A Diet of Treacle

A New Afterword

by the Author

In the summer of 1956, after a freshman year at Antioch College, I came to New York to spend three months in the mail room at Pines Publications. I’d be rooming with Paul Grillo, who’d arrived a few days before me and found us a place to live, at 147 West 14th Street. We were there for two weeks and then found a less expensive place to stay at 108 West 12th. By then we’d acquired another roommate, Fred Anliot, and the three of us were sharing a squalid little cell that a solitary midget would have found confining. Two weeks of that and we moved again, to a first-floor apartment at 54 Barrow Street, where we remained until our three months was up and it was time to return to campus.

The job was supposed to provide valuable vocational experience, and I’m sure it did. The guy who ran the promotion and publicity department took me aside one day and said his assistant was leaving and would I like to replace him? I was all set to go for it, and said maybe I’d drop out of school—and that led him to rescind the offer. If I was a student, he said, I should stay in school. That would be more valuable to me than the job he was offering.

I’m not sure he was right about that. The real education was being on my own and living in the Village and meeting all sorts of fascinating folk. I still know some of the people I met on Sunday afternoons around the fountain in Washington Square. A few of them are gone, and I miss them, even as I miss those days and nights.

A few years later I wrote a book set in that time and place. I called it A Diet of Treacle, with an epigraph quote from Alice in Wonderland. It wound up at Beacon Books, where they published it with the title Pads Are for Passion. I used a pen name on the book—Sheldon Lord, a name I’d used before and would use again.

Years passed, as they’re apt to do. Hard Case Crime, which had reprinted several of my early crime novels, was casting about for something else of mine, and I remembered the book. Founder Charles Ardai not only liked the book, he even liked its original title.

And, wonder of wonders, Publishers Weekly had these nice things to say about this early effort:

Block’s New York is a noir wonderland, populated with junkies and beatsters (the dark predecessor to the modern hipster) spouting angular tough-guy dialogue… Block effortlessly immerses himself in… their world of drugs, sex, and disaffection with a matter-of-factness that hits hard, all the more convincing because Block never makes an overt effort to convince. A potboiler morality play at its finest. (“Fiction Reviews,”

Publishers Weekly

, October 2007)

Well, that’s generous of them, innit? Possibly more generous than this very early work deserves, but that’s OK. I’ll take it, and I’m glad to see it go on to a further existence as an ebook. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

And as for its author, I’ve moved around a bit since that first sojourn in the Village. I’ve lived at various times in upstate New York, in New Jersey, in Wisconsin, in California and Florida; within New York City I’ve had apartments on the Upper West Side, in Washington Heights, and in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint. But I’ve spent most of my time where I started, in Greenwich Village, and for the past twenty years I’ve lived within a half mile of that first place on West Fourteenth Street. Sometimes it seems as though I’ve come a long way. Other times I don’t seem to have gone very far at all.

—Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.