Enough Rope

Introduction

“Eighty-four stories?” My friend gave me a look. “That’s not a book,” he said. “That’s a skyscraper.”

It’s a handful, too, as you’ve no doubt already noticed yourself, and I’m conscious as I prepare these introductory remarks that I’m only making the damned thing longer with every word I write. This book was very nearly entitled Long Story Short, and it’s been observed that when you utter the words “to make a long story short,” it’s already too late.

But I digress, and not for the first time. A short story collection seems to cry out for an introduction, especially when it’s a huge doorstop of a thing like this one, and especially when it represents one person’s entire output of short fiction over a career that began in (gulp!) 1957.

Well, virtually entire...

My earliest stories, collected a few years ago in a signed limited edition (One Night Stands, Crippen & Landru), have been purposely omitted. I don’t think much of them — which puts me in the majority, I’d have to say — and, while I’m not unwilling for collectors and specialists to have them, they don’t belong in this book. (I’ve made one exception, my first published story, called “You Can’t Lose.” It seemed worth including, if only as a curiosity.)

Two more recent shorter fictions, “Speaking of Lust” and “Speaking of Greed,” have also been omitted. Each is the title novella in a volume of the Seven Deadly Sins anthology series, and when all seven novellas have been written and published, they’ll be gathered into a single volume. I’m very fond of the two written to date — but they’re long, running around 20,000 words each, and they don’t belong here.

And, come to think of it, my episodic novel Hit Man is essentially a collection of ten short stories, and that constituted a quandary all its own. If I were to include them all, I’d be folding a full book into this one, and making people buy it a second time. If I left them all out, well, I’d be passing up the chance to include one story that was shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and two others that won it outright. Some authors might be modest enough to omit such stories, and even to leave off mentioning the awards, but I am not of their number.

So I’ve compromised, and included those three of the ten, along with two more Keller stories — “Keller’s Horoscope,” extracted from the second Keller novel, Hit List, for publication in a German anthology, and “Keller’s Designated Hitter,” written for an anthology of baseball stories and otherwise unpublished. If there’s a third book about Keller, perhaps it will be included. Then again, perhaps not. At any rate, it’s here.

Once I’d selected the stories, I had to put them in order.

As far as I can see, there are three accepted ways to organize collections of short fiction. You can line them up in the order they were written, you can alphabetize them by title, or you can place them here and there like paintings in a gallery, trying to arrange them so that they’ll complement one another.

The last is altogether beyond me — how the hell do I know in what order you’ll enjoy coming upon these stories? And chronological order is out the question, because I couldn’t possibly recall precisely when each story was written. Alphabetical order has always made perfect sense to me, it’s so deliciously arbitrary and yet so marvelously unequivocal. How better to construct a sheer hodgepodge with the illusion of order?

But there’s another variable to weigh in the balance, and that’s that some of my stories are about series characters, and they really ought to be set off by themselves. And I do recall the order in which the series stories were written, and they really ought to be arranged in that order.

So here’s the plan:

The stories which appeared in my three previously published collections, Sometimes They Bite, Like a Lamb to Slaughter, and Some Days You Get the Bear, appear first, in one great alphabetically ordered jumble.

The groups of stories which follow — about Martin Ehrengraf, Chip Harrison, Keller, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and Matthew Scudder — appear chronologically. Many of these showed up in the three above-named collections, but quite a few did not, and these are collected here for the first time: “The Ehrengraf Presumption,” “The Ehrengraf Riposte,” “The Ehrengraf Affirmation,” and “The Ehrengraf Reverse”; “As Dark as Christmas Gets”; “Keller’s Horoscope” and “Keller’s Designated Hitter”; “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke”; and “The Night and the Music,” “Looking for David,” “Let’s Get Lost,” and “A Moment of Wrong Thinking.”

Next are twelve new non-series stories. (One of them, “It Took You Long Enough,” was written thirty years ago and just now rediscovered.) And last and least is an old story, indeed a first story, “You Can’t Lose,” sold to Manhunt in the summer of 1957 and published in February 1958.

And is that it?

Well, I hope not. I still get an enormous amount of satisfaction out of writing short stories, and I still find things I haven’t done and try to work out ways to do them.

There is one thing I’ve noticed over the years, and maybe it’s worth comment. It is, simply, that the stories have grown longer over time. In the early days I had to work at it to stretch a story to 3,000 words — and that was when I had every incentive to write long, as every word I used meant another cent and a half in my pocket. Now, when I tend to get paid by the story rather than by the word, I have to work even harder to hold them to two to three times that length.

(The same’s true for books, and you hear people blame computers for making it easier to go on and on. I thought that might be it, until I wrote Tanner on Ice, the first Tanner novel in twenty-eight years, and found it running half again as long as its predecessors. I couldn’t blame a computer, either, as I wrote the thing with a ballpoint pen on a stack of legal pads.)

Not long ago I read a thoughtful and perceptive introduction to a collection called Here’s O’Hara, by Albert Erskine, John O’Hara’s longtime editor. He noted that the more recent stories were substantially longer than the earlier ones, and said that they were also better. He wouldn’t be foolish enough to argue that they were better because they were longer, Erskine wrote, but thought it was fair to contend that they were longer because they were better.

I know that’s true for O’Hara, and I’d like to think it’s true of my work as well. And maybe it is, maybe I write longer these days because my characters and situations are more richly conceived, and I consequently have more to say about them.

Or perhaps I’m just turning into a wordy old bastard. Tell you what — you decide.

— Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village