From: djheydt@kithrup.com

In article <1lvubqe.xjjz8wstn6qcN%mbottorff@lshelby.com>,
Michelle Bottorff  wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt  wrote:
>
>> Lawrence Block, who back in the day wrote lots of whodunits and
>> also wrote a monthly essay for one of the writers' magazines on
>> how to write fiction (generally, everything else in the book was
>> about how to write nonfiction and how to sell it to the editor
>> before you had written it).  One of his essays was titled "Let's
>> Hear It for Sex and Violence!"  He gave a couple of sample
>> paragraphs full of sex and violence, and then said, "You'd go on
>> reading, wouldn't you?"  No, I wouldn't.
>
>I probably wouldn't have either.
>
>I read a Lawrence Block book once, and I did actually finish it, but I
>didn't pick up any more Lawrence Block books, because I prefer my
>mysteries not to have utterly pointless sex scenes inserted in them.
>
Yeah, well, Block (as he admitted from time to time) kept beans
on the table till he hit his stride, by writing soft porn thinly
disguised as case-histories, by "[Various Pseudonyms], M.D."  He
seems to have gone on thinking, perhaps unto the present day,*
that if nobody gets bonked or beaten up in a chapter the reader
will not buy it.

_____
*I just googled him; born 1938, he appears to be still alive.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the gmail edress.
Kithrup's all spammy and hotmail's been hacked.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)