick to publish some of the really early Lawrence Block. For the record, Block deserves every major award he has ever been given, and that would be a big pile of awards. However, everyone had to start some place and not all starts are great.
Strange Embrace does to conform to a murder mystery plot. The characters are somewhat engaging, and there are enough alternatives as to who is the killer to keep the reader guessing most of the way. There are some nice observations about the theater scene. This part of the book is a strong 3 or a weak 4 star effort.
69 Barrow Street is a whole different creature. It's more of a sociological investigation of weird people in early 1960's Greenwich Village pushing the limits with drugs and sex than it really is any kind of mystery. Yes, a crime takes place, but it occurs towards the end of the book. Block seems to mostly want to stand back and say "What odd creatures these be!"
And odd they are, but not compelling. The villain in particular is loathsome, but predictable. In later life, Block created and filled out the back story of some very memorable charterers, Matthew Scudder being his penultimate. In these early works, he is still struggling with how to make his characters interesting. This part of the book is a weak 3 stars at best.
There are literally two dozen Lawrence Block books which cannot be missed by any serious reader of crime fiction. This book is not one of them.
A 1962 Midwood paperback by Block's early pen name Sheldon Lord is guaranteed to be pulpy, sexy, possibly raunchy. This book is about Greenwich Village in the early sixties, described as being the former location of many artists and writers, but now filled with junkies, queers, perverts, and the dregs of society.
And, it was where Ralph Lambert and Stella James lived. Stella was tall beautiful blonde and a tigress. Ralph was a failed artist who hadn't painted a thing in months and lived off Stella's inheritance. Ralph was bitterly unhappy with the arrangements and considered Stella a first class bitch on wheels. There was no monogamy in this arrangement either as far as Stella was concerned. She enjoyed both men and women and Ralph put up with it.
Susan often organized parties in the apartment which were often little more than marijuana fueled sex orgies. Many of the couples had no jobs and lived in the Village.
Susan Rivers, who was a lesbian, was a neighbor and afraid of Stella. Both Ralph and Stella have designs on Susan.
No one survives this story whole. They all come out twisted and damaged.
Strange Embrace is a 1962 novel by Lawrence Block, originally published under a pseudonym, Ben Christopher. Block explains that it was published by Beacon and Beacon was a particularly chessy publishing house of softcore stuff so no one put their real names on Beacon books at that time.It was originally intended as a tie-in to a tv series, Johnny Midnight, starring Edmund O'Brien as a theatrical producer with a wisecracking Japanese butler, Ito. The series ran for a full season of 39 episodes, but was then not renewed.
With the name of the title character changed to Johnny Lane, the book was off and running. Although it is packaged by Hard Case Crime with 69 Barrow Street, Strange Embrace is the better of the two novels and the more complete novel. What the two works have in common is a connection to the East Village of Manhattan in 1962 where the hippies, beatniks, and other purveyors of alternative lifestyles gathered and engaged in drugs, orgies, and other behavior, sometimes violence like murder, at least in novels portraying the alternative generation. But, the connection between the two novels doesn't go much further than that. Unlike 69 Barrow Street, Strange Embrace is a solid pulp whodunit mystery novel that is focused more so on the mystery of who is doing the killings than on the East Village itself.
The basic plot to Strange Embrace is that Johnny Lane is a Broadway producer who has a play that is about to hit the road the next morning "A Touch of Squalor." Lane is a little concerned about the fact that his lead actress, Elaine James, is not returning his calls. Elaine is twenty-two "with all the requisite curves in their proper places."
Since Elaine is about as straight-laced, small-town, virginal as could be, Johnny becomes concerned and goes to her apartment, a run-down tenement building in the East Village. Finding her door unlocked, he goes in and looks around and, as any purveyor of pulp mysteries can guess, he finds her nude body sprawled across her bed with her throat slashed. Here, it never occurs to Johnny that he could end up being the chief suspect and, even though his fingerprints are everywhere in the apartment, he calls a friendly homicide detective, Haig. "Elaine James was a lovely girl, she was lovely from the neck down. She was also lovely from the neck up. But her neck was not lovely at all, because somebody had slashed a hole in it."
