Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails by Lawrence Block

It would be difficult to get a purer collection of miscellaneous nonfiction than this one. I may have found the platonic ideal of the odds & sods book.

First up, Lawrence Block is a novelist, mostly: he's written about seventy of them, almost all of them in the crime genre, more or less. (The early days were "less," since he started out writing sex books, but even those often ran on crime plots.) Plus a hundred-odd short stories: that's the mass of his career. Nonfiction is a sidebar at best.

When he does write nonfiction, it's mostly fallen into categories: he wrote a column for Writers' Digest for a decade or so, and that and other activities added up to six books of advice for writers. He also wrote a full-length book about racewalking, Step by Step.

This century, he's been republishing his old books, because he's got a devoted audience and a huge backlist. And why shouldn't he publish his own books and make the money from them? So he's put out editions of a dozen or three of his older, mostly genre-straitjacketed books over the past decade.

And, along the way, he's made a few new books out of the pieces that didn't get collected by external publishers: a book of his Matt Scudder stories, a book of his Bernie Rhodenbarr stories. And then some nonfiction: Generally Speaking, all of his columns about stamps. The Crime of Our Lives, with nearly all of his pieces about the crime and mystery-fiction world.

So he's done a lot of publishing before he got to Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails. This is very much what's left after he parceled out all of the other pieces that made sense to be collected together. (I don't want to say "bottom of the barrel," since it's not the same barrel -- it's like a storeroom full of barrels, and he's gotten back to the far corner, and the one marked "Stuff & Things, Various.")

Hunting Buffalo is explicitly the nonfiction pieces that didn't fit into earlier books. Even more so, it's those pieces arranged alphabetically by title, since Block didn't have a better idea, or want to be fancy about arranging them. So there is no elegant procession of topics, arranged according to some secret schema: no, we begin with ""Abridge This!" and run straight through to "Writing My Name," because it is an organizational principle everyone already knows, and Block hasn't written over a hundred books by being precious and wasting time.

So this book is random. It's all of the things that Block wrote about, for various publications, over several decades, that were not stamps or writing. (Well, some of them are about writing, since he's a writer and he forgot about some of these pieces the other times he was collecting stuff. 'Cause they were in that back-of-the-room barrel is my guess.)

All of it is in Block's mature voice: wry, thoughtful, discerning, amusing. A lot of it is about the two kinds of "how do you get your ideas" for writers -- going random places around the country for no clear reason, or sitting in a room reading and researching and thinking. But it's so varied that I'm not going to try to characterize the pieces -- there's one about collecting subway cars, for chrissakes.

This is inevitably a book for Block fans. It's published by him to include his rarest and quirkiest pieces; how could it be otherwise? If you're not a fan, try a Scudder or Rhodenbarr book first. But if you are a Block fan, and didn't know this existed, you probably want it.