Lawrence Block

Trailer Trollop Lawrence Block

LAWRENCE BLOCK remembers:

"Actually, the header's mistaken. In point of fact, I remember next to nothing about Trailer Trollop. I've loaded it onto my Kindle in advance of republishing it, and I've made my way through a few of its chapters, and while there's sufficient textual evidence to make it very clear that I wrote this book, the memory of the two or three weeks devoted to so doing has long since left me.

"I can tell you where and when I wrote it. In the spring of 1960, my recently-acquired first wife and I took an apartment on West 69th Street in New York. I installed a desk in the bedroom, and I spent my days seated at it, flailing away at a manual typewriter. A year earlier, unmarried and living in an SRO hotel some twenty-two blocks to the south, I'd launched Andrew Shaw's career with Campus Tramp, and ever since then I'd had a standing assignment; I produced a 50,000-word book every month, for which the publisher paid $750. (My agent took $75, which left me with $675. And yes, one could live on that; the rent at 110 W 69th was $125 a month.)

"Of course I was writing more ambitious work as well. Short stories for crime fiction magazines. Novels, too--my first crime novel under my own name, now available as Grifter's Game, came about when what I'd intended as an opening chapter for that month's Andrew Shaw title struck me as having the potential to be something more. I wrote a little of this and a little of that, I completed a mystery novel that William Ard had left unfinished at his death, I fielded whatever assignments my agent steered my way, and I have to say I kept busy.

"Nightstand Books published Andrew Shaw, and God knows they were easy to work with. They left it to me to come up with the backgrounds and storylines each month, and I can only recall one book that grew out of a suggestion of a Nightstand editor, relayed to me by my agent.

"And that was Trailer Trollop. 'A mobile home with three or four hookers parked on the edge of an army base. They share it, they live and work in it, it moves around. You get the idea.'

"Well, sure. I got the idea, and a couple of weeks later the manuscript was on its way to Nightstand's Illinois offices, and sometimes in 1961 the book was published. The title, a pair of alliterative trochees, may be the book's most memorable element, and I have to think that it popped into my mind when the book's premise was proposed to me.

"Or had someone at Nightstand come up with it, along with the idea itself?

"No way to know. But I think I'll claim it as my title. At this stage, there's no one left alive to say otherwise.

"So that's as much as you--or anyone, really--needs to know about Trailer Trollop. I can but hope you find some diversion and amusement in it. And, of course, if you've any interest in my beginnings as a writer, and my adventures in Midcentury Erotica, you'll probably want a look at my memoir of those days, A Writer Prepares."