Everyone in the play is a suspect and it is puzzling who has a motive to kill the lead actress and even more puzzling when a secondary actress in the play, Jan Vernon, tells Johnny that both she and Elaine have been getting threatening telephone calls, telling them that the play cannot go on. Jan Vernon is described as having a "sleepily voluptuous figure, the pouting mouth, the lay-me look that never left her eyes, not even when she was doing something as prosaic as counting her lines." She was rumoured to have participated in orgies and marijuana parties on the West Coast. "Obviously, Jan's position in life was basically a horizontal one and Johnny struggled with a strong urge to haul her off to the bedroom and ravish her." As she disappears with the coats at a gathering, Johnny sees "her pert little behind twitching impressively, her hips rolling like a boat in rough water with every step she took."
Even as the police are trying to solve the puzzling crime, Johnny investigates on his own, interviewing actors in the play, throwing out accusations, and talking to Elaine's neighbors, including those who are bearded beatniks, those who hang out in marijuana-filled coffeeshops and aren't sure if they are attracted to men or women. As he explains, Elaine hung out with a "pretty strange crew of Village types. Grils who don't comb their hair and boys who don't shave. I think they call them beatniks this year." He visits one neighbor who won't get up from his full lotus position and talks about being on a Zen kick and turning on to visions of hallucinatory reality. In the coffeeshop, he sees young men with beards who look like actors on the skids with "torn sweaters, uncut hair, unshaved faces - sprawled over chairs, their eyes shut and their mouths hanging open." When he finds Sondra in the coffeeshop, she sat "glassy-eyed and inert" and had "violet eyes" that were "unfocused, blank, opaque." She fits every stereotype of the alternative lifestyle hippies and drug-addled beatniks known to inhabit the East Village.
In some ways, the plot bears a little resemblance to Violence in Velvet by Mike Avallone as both stories focus on murders in a Broadway play.
This tale is solidly in the hardboiled world and is a pleasure to read from the descriptions of the characters to the beatings that Johnny takes when told to lay off the case. When he gets beaten "He had just enough time to see a broad, dull forehead and a pair of piggish little eyes. Then a hand the size of a leg of lamb slammed into his chest. He went down."
In fact, there is a scene in which Johnny channels his inner-Spillane and gives back to the hoodlums as good as he gets.
There is a bit of humor thrown in as well as Ito the butler makes comments poking fun at stereotypes about Asians. He constantly refers to himself as an inscrutable Oriental who spends his evenings watching Charlie Chan movies "You know, we Orientals are wonderfully industrious," he deadpans. "And inscrutable," he adds. Ito jokes about being the humble servant when answering the telephone.
All in all, it is one terrific novel, solidly hardboiled, solidly humorous, and just plain filled with damn good writing. As a reader, you don't want to put it down until the mystery is solved. Good stuff, indeed.
Strange Embrace is a 1962 novel by Lawrence Block, originally published under a pseudonym, Ben Christopher. Block explains that it was published by Beacon and Beacon was a particularly chessy publishing house of softcore stuff so no one put their real names on Beacon books at that time.It was originally intended as a tie-in to a tv series, Johnny Midnight, starring Edmund O’Brien as a theatrical producer with a wisecracking Japanese butler, Ito. The series ran for a full season of 39 episodes, but was then not renewed.
With the name of the title character changed to Johnny Lane, the book was off and running. Although it is packaged by Hard Case Crime with 69 Barrow Street, Strange Embrace is the better of the two novels and the more complete novel. What the two works have in common is a connection to the East Village of Manhattan in 1962 where the hippies, beatniks, and other purveyors of alternative lifestyles gathered and engaged in drugs, orgies, and other behavior, sometimes violence like murder, at least in novels portraying the alternative generation. But, the connection between the two novels doesn’t go much further than that. Unlike 69 Barrow Street, Strange Embrace is a solid pulp whodunit mystery novel that is focused more so on the mystery of who is doing the killings than on the East Village itself.
