Customer Reviews

Getting Off: A Novel of Sex & Violence (Hard Case Crime)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

In over 50 years of publishing, Lawrence Block has written more great words than almost any writer you can think of. Terms like "master" and "legend" get thrown around to often -- but if you wanted to throw a couple of them Block's way, I wouldn't argue with you. Yes, he really is that good.

For almost 20 years now, whenever anyone has asked who my favorite writers are, I've always answered "Ross Thomas and Lawrence Block." And two decades on, my answer is still the same. They are both essential authors that anyone interested in popular fiction simply has to read.

For Getting Off, the book chosen by Hard Case Crime to relaunch their publishing line, Block has resurrected an old pseudonym to grace a new book. "Jill Emerson" is the pen name that he used for several books back in the Sixties. Most of them were sex romps of one type or another -- which is appropriate, given that Getting Off is a sex romp of one type or another. But it's not a type we're used to seeing.

The subtitle of the book is "A Novel of Sex & Violence" so readers should consider themselves warned, because it's filled with both. Kit Tolliver, the protagonist of the novel is a woman who loves having sex with men. The problem is, what to do with them afterward? And there she's found a rather tidy, if blood-thirsty solution. (This is where the violence part comes in.) Much like the preying mantis, she first loves the men, then she leaves them -- at room temperature.

When it occurs to her one day that earlier in her life she had relations with several men whom she didn't kill, it starts to bother her. She's not the kind of woman who likes to leave things undone. Thus, she sets out on a detective mission of sorts, tracking down her former lovers, and setting things "right."

Getting Off is a shocking book, for those of us who still have that capacity. (I'm not too sure about myself.) It is certainly not for every taste, but it is brilliantly written. It's a sexy, violent (there goes that subtitle again), disturbing, darkly humorous, and immensely entertaining novel that prompts some interesting questions about the dichotomy between love (lust?) and hate, fidelity, and how one's personality (and pathology) are shaped by the things that happen to us.

For a man in supposed retirement, Block just keeps on doing what he's always done: write great books. Let's hope this "retirement" lasts a very long time.

****Caution: This review has spoilers****

Katherine Anne "Kitty" Tolliver was a troubled and abused girl who kept her name & her history until graduation when she would rewrite and recreate them. Now she's a new person as often as the whim takes her, and she also changes her boyfriends in the same way that most people use Kleenex. She has to, she kills them after sex you see, and believe it or not, there are people out there just crass enough to find this behavior offensive. There are even people out there called "the police" who make the special effort to butt into people's business, and who take offense at having to clean up Kitty's litter.

Kitty is, after all, a serial killer, and like all serial killers she has multiple excuses for offing her beaus. The first is that she doesn't like the idea that they might be impolite enough to brag about having shared her special favors. Another is that these people all need peace, and Kitty is just the gal to give it to them. And of course there is the main reason, and that is killing them just plain turns her on.

Then she comes up with a brainstorm. Over the years four of her lovers have escaped her precious clutches, and there is something that seems just so untidy about leaving past lovers alive to clutter up her past and to brag and tell the tale. Well, something just has got to be done about this, and while it might take some effort, Kitty is no slacker, she's up to the challenge, and you know, a girl's just gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

And it's off to the races we go as Kitty goes on her quest with a vengeance. Ummm, so to say. I have to admit that while I actually liked the mechanics of the writing, the droll black humor fits the character nicely, unfortunately that turns out to be just not enough to have kept me reading.

The basic problem is two-fold. The first is the story. It's stupefyingly, and mind-numbingly redundant. Kitty meets man, screws man, tortures man, kills man, wash, lather, rinse, repeat. EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER follows this formula, and then just as you think that it can't get any worse, Block then drags lesbianism into this dirt bath when she then meets gal pal Rita, with whom she will start with some salacious and sleazy sex, including a long, dull masturbation scene (jilling), and then clutters up this clutter with some useless information on butt plugs (?). We all know that if this were a male explicitly exploring his gay side this would never have gotten published.

We also are treated to detailed information on how c*** rings work, just before a castration scene, and extracted scenes like these just go on and on. At times I just wanted to take a bath after these scenes. It takes a lot, but Block actually managed to make me feel more sympathetic for a rapist in this novel than for the victim. Kitty tracks down her old boyfriend, an old lover, and others, and brutally kills them, along with anybody else that she whimsically feels like sleeping with, often climaxing while riding the man's dead body.

The story also suffers from a flaw in the basic story-telling structure, and that is that there is no counterpoint to Kitty's story. It's just her, sexing and killing, and killing and sexing, with a plotless story that's as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead. It would have been nice to have had something to counterbalance Kitty's sociopathic bloodlust, and no, Rita won't be it. Block throws himself a lifeline, and then misses it. Kitty runs into a serial killer, but while a cat-and-mouse subplot would have nicely spiced things up, Block just tosses the whole thing away as a just another filler vignette to pad this cynical and episodic novel out.

