The Topless Tulip Caper

A New Afterword

by the Author

Chip Harrison is several things.

Firstly, he’s the narrator and protagonist of four novels: No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper.

Secondly, he’s the credited author of those books, or was in their first appearance; more recently they’ve been republished in various editions under my name, Lawrence Block.

And, finally, he’s also the series character in a series with an identity crisis. The first two books are lighthearted, sexy novels of a young man’s coming of age, and the third and fourth are deductive mystery novels. (They’re also lighthearted and sexy.)

Here’s what happened: Sometime in the late 1960s, while I was still living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I wrote a book I called Lecher in the Rye. The title says it all; it was a Salingeresque romp about a youth’s efforts to acquire sexual experience. A couple of publishers almost bought it, and then one did—Knox Burger at Gold Medal Books. Knox had bought several books from me over the years, but I don’t believe he knew at the time who Chip Harrison was. What did he care? He liked the book, improved the title to No Score, commissioned a great piece of cover art, and sent the book out into the world where it did remarkably well, going into two or three printings.

It did well enough that Gold Medal might have asked for a sequel, but that idea didn’t occur to anyone there. It occurred to me, though, because I enjoyed writing in Chip’s voice and thought it might be interesting to see what he did next. By the time I wrote the second book, my family and I had moved to a farm a mile from the Delaware River where I found it impossible to get any work done. I took an apartment on West Thirty-fifth Street in Manhattan and wrote several books there over a period of a year or so. One of them was Chip Harrison Scores Again. (I don’t remember what I called it, but it wasn’t that.)

I had fun with the book, and Gold Medal was happy with it. Knox Burger had left to set up shop as an agent—some years later I’d become one of his clients—and Walter Fultz took over, and enlisted the same artist to do the cover. But this artist worked from models, and the model she’d used before was now too old for the role. But the guy she picked to replace him was far too tall and worldly to be Chip. It was the cover of No Score that had drawn all those young female readers, and the sequel didn’t sell nearly as well.

Oh well.

A few years later my marriage was over and I was living by myself on West Fifty-Eighth Street, around the corner from what would soon become Matthew Scudder’s hotel. And I remembered how I’d enjoyed writing as and of Chip Harrison, but how could he go on coming of age? One bildungsroman per character is generally enough. Two is really pushing it. Three is out of the question.

And how could I let Chip age? His youth and naïveté were part of his charm. Without them he was just a gnarly guy who didn’t get laid as much as he’d have liked to, and if I wanted that all I had to do was look in the mirror.

But suppose he went to work for a private detective. And suppose the guy was a poor man’s Nero Wolfe, a sort of road company Nero Wolfe. Suppose he was a great reader of mysteries who idolized Nero Wolfe and—yes!—believed that Wolfe really existed and that he might someday so distinguish himself as to be invited to dine at Wolfe’s table.

And Chip, who had presumably actually written No Score and its sequel, would be hired not merely to play Archie Goodwin to this fellow, but to write up the cases and publish them.

Worked like a charm. And it allowed Chip to remain the same age forever, because that’s what fictional private eyes do. They remain forever young. There’s a passage somewhere—it may be in one of the two Chip Harrison stories—in which Leo Haig tells young Chip to be grateful for his profession, as it’s as good as a dip in Ponce de Leon’s fountain.

Or words to that effect.

I called the first Chip Harrison mystery The Cornish Chicks Score. Gold Medal seemed to like having “score” in the title, and that would do it. The five sisters in the story were of Cornish descent, and this title would play on the Cornish game hen, that fancy chicken Victor Borge was raising for the American dinner table.

So they called it Make Out with Murder. Well, OK. Then a few years later Allison & Busby, a UK firm, brought out a hardcover edition and called it Five Little Rich Girls. That’s a whole batch of titles and I can’t say I’m crazy about any of them, but it’s been Make Out with Murder more often than not, so that’s the name it will continue to bear in its new life as an ebook.

Ah well. I’m older than I was when I began writing as and about Chip, and, in all likelihood, Dear Reader, so are you. Almost everybody is.

But not Chip. He hasn’t aged a day.

—Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

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