BORDERLINE

"In the summer of 1958, I turned twenty years old. I had been working for a little less than a year as an editor at Scott Meredith Literary Agency, even as I had begun selling stories to crime fiction magazines. (All of this is detailed in A Writer Prepares, if you care.) I'd decided to return in the fall to Antioch College, and I'd left my job in May and spent June in my parent's house in Buffalo, writing my first novel. (Shadows, by Jill Emerson—if you care.) Now I was off to Mexico with my freshman roommate, Steve Schwerner, for an interlude of debauchery before the fall semester.

"We flew to Houston, then spent a day hitchhiking to Laredo, where we found an inexpensive hotel. The following day we crossed the border to the Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo, where we found our way to the large public square. We began walking around the square, and when one of the locals asked if we were looking for anything in particular, one or the other of us asked tentatively if we could perhaps buy some marijuana. 'Oh, no,señores,' was the reply. 'Marijuana is not legal in Mexico.' We walked a little further, and asked the same question of another helpful citizen, who gave us the same answer pretty much word for word.

"'I guess it's not as easy as I heard,' Steve said.

"We walked the rest of the way around the little park, and a dapper fellow approached us, announcing himself as Ernesto. 'I hear you guys are in the market for a little pot,' he said.

"It was an interesting couple of weeks, that trip to Mexico. It did not end well, but that's another story. And BORDERLINE is also another story, its background drawn from those few days in Nuevo Laredo, its storyline the outflow of a young man's fertile imagination." ~Lawrence Block

"It is wonderful piece of old-fashioned pulp and one of the amazing things about it is that it was written so long ago. It combines many of the risqué elements of Block's early writings in the dimestore paperback industry with the mystery elements of his later writings. Here, you have hippie hitchikers, professional gamblers, divorced housewives out to experience life for the first time, and a serial killer stalking and mutilating his prey. Block takes the reader into an amazing journey, first focusing on one of these people and then on the next and weaving them into this tale." ~Dave Wilde, Amazon reviewer