Authors: Lawrence Block

Campus Tramp (19 page)

If it was too good to give up after three months, it wasn’t so great that I wanted to hang on to it for more than a year. I resigned at the end of the spring of 1958, went back to Buffalo, wrote a sensitive lesbian novel in a couple of weeks, sent it to my agent, and went off to Mexico with my buddy Steve Schwerner. We came back sooner than we’d planned, and, on the strength of that lesbian novel, I got an assignment from my agent to do a book for Midwood Tower, a new firm under the aegis of one Harry Shorten, devoted to the publication of sexy paperbacks.

I wrote a book called
Carla
, and it was catnip to Harry Shorten. There was one scene in which the titular heroine (and that’s the right adjective, trust me) has it off with a gas pump jockey in the service station’s grease pit, and Harry thought that scene was the cat’s pajamas. It blew him away, so to speak, and he wanted more.

Meanwhile, I’d made arrangements to return to Antioch, where I’d spend the fall quarter taking classes, the winter quarter editing the school newspaper, and the spring back in class again.

Well, here’s the question: How are you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? All I wanted to do, really, was write books and stories. And I’d sold upwards of a dozen stories to the crime fiction magazines, and some articles to men’s magazines, and a little of this and a little of that elsewhere. Harry Shorten wanted more books from me, and the first house that got a look at that lesbian novel, Fawcett Crest, wanted to publish it. So I could write books and stories and actually get paid for them, or I could read Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett and write papers on the Eighteenth Century English Novel.

Well, what do you think happened?

I got through the year, but don’t ask me how. I did try to drop out during the fall but was persuaded to change my mind. I edited the
Antioch Record
winter quarter, and that went okay, but during the two academic terms I did not exactly cover myself with glory.

Then summer came, and I couldn’t find a co-op job that I liked, and I don’t suppose I looked very hard for one. I arranged to go on my Own Plans again and moved to New York, where I took a room at the Hotel Rio on West Forty-Seventh Street and began writing books.

The first was
Campus Tramp
.

You were probably wondering if I’d ever get to it, and so was I. But here we are, in July of 1959, and there I was, in my room at the Rio, typing furiously. By this time I’d written and sold four books—
Strange Are the Ways of Love
, published by Crest Books under the name of Lesley Evans, and three novels published by Midwood under the name Sheldon Lord,
Carla
(which I wrote in Buffalo) and two books I knocked off during that year at Antioch,
A Strange Kind of Love
and
Born to be Bad
.

Now my agent informed me that a new publisher, Bill Hamling, was starting a company to be called Nightstand Books, and that I’d been chosen to write for them. Midwood had been paying me six hundred dollars a book, and Hamling would pay seven hundred fifty dollars.

I decided a college novel might be just the ticket. I’d been trying to figure out what to try for Fawcett/Crest—after all, they had paid me two thousand dollars for that lesbian novel. But on some level I didn’t really believe I was good enough to write for that good a house, and that self-doubt kept me from trying. I’d been thinking my second book for Crest might be set on a campus, and when Nightstand came along I took that idea and aimed it at them.

I wrote
Campus Tramp
in a couple of weeks.

The only college with which I was familiar was Antioch, so it was an easy decision to set the book there—or at its fictional equivalent, which I called Clifton. And, to amuse myself and any other Antiochian who might read the thing, I gave every character in the book the name of an actual Antioch dormitory as a surname. Since most of the dorms were named after people, guaranteeing them the immortality of, say, Lewis J. Bennett, it wasn’t a stretch to fasten their names to human beings, albeit fictional ones. While I was at it, I named the buildings on Clifton’s campus after some Antioch people.

I finished the book, walked a block and a half to Fifth Avenue, and turned in the manuscript to my agent, who dutifully sent it to Hamling, who thought it was just fine, even if it didn’t have anybody screwing in a grease pit. I was invited to pick a new pen name and chose Andrew Shaw. Mr. Shaw now had an assignment to produce regularly for Nightstand, even as Mr. Lord was still very much in demand at Midwood. The only place that didn’t want me, it turned out, was Antioch.

It was not long after I turned in
Campus Tramp
and started another writing project that a letter from Antioch’s Student Personnel Committee reached me at the Rio, informing me that a review of my performance the preceding year left them with the sense that I might be happier elsewhere.

I thought that was damned perceptive of them. I would indeed be happier elsewhere, no question about it, and wasn’t it considerate of them to point that out to me? I’d already tried to drop out once and had been talked out of it by my parents, but now I had the perfect excuse. I’d been, as the British say, sent down. (It sounds much nicer than expelled, doesn’t it?) And, having been sent down, I could stay down. I was free.

I think—and thought at the time—that I could have talked my way back in. The tone of the letter suggested as much. But why would I want to do that? I had books to write.

And then a curious thing happened.
Campus Tramp
was published, and word got around Yellow Springs that it was my revenge on the school, that I’d savaged the place as a way of getting even.

Getting even for what, for God’s sake? For expelling me? That was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. For schooling me for several years? I can’t think where I might have more enjoyably or profitably spent those particular years. I had no quarrel with the place, and if it was anything vis-‡-vis Antioch, the book was a wink and a nod, a veritable homage.

Besides, when I wrote it I still fully expected to return to Yellow Springs in the fall. I had a year to go, and then I was scheduled to graduate. I didn’t much want to go back, but I’d planned to do it anyway, so I certainly didn’t think of myself as burning any bridges with
Campus Tramp.

Go figure.

Over the years, the story of Linda Shepard became a part of campus folklore. I’ve heard of copies commanding unlikely prices at Senior Sales. A young woman I know—she’s since become a Facebook friend—has been known to give dramatic readings at alumni gatherings.

Nightstand reissued the book a few times over the years, in one instance doing the curious task of un-Bowdlerizing it—some poor schnook of an editor went through it and added dirty words, in recognition of looser standards in the industry. Consider this schlepper whenever you start to think you have the worst job in the world.

I never thought
Campus Tramp
would be around in the present century, and never thought I’d want to allow it to happen—or to put my own name on it. But when Creeping Hemlock Press proposed a handsome new edition, how could I say no?

After all, I wrote it. And I’m never going to have my name on a high school, or a bridge, or even a public toilet, so I have to take my Lewis J. Bennett–style immortality where I find it. Remarkably, I find I’m out-and-out delighted that it’s now available as an ebook. An old friend from—yes, Bennett High—recently emailed me to say he’d read and enjoyed
Campus Tramp
, and somehow found elements to praise therein. And praise, like immortality, I’ll take where I find it. Why not?

—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in
Manhunt
, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including
American Heritage
,
Redbook
,
Playboy
,
Cosmopolitan
,
GQ
, and the
New York Times
. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including
Enough Rope
(2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in
No Score
,
Chip Harrison Scores Again
,
Make Out with Murder
, and
The Topless Tulip Caper
. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.