The other basic problem is Kitty herself. She's just not a very interesting person. She turns out to be an unsympathetic, sociopathic, dull, flat, shallow, torturing, hypersexual, and uninteresting character that seems to not have even one redeeming feature to fill out her static portrayal. If she were any one of the hundreds of male maniacs that have populated popular literature over past hundred years then nobody would have given a damn about her, but because she's a babe, we're all supposed to care, and find her interesting. I didn't. In the end, Kitty is a backup singer who can't handle a solo career. And while Kitty might have been readable and/or interesting in the short form she originally appeared in a series of short stories in Bronx Noir (Akashic Noir), Manhattan Noir, Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) and Warriors, under Block's real name, not that of Jill Emerson. Kitty might have even have carried a hundred and fifty page Fawcett Gold Medal book, (which this novel is supposed to be emulating) but there's just not enough here to justify this sleazy, overlong, redundant THREE HUNDRED plus paged bloated, lazy, and padded book.

Eventually after wasting enough of my time on this, I just got bored, and I've finally done something that I never done before, and swore that I wouldn't do. I'm reviewing a book that I just couldn't finish after the two-thirds mark; after all, I don't think any last act could have saved this. Although I did skip to the end and found little closure as nothing seemed resolved, in fact, things are just going from bad to worse. It's hard to believe that somebody who has been writing since the fifties would have taken such a backwards step in his writings, and would still turn in such bad sleazy trash. This novel seems to want to prove the adage that "It's not what you know, but who you know", because it's obvious that without Lawrence Block's name behind this, this exploitive, skid-row roughie would never have been published by a mainstream publisher. It also goes to show why the quality of the Hard Case crime line has gone downhill so much over the years. Only for the easily amused.

Many moons ago Lawrence Block dropped out of Antioch and became a professional writer. He wrote many things, including erotica. His new book, Getting Off, is a return to those roots. At the same time it is the first hardcover from Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai's gift to crime fiction readers everywhere.

As the subtitle tells you, Getting Off is a novel of sex and violence. Its narrator lingers more over the sex than the violence which is of the `then I slipped the icepick into his heart' variety. The sex is not quite to the pornographic stage, but it's well beyond the R-Rated.

The Amazon product description gives away much of the story's narrative thread. This is a female serial killer novel with a protagonist who beds her victims and then murders them. Early on we find out why (SPOILER, though a predictable one: it has to do with her childhood). In the course of her picaresque adventures she realizes that a number of her lovers lived to tell the tale and she resolves to search them out and clear the slate by providing for their (eternal) rest.

Block is writing as Jill Emerson in this novel, but he's not trying too hard to fool us. An inveterate traveller and a weekend walker/racer (see his memoir, Step by Step), Getting Off has a broad canvas and his protagonist, like her creator, finds her way (comfortably) through a wide swath of American landscape. There is also the pitch-perfect dialogue and the wonderful Block details. The protagonist, Katherine Tolliver, has carried a number of nicknames, among them Kit. Unfortunately, the narrator points out, when the nickname and the surname end/begin with common consonants people have a tendency to elide the names and turn Kit Tolliver into Kit Oliver. This is the kind of seemingly innocuous detail that creates plausibility. Defoe was a master of it and Block is among his most distinguished successors.

There are multiple mysteries here. Why does Kit do what she does? Will she find all of the men on her hit list? What will happen to them? What sex/violence interludes will occur in the course of her journey? Where will she end up--behind bars or behind a white picket fence? All of these questions, as they say, will be answered to the reader's satisfaction.

Getting Off is something of a tightrope walk. It is often said that we are sympathetic to putatively unsympathetic protagonists because we get to know them in the course of the narrative. Those we know best are those who earn our greatest sympathy. This is certainly true here. Moreover, the book ends with a black-humor smile which resolves the tonal issues which Block has faced from the beginning: how can I make Kit both interesting and likeable when she is both promiscuous and homicidal? She is also quite sane and self-conscious, not a monster and not an out-of-control automaton. For all of her extreme behavior she seems like a nice girl who might want to settle down and enjoy life. How can I reconcile the studiously abnormal with the conventionally normal? And make the reader believe it? And enjoy it.

While this is not easy to do, count on the creator of both Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr to be able to do it. The wonderful ending is both unexpected and, simultaneously, telegraphed early. This gives the story a chilling but delicious inevitability. Enjoy it. And thank Charles Ardai by feasting on his Hard Case Crime series.

Highly recommended.

335 pages of pornography with no pay-off. I am a big Block/Scudder fan, but GETTING OFF is a total waste of time. Could (should?) have been a decent short story, but it just went on and on and on. Very surprised that it was offered thru my local public library with no content warning. Betcha the 15 year-old boys will be lining up for it once the word gets out.

