Hellcats and Honeygirls

Dust Jacket Illustration by Glen Orbik

Subterranean Press is proud to publish an omnibus containing the three novels jointly written by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake. The individual titles have out of print for nearly five decades.

“Now, as I write these lines, Don’s been gone a year and a week. And our three joint novels are now available in this handsome hardcover edition. I’m happy about this, and I can only hope that Don would be pleased as well.

I can’t be sure of that, as he hasn’t had any say in the matter. I do know that, in recent years, he became increasingly open about pseudonymous work that he’d previously kept in the dark. Part of this may have stemmed from a recognition of the inevitability of it all. There are people out there practicing a weird form of scholarship on the crap of which we who wrote it thought so little, and a quick search of the internet can unearth no end of information about our early work, some of which may even be true. The genie, alas, is out of the bottle, and the toothpaste is out of the tube. And, really, what difference does it make?

When Don agreed to have Hard Case Crime reissue some of his early books—crime novels, I should point out, which had nothing to apologize for—a mutual friend asked him why he thought this a good idea. The money didn’t amount to much, after all, and the work was not as good as what he’d produced since then, and—

’The difference between being in print and out of print,’ Don told him, ‘is the same as the difference between being alive and being dead.’

So I don’t think it’s too great an abuse of our friendship that I’m shepherding these three books back into print.”
—Lawrence Block, from his Introduction

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Lawrence Block
• A Girl Called Honey
• So Willing
• Sin Hellcat

From Publishers Weekly:
“Block’s heartwarming introduction to this omnibus recounts their glee at killing off each other’s characters and admiration for each other’s great lines… Readers will need to set aside their modern sensibilities to appreciate the mastery underneath the wild, hilariously euphemistic, and questionably consensual sex, but these classics are undeniably worth the effort.”

From Booklist:
“…as an opportunity for fans to see what these genre giants were writing way back when, this is an indispensable collection.”

From Somebody Dies:
“One gets the impression that the authors got a great deal of amusement from taking off on each other’s plot twists and especially from getting rid of characters created by the other when they began to annoy. The books are full of little in-references (one character signs a hotel register as ‘Andrew Shaw’) and throwaway jokes (like calling a town Modnoc; read it backwards) that only add to the entertainment. All in all, Block and Westlake have nothing to be ashamed of with the early novels in Hellcats and Honeygirls, and their fans will be glad to see them back in print, if only so that they can generate royalty checks once again.”