Lawrence Block (John Mortimer) Books in Order

This corner brings together two very different, and oddly complementary, crime writers: Lawrence Block, rooted in the streets of New York, and John Mortimer, whose imagination was shaped by English courts and countryside. The books gathered here are for readers who enjoy one of them and are curious about the other, or who want to see how their worlds occasionally touch.

One obvious meeting point is Death Cruise: Crime Stories on the Open Seas, an anthology of shipboard mysteries edited by Block that includes contributions from Mortimer among a roster of crime writers from several countries. Every story is set on or around cruise ships, where the isolation of the sea and the artificial intimacy of life aboard make for tight, nicely contained plots. It is an easy way to sample different voices, including Mortimer’s, in a single volume.

Beyond that, the link between Block and Mortimer is thematic. Both are preoccupied with what the law does to people, but they look at it from opposite directions. Block’s Matthew Scudder is a former policeman eking out a living as an unlicensed private eye, haunted by his own mistakes and by the compromises demanded by a rough city. Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole is a lifelong defence barrister, clinging to jury trial and cross‑examination as protections for the awkward and the poor. One moves through bars and back alleys in Manhattan, the other through chambers, wine bars and suburban flats around the Old Bailey.

Readers who like Block’s mix of moral seriousness and street‑level detail often find a familiar pleasure in Mortimer’s stories, where jokes and set pieces sit alongside sharp arguments about civil liberties. Fans of Rumpole’s courtroom monologues may, in turn, enjoy the way Block lets Scudder think aloud about guilt, redemption and the thin line between law and crime. This series exists to point out those echoes and suggest paths from one body of work to the other.

On the page you can expect short overviews of shared projects, cross‑referenced reading lists and a sense of how Block’s New York noir and Mortimer’s British legal comedies can speak to each other. Think of it as a friendly guide for making a transatlantic jump in your crime reading.

Whether you come here from the Timsons’ corner of London or from Bernie Rhodenbarr’s bookshop in Manhattan, the idea is the same: to help you find the next writer, story or anthology that will scratch that same itch for clever, humane crime fiction.