I previewed this on my new Kndle. It looked interesting, so I checked it out of the library.
After 60 pages I gave up. It was a continuous series of sex and murders, but the sex was (unfortunately) not erotic, and one murder after another got quickly old. I finally flipped to the end hoping there was some kind of interesting twist, but as it ended it was just more of the same. I could not detect any plot -- almost like it was written 50 years ago as a "dirty book" but is now just boring.

I'm a big fan of Larry Block. Has anyone read the Tanner novels? Classics. I've read Bernie and Scudder too, of course. I'm not sure if everyone realizes how long or prolific a career that Block has enjoyed, or that back when he began, writing soft-core porn was a good way to earn some bucks in the writing biz. So he's no stranger to this kind of writing and this kind of story, and if you are, this may be a little too much for you.

I'm a fan of erotica if it serves the story and makes sense. I won't just sit and read an erotic novel, but I'll read a murder-mystery with sex if it makes sense. In this book, it makes sense. The murderess is a sex fiend, and has a history of issues with sex, and thinks about sex, and acts out during sex, and seeks her revenge via sex. See? Makes sense.

Also, I think some of Block's fans have allowed themselves to take residence within his series novels. In this book, there is no witty wise-cracking burglar hiding in the closet. There is no gritty alcoholic detective working through his issues.

Something I truly enjoyed about this book was Block's way of taking this vile, crazy, lethal, souless murderess and actually make me enjoy reading about what she thinks and feels. Some of it may be the old-fashioned Betty Boop style of thinking and talking "Gee, I can't believe a fella can bleed so much" (not an actual quote from the book, just an example)but I enjoyed following her through her various sexploits and her extremely focused killing spree.

I do agree that this book could have been leaner, more a stiletto than a butcher knife, and perhaps it wouldn't have lagged at the end. Or maybe, like all shallow beauties, Kit (the main character) is amusing at first and boring in the long run. Either way, she was a lot of fun while it lasted, and this book went on my shelf with my other Block books and it looks good there, it fits, it's Block, it's bloody and fun, and what else do you want?

Authors have lots of stories to tell. They won't all appeal to you, but they are all worth the telling.

Hard Case Crime is back. And that is wonderful news for fans of noir fiction. After a year's absence in which they found a new publishing partner to handle their distribution, the publisher returns with a vengeance with its first hardcover book. And they made it worth the wait.

Fans of Hard Case have come to expect quality entertainment, both reprints of the greatest of past crime fiction and terrific original stories that prove that hardboiled writing is still very much alive and well in the early years of the new, all-too-bloody-so-far, century. Now this is saying something, but GETTING OFF just might be the best book HCC has ever published. Lawrence Block (writing as Jill Emerson) does not just push the boundaries of fiction, he blows them away. This is a book you are never going to forget reading if you give it a chance.

First, the obvious: the sex. There is a lot of explicit sex here, just about in every chapter. Indeed, this might be the most sexually explicit book ever published by a mainstream American publisher. And it is plenty violent as well. But it is also a noir masterpiece. Block has written a book equal to anything ever written by noir masters like James M. Cain or Jim Thompson. His work now resides among the giants of the genre. GETTING OFF is a heck of a wild ride and loads of fun. Once you pick it up, you are not putting it down. Just remember to pay for it first in the bookstore.

The plot is very straightforward. The story starts with a mysterious woman whose name is Katherine, but we will come to know her as Kimmie. She uses a lot of names and travels frequently. She picks up a well-dressed, super confident man in a New York Hell's Kitchen bar. They return to his apartment, do the deed, and she knocks him out with a roofie. She then quietly slides a kitchen knife between his ribs and into his heart. Once she relieves him of his cash, she slips out the door.

As the Great Recession leaves 25 million Americans without gainful employment, Kimmie has found an entirely new career at which she is an expert. But this is not your ubiquitous serial killer novel that you have read a million times before or some Hollywood-bound teenage slasher tale. We soon learn of her background, and Kimmie hits on a new idea: have sex and remove from the planet every man she has ever slept with until the number is reduced to zero.

Block takes us deep into the noir world. And one of the rules of noir is that the ordinary world is turned right on its head. The book is as chilling as it is sexually prurient. And Block has created not a killer we fear and loathe, but a strong, independent, attractive woman. This is a tale not of vengeance or mayhem ultimately, but of self-discovery. Block gets us rooting for this killer because we can understand her fully; we see the world from her perspective.

Block writes, "And then --- bingo! --- he was dead, and that was the best of all. Oh, she had been with plenty of dead men, but her interest in them had always ended with the sweet delight of their dying. Once they were dead, once she absorbed the sense of accomplishment and completion their deaths afforded her, she was ready to move on. They were off the list, out of her life even as they were out of their own..."

