You Could Call It Murder

In 1961, Lawrence Block was living in New York and earning a living writing Midcentury Erotica and crime fiction. He'd just sold his first book under his own name, Grifter's Game, to Gold Medal Books. (They insisted on calling it Mona, but the original title's been restored by Hard Case Crime.) His agent got him an assignment to write a tie-in paperback novel for Belmont Books, linked to the TV series Markham, starring Ray Milland. The book turned out well, and the young writer's agent felt...