If you are looking for a Matthew Scudder or Bernie Rhoddenbarr style book, this is not the book for you. However, there are some things that have not followed through, such as the explicit horniness of many of his characters (excused in one on her high intake of alcohol and weed), as well as the dealing with the gutters of life - the cathouse, the rapes, incest, pornography, voyeurism, orgies, murders etc.as well as a mad killer with a switch-blade! (and all in less than 170 pages!).

This has some of Block's trademarks from his later books - the shortness and tightness of the story for instance as well as his characters being more than a little damaged (and who like their drink). Weaver is a cold-blooded serial killer with nothing left to lose. Lily is a hitchhiker looking to start a new life who ends up working in a cathouse. Meg is a recent divorcee looking for thrills. Marty is a moderately successful gambler, with a preference for poker. Four drifters wind up in Juarez on the Texas/Mexico border and find that some borders, once you cross them, cannot be uncrossed.īorderline is the story of four drifters whose lives intersect once they reach the border towns of El Paso and Juarez.

(Oct.Originally published in the late 1950s, republished with this edition in 2014. Readers will need to set aside their modern sensibilities to appreciate the mastery underneath the wild, hilariously euphemistic, and questionably consensual sex, but these classics are undeniably worth the effort. Then there was a hole in it.' Westlake: 'Oh well, what the hell, there was always Adele.') The straightforward, raunchy stories are light on plot and heavy on drugs, guns, gold-hearted whores, manipulative lesbians, and charmingly hapless heroes. (Block: 'For the shadow of an instant he stared and his face was a study. Block's heartwarming introduction to this omnibus recounts their glee at killing off each other's characters and admiration for each other's great lines. One pounded out a chapter on his typewriter and sent it off to the other, who reciprocated. In the 1960s, Block and the late Westlake (1933–2008), not yet individually established as two of the world's most superbly talented crime writers, collaborated on three erotic pulp novels: A Girl Called Honey, So Willing, and Sin Hellcat.

Borderline by Lawrence Block