Review: Playing Games, edited by Lawrence Block

 

I have been a fan of Lawrence Block's books for a whole lot of years, but Playing Games has somehow managed to make me appreciate him now more than ever. Block invited sixteen authors to write short stories, each of them centering around the common theme of making a specific game the core of their story, and it appears that all of them were eager to respond with one. The result is seventeen (Block contributed the last story in the book) really good tales - all of them written in 2023. 

Quick Aside - I got a kick out of the book's "About the Editor" section, a career biography obviously written by Block himself, because of this sentence beginning the section's second paragraph: "In recent years, Lawrence Block has found a new career as an anthologist, having realized how much easier it is to dash off an introduction while inveigling others to supply the actual stories." I love that.

The "bigger" names contributing stories to the collection are probably Block, S.A. Cosby, Robert Silverberg, Jeffery Deaver, and Joe R. Lansdale. Surprisingly to me, none of the five authored one of the stories I most enjoyed - although Cosby came very close. 

One of my favorites is Tod Goldberg's "Paladin," one of the longest stories in the collection. It tells the story of a cop's best friend who is lost at sea while attempting to rescue a distressed vessel. I was particularly impressed at how much like a full novel this one reads, with so much information and so many twists packed into relatively few pages.

Another favorite is "Lighting Round" by Warren Moore. "Lightning Round" is about a man who loves from afar the woman who is running the Trivia Night game at his local pub every week. He has given it his best shot, but she has firmly rebuffed him and now he just comes to the weekly game to see her. But once he begins to suspect that she has serious boyfriend trouble, something very clever and dramatic is about to happen on Trivia Night.

Similarly, David Morrell's "The Puzzle Master" puts an entirely new twist on jigsaw puzzles and those who illustrate the boxes and puzzles. One couple, new to puzzling but loving it, notices a pattern in one artist's puzzles when they go back and begin to work them in chronological order. What they learn makes them suspect that a serious crime is being hinted at - and they decide to solve a whole different kind of puzzle for themselves.

The best thing about Playing Games is the consistency of the work. I've read a whole lot of short story compilations, and their biggest flaw is almost always the same: three or four really great stories, a bunch of average ones, and two or three real stinkers. Playing Games, on the other hand, is made up almost entirely of very good stories, with a handful of excellent ones and only one real stinker (which will remain nameless). If you're a crime fiction fan but are new to reading crime fiction short stories, I can't think of a better place to begin.

My thanks go to Tracy over at Bitter Tea and Mystery who alerted me to this collection via a post earlier this month. Click here to read her post.