SO A WAR VET, A PSYCHOPATH, AND A HOT BABE WALK INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK...

...and years later they tell us what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. Lawrence Block was on the scene, just starting to find himself as a writer, and A Diet of Treacle was his attempt to get it all down on paper.

It was published by a low-rent paperback house, with a tacky title and a pen name, and disappeared from view until Hard Case Crime found it and published it a few years ago. Publishers Weekly exulted: "Block effortlessly immerses himself in the mind space of Joe and Shank, reporting their world of drugs, sex and disaffection with a matter-of-factness that hits hard, all the more convincing because Block never makes an overt effort to convince. A potboiler morality play at its finest, the novel doesn't deliver much action until its last third, but the slow build of the first two will give readers the delicious (and all-too-rare) feeling that anything could happen."

The Beat Generation has been mythologized extensively since the heyday of Ginsberg and Kerouac, as it's hard to see it in perspective. A Diet of Treacle—the title's from Alice in Wonderland—provides a glimpse you won't forget.

This Classic Crime Library ebook edition of A Diet of Treacle includes as a bonus the opening chapter from the next book in the series, You Could Call It Murder.