The Third Degree: The Lawrence Block Interview

After intensive questioning, some of the world’s leading writers of mystery fiction give up the goods on the art of writing, their lives, and their innermost thoughts having undergone THE THIRD DEGREE. Published individually, these intimate and candid interviews, some published for the first time, explore the art and form of storytelling, the value of personal experience, the sense of place and social history in fiction, the moral maze, and the iconoclasts who run at a tangent to the mainstream.

THE THIRD THE LAWRENCE BLOCK
Although Lawrence Block has been gainfully employed as a fiction writer since the 1950s, he began captivating readers all over the world in the 1970s with two fascinating characters. In the Burglar mysteries he writes books that cross the boundary of funny into the territory of wit. In the Matthew Scudder mysteries he transforms what could have been a static, repetitive guilt-ridden ex-cop-turns-to-drink series into a trip through a morality maze where all the exits have been bricked up. Block breathes on his word processor and people leap out of his screen.
Paul Duncan met Lawrence Block at Bouchercon in Nottingham, UK in 1995.

Also in this series, published and

- Lawrence Block (The Matthew Scudder mysteries, The Burglar mysteries)
- Edward Bunker (No Beast So Fierce, The Animal Factory)
- Martina Cole (Dangerous Lady, The Take)
- Patricia Cornwell (The Kay Scarpetta mysteries)
- Michael Dibdin (The Aurelio Zen mysteries),
- James Ellroy (The LA Quartet, The Underworld USA Trilogy)
- John Harvey (The Charlie Resnick mysteries)
- Andrew Klavan (Don’t Say A Word, True Crime)
- Walter Mosley (The Easy Rawlins mysteries)
- Derek Raymond (The Factory mysteries)
- James Sallis (Drive, The Lew Griffin mysteries)

Reviews for the original paperback version of The Third

“Outstanding... guaranteed to intrigue anyone interested in what makes contemporary fiction tick.” Philip Oakes, Literary Review

“A gripping collection.” Brian Case, Time Out

“The finest interview I’ve had.” James Sallis

About the Paul Duncan has edited and written over 150 books and magazines on cinema, mystery fiction, comic books, history, and literature. He won the August Prize as co-editor of The Ingmar Bergman Archives, and subsequently edited The Pedro Almodovar Archives, The James Bond Archives, and The Charlie Chaplin Archives. He has also written monographs on Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick which have been published in many languages around the world.