What do You think about Deadly Honeymoon (2003)?
I often wondered why many famous authors make it difficult for readers to sample their very early work. After reading Deadly Honeymoon I think I might have the answer. Up front I have to say that Lawrence Block is one of my favourite authors and Matt Scudder one of my favourite characters in the crime fiction world. So when Mr Block started e-publishing and promoting some of his very early work I thought I would have a look.Deadly Honeymoon is a straight out and out revenge tale. A young couple on their honeymoon witness a gangland murder and then the two hitmen decide to beat the husband and rape the wife. The reason they don't kill them is because one of the goons decides "I don't like killing nobody without I get paid for it". Then in less than half a page of dialogue the couple decide they will head to New York, track the two men down, and kill them.What follows is a very,very linear story with more detail given to street directions than fleshing out the characters. Interestingly Block says in the afterword that Gold Medal (who had published some of his other earlier stories) turned this book down.Full kudos to Lawrence Block for making his earlier work available to readers. If you are a Block fan this may be of interest to you. If you want to sample his earlier work I would suggest those books published by Hard Case Crime which are much stronger than this. If you are new to Block don't start here!
—Nick
This 1967 mystery by "potboiler" author Lawrence Block was recommended in the _Murder Is Binding_ mystery I just read. It's a good one, a quick read, about a couple who get involved with murder on their wedding night.* * * * *I thoroughly enjoyed the story, which was originally the idea of Block's good friend, Donald Westlake. It makes me want to read Westlake's "Parker" stories and other 1960s mystery and detective stories, on which I cut my reading "teeth," and a genre I haven't read in years. It was so funny to read about New York City in the 1960s: people were located when only their first names were known, a hotel room was $5.50, boarding houses had shared bathrooms and men always shaved and wore suits and ties. Diners abounded in the city and folks routinely smoked in them. Tee hee.
—C-shaw
Now sometimes it happens that I buy a book because its cover makes it look exciting and interesting and I get it home and begin to read and the cover shows itself to have been desperately misleading. At other times I find titles fascinating or intriguing, their very weirdness or beauty can entice and draw me in and you have to congratulate the imagination of the writer but in this case it was an ebook so the cover is nothing and the story does exactly what is 'says on the tin'. Jill and Dave Wade drive from their Wedding ceremony to their honeymoon in a small lodge by the side of a Lake. Here they witness a brutal murder and the hitmen beat up the young husband and then proceed to rape Jill who had remained a virgin so as to enable her husband to be the first.The story is of their revenge on the two perpetrators. They follow them to New York and during the course of the first week of their married life they proceed(view spoiler)[ to kill a musclebound bodyguard,Carl; beat up Carl's employer so as to discover the identity of their attackers and then coldly and clinically kill the two rapists. (hide spoiler)]
—Mark