In true noir tradition, bad has now become good. And people who get hung up on the sex will miss entirely the greatness of the story. There is no black or white here. Kimmie is not a monster, but a badly damaged human being trying to survive as best she can. In the process, she explodes the small cruelties and major arrogance at the heart of many casual sexual relationships.

And we see her humanity in a few beautifully written chapters where she interacts with an ex-one night stand: a soldier who came back from Iraq a living vegetable trapped in a body that is now mostly gone. And in a few pages, Block has written a powerful anti-war story, showing us the picture of war the media rarely reveals, exposing the lies behind words like glory and honor.

Block then goes on to write some of the most terrifying chapters in recent noir fiction, like when Kimmie encounters a male serial killer who has chosen her to be his next victim. In the noir world, nothing is as it seems, and a simple walk at night can turn instantly into an out-of-control nightmare. And then she is picked up by a couple, and we learn the husband --- a rapist --- wants to get a taste of what it is like to kill. We delight in watching the battle of killers. And Block is so much in control of his narrative that the outcome is always in doubt, and we keep turning the pages.

The tension builds relentlessly throughout. And the closer to the ending we get, the more absorbing the story becomes. Will she slip up? Will she accomplish her mission? Will she get caught and brought to justice? But what is justice in the world of noir? Is any such thing even possible if everybody is guilty on some level?

This is the book Cain or Thompson could have written if they had not lived in the age of the Hollywood Production Code and strict censorship of all printed matter dealing with sex. Think of Phyllis Dietrichson, the ultimate noir femme fatale. Block has created a character here who is her equal, if not better. And this is ultimately a great novel because the story is true to Kimmie's character. It is authentic, with a perfect ending.

Lawrence Block gives us a peek into the darkness --- darkness that exists all around us, even in broad daylight --- without giving into despair. GETTING OFF is one of the best books of this or any year. Congratulations to Block, who now needs to bring Kimmie back in a sequel. And kudos also to Charles Ardai, editor and publisher of Hard Case Crime, for bringing back the books so many of us love. Look for three more Hard Case books coming this fall, and eventually every other month, hopefully for a long time to come.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

The first part of this book was alot of fun. Kit is a woman who enjoys sex almost as much as she enjoys murder. Making her away across the country picking up men,drugging them, having sex with them, killing them,and then robbing them, she gleefully turns the tables on the men who would use her. She then embarks on a journey to hunt down and kill the five men that escaped. Then, she meets a woman and falss in love. Fearful that her murderous ways might apply to females as well as men, she decides to experimentwith lesbianism, meeting new victims along the way.

The first part of the book sizzles. Kit is unrepentent and for the most part, her victims have it coming. Her attempts to kill the man who actually drugged her are wickedly funny. although she was sexaully abusedand abandoned by her father, it is clear that what really gets her off is the killing.

Unfortunately, the book drags as she indulges in some tired self assessment and her relationship with the other woman just fell flat. I was not convinced that "love" changed her and that she would be so stupid to unburden herself to her bland female love interest. The conversations with the lover and the sex scenes dragged. After the proxy marriage/murder, it all became monotonous.

I applaud the author for turning the tables on the serial killer story.It examined what happens when a woman used for sexual currency revolts and only stumbles when she almost develops a conscience. But the bottom line is that Kit is a killer and probably would be no matter what her background. I thought the author presented an interesting and uncomfortable conundrum regarding her sexual abuse. Was her anger at the sex or at her father's ultimate rejection or both? I enjoyed the first half of the book and got bogged down after that. The parts that were good were good enough for me to try this author again.

I'm sure there must be a point to this novel, other than the obvious story about a young girl, abused by her father for many years. When she grows up, he shuns her, and she feels neglected, so she kills both her mother and father, then goes on a long-term sex spree, going to bed with a succession of men and then murdering them.

The rationale seems to be that she is killing her father over and over. So what?

Lawrence Block [writing here as Jill Emerson] is more than capable of writing a more meaningful tale. After all, he's done it many more times than not. This just isn't one of them. It isn't even good erotica, no matter how well it's written. And it is unfortunate that I am precluded from further comment as to the novel's conclusion, which might or might not be a spoiler.

GETTING OFF: A NOVEL OF SEX AND VIOLENCE is written by Lawrence Block, writing as Jill Emerson. That distinction is important. Jill Emerson is a pen name Block used early in his career for sexy "soft porn" novels.

GETTING OFF is definitely soft (if not quite hard) porn. The main character "Kit" (she changes her name so often you can lose track) travels the country sleeping with and killing men, for reasons that come clear through the novel. It's typical Block in that the characters are well drawn and the dialogue sings, but I can't say if it's typical Emerson because I never read any of the Emerson works.

This one is a winner, but make sure you know what you're getting off on. It's not typical Scudder/Rhodenbarr/Keller fare.