The basic plot to Strange Embrace is that Johnny Lane is a Broadway producer who has a play that is about to hit the road the next morning “A Touch of Squalor.” Lane is a little concerned about the fact that his lead actress, Elaine James, is not returning his calls. Elaine is twenty-two “with all the requisite curves in their proper places.”
Since Elaine is about as straight-laced, small-town, virginal as could be, Johnny becomes concerned and goes to her apartment, a run-down tenement building in the East Village. Finding her door unlocked, he goes in and looks around and, as any purveyor of pulp mysteries can guess, he finds her nude body sprawled across her bed with her throat slashed. Here, it never occurs to Johnny that he could end up being the chief suspect and, even though his fingerprints are everywhere in the apartment, he calls a friendly homicide detective, Haig. “Elaine James was a lovely girl, she was lovely from the neck down. She was also lovely from the neck up. But her neck was not lovely at all, because somebody had slashed a hole in it.”
Everyone in the play is a suspect and it is puzzling who has a motive to kill the lead actress and even more puzzling when a secondary actress in the play, Jan Vernon, tells Johnny that both she and Elaine have been getting threatening telephone calls, telling them that the play cannot go on. Jan Vernon is described as having a “sleepily voluptuous figure, the pouting mouth, the lay-me look that never left her eyes, not even when she was doing something as prosaic as counting her lines.” She was rumoured to have participated in orgies and marijuana parties on the West Coast. “Obviously, Jan’s position in life was basically a horizontal one and Johnny struggled with a strong urge to haul her off to the bedroom and ravish her.” As she disappears with the coats at a gathering, Johnny sees “her pert little behind twitching impressively, her hips rolling like a boat in rough water with every step she took.”
Even as the police are trying to solve the puzzling crime, Johnny investigates on his own, interviewing actors in the play, throwing out accusations, and talking to Elaine’s neighbors, including those who are bearded beatniks, those who hang out in marijuana-filled coffeeshops and aren’t sure if they are attracted to men or women. As he explains, Elaine hung out with a “pretty strange crew of Village types. Grils who don’t comb their hair and boys who don’t shave. I think they call them beatniks this year.” He visits one neighbor who won’t get up from his full lotus position and talks about being on a Zen kick and turning on to visions of hallucinatory reality. In the coffeeshop, he sees young men with beards who look like actors on the skids with “torn sweaters, uncut hair, unshaved faces – sprawled over chairs, their eyes shut and their mouths hanging open.” When he finds Sondra in the coffeeshop, she sat “glassy-eyed and inert” and had “violet eyes” that were “unfocused, blank, opaque.” She fits every stereotype of the alternative lifestyle hippies and drug-addled beatniks known to inhabit the East Village.
In some ways, the plot bears a little resemblance to Violence in Velvet by Mike Avallone as both stories focus on murders in a Broadway play.
This tale is solidly in the hardboiled world and is a pleasure to read from the descriptions of the characters to the beatings that Johnny takes when told to lay off the case. When he gets beaten “He had just enough time to see a broad, dull forehead and a pair of piggish little eyes. Then a hand the size of a leg of lamb slammed into his chest. He went down.”
In fact, there is a scene in which Johnny channels his inner-Spillane and gives back to the hoodlums as good as he gets.
There is a bit of humor thrown in as well as Ito the butler makes comments poking fun at stereotypes about Asians. He constantly refers to himself as an inscrutable Oriental who spends his evenings watching Charlie Chan movies “You know, we Orientals are wonderfully industrious,” he deadpans. “And inscrutable,” he adds. Ito jokes about being the humble servant when answering the telephone.
All in all, it is one terrific novel, solidly hardboiled, solidly humorous, and just plain filled with damn good writing. As a reader, you don’t want to put it down until the mystery is solved. Good stuff, indeed.
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