Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man
by Lawrence Block
Generally available for the first time in over 25 years, the mystery Grand Master's rarest novel!
In the late sixties... I wanted to write some frankly erotic books that would be fun to write, and might even be interesting to a reader with a three-figure IQ. My agent found an enthusiastic publisher, and I did three books in all, publishing them under a female pen name, one I'd used earlier on a pair of lesbian novels.
Ronald Rabbit was initially intended to be a pseudonymous paperback original. I wanted to write an epistolary novel, but not the traditional series of narrative letters from a single character in the manner of Richardson's Pamela. Instead I was inspired by Mark Harris's brilliant comic soufflÈ, Wake Up, Stupid, and my good friend Hal Dresner's hilarious The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. Each tells its story through the medium of the collected correspondence of the protagonist, letters written to him as well as letters written by him, and that's what I wanted to do in Ronald Rabbit.
I wrote Ronald Rabbit in four days... One letter kept leading to another. I was completely caught up in the realization of the havoc that could be wreaked by a single manipulative maniac with a typewriter...
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Generally available for the first time in over 25 years, the mystery Grand Master's rarest novel! In the late sixties... I wanted to write some frankly erotic books that would be fun to write, and might even be interesting to a reader with a three-figure IQ. My agent found an enthusiastic publisher, and I did three books in all, publishing them under a female pen name, one I'd used earlier on a pair of lesbian novels. Ronald Rabbit was initially intended to be a pseudonymous paperback original. I wanted to write an epistolary novel, but not the traditional series of narrative letters from a single character in the manner of Richardson's Pamela. Instead I was inspired by Mark Harris's brilliant comic soufflÈ, Wake Up, Stupid, and my good friend Hal Dresner's hilarious The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. Each tells its story through the medium of the collected correspondence of the protagonist, letters written to him as well as letters written by him, and that's what I wanted to do in Ronald Rabbit. I wrote Ronald Rabbit in four days... One letter kept leading to another. I was completely caught up in the realization of the havoc that could be wreaked by a single manipulative maniac with a typewriter...