Lawrence Block on Donald Westlake

Lawrence Block is one of the most successful crime fiction writers of his generation. He was a college dropout who began his writing career in the late 1950s churning out pornographic novels. He has managed to write roughly a novel a year for the past fifty years, creating series detectives such as Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, protagonist of the innovative ‘Burglar Who …’ novels. Block’s early books were often written, pseudonymously, in collaboration with Donald Westlake, who died on the last day of 2008. Here is a short video from a talk at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York in which Block talks about his friend and his novel Memory, due for release in 2010.