Book review: Getting Off

ALTHOUGH he is regrettably not as famous as them, Lawrence Block counts among his admirers some very significant authors: Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, James M Cain, Ed McBain, Robert Ludlum and Ian Rankin have all expressed their admiration for his work.

He is best known for two series of books that contrast and complement brilliantly. With the Matt Scudder novels, beginning with The Sins Of The Fathers and now on volume 17, A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, he re-invented classic noir, investing it with a profound moral seriousness. (Readers looking for a good place to start would do well to read A Walk Among The Tombstones.)

With the Bertie Rhodenbarr series, he showed a lighter, wittier side – Bertie is a professional thief who invariably stumbles on a murder to solve. The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart is smart, self-aware and stylish.

Getting Off is a standalone novel which vacillates between these registers. Subtitled, completely truthfully, A Novel Of Sex & Violence, it is a homage to the pulpiest of pulp fictions.

The cover – by Gregory Manchess, which it is almost worth buying the book for – shows a post-coital couple on a dishevelled bed in the background, and the back of a fully naked woman in the foreground, a large kitchen knife concealing her modesty. This is a book one can judge by the cover: pastiche sleaze.

The “heroine”, Kit Tolliver, though she barely uses that name any more, likes to have sex, and likes even more to kill the man afterwards, often using the date-rape drug Rohypnol to incapacitate her victims, but changing her modus operandi frequently enough that no-one realises there’s a serial killer on the loose.

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes, or even Sigmund Freud, to pinpoint the specific childhood trauma which has turned her into a gynophobic nightmare, and indeed, by page 22, her father is sneaking into her bedroom.

Block cannily quotes H Rider Haggard’s She on the opening page: he wants you to know that he knows what he’s doing with this. But the larger than life and the all too real never find a satisfactory equilibrium.

To give the plot some momentum over and above bonk and bump off, we learn that there are five men whom Kit has slept with and has not killed.

Part of the plot, therefore, is her looking for the five who got away.

There are some complications: one is her first boyfriend, one is a recovering sex addict, one is in prison, one is a quadriplegic veteran and one is probably not called Sid and probably doesn’t live in Philadelphia.

Kill these five and “she will be a virgin all over again”. She also has begun to have strong feelings for a woman with a penchant for phone-sex, Rita, and worries that she won’t be able to disconnect sex and murder when they’re together in person.

Readers of a sensitive disposition should take the subtitle very seriously indeed. Block is akin to De Sade in his exhaustive catalogue of perversions, up to and including necrophilia. There’s a lot of masturbation – and the best joke is the women call it “jilling”, as in the opposite of jack.

The violence, by contrast, is really rather tame and uninventive.

It is very curious that next to the inch high “Lawrence Block” on the cover is another subtitle “Writing as Jill Emerson”.

This was the pseudonym Block used to write lesbian erotica such as Enough Of Sorrow and Warm And Willing in the 1960s – he used another pseudonym, Dr Benjamin Morse, to write fake sexological books, including the “frank study”, The Lesbian.

Getting Off isn’t a remnant from that period – there are plenty of contemporary cultural references – but the obvious wink begs the question about the relationship.

Is this ironic, in the sense of a postmodern metafiction which is provocatively and knowingly tasteless? Or is it lads’ mag “ironic” – the modern defence mechanism against being called simply sexist?

• Getting Off by Lawrence Block, Hard Case Crime, £18.99