Kudos to Larry

I see that Larry Block, friend of my youth, has made the Telegraph list of 50 great crime writers (link). Hard earned and well deserved, I say. Best way I can tell, Larry has never had a blockbuster hit. But if winning is showing up, he richly deserves all the credit he can get. By all appearances, Block is the guy who slugs it out every day (although I believe he uses a yellow pad*).

His novels probably count as noir, but they can be darkly funny--he has a knack for the devastating one liner--and for a guy who keeps such low company, he shows a real streak of compassion--not to mention a lifelong love affair with Manhattan. You read Simenon for Paris, Donna Leon for Venice; read Block for a wry post-Batman overview of his favorite city.

An interesting, if not entirely typical, place to start, would be with Small Town, his Valentine to the Manhattan after 9/11 (link). Then again, maybe not; maybe try instead Eight Million Ways to Die, one of the Matt Scudder series: it gets 18-out-of-20 five-star Amazon reviews (link). Amazing to me, my current research even turned up a link to Mona, which I think may be Larry's first grownup work (link). I first read it in an Army barracks at the now-long-defunct Fort Slocum in Long Island Sound, not long after we had separately decamped from Antioch College, back around 1960. It has a shocker ending that stood my hair on end.

Wiki has a remarkably sympathetic and thorough exposition (link), including a hilarious shot of a pulp cover from the 60s. Block's own website is here.
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*Wrong. An impeccable source says he uses a MacBook, sometimes an Imac.