Lawrence Block’s THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART may be four decades old, but as the new Hard Case Crime reissue proves, it’s as fresh as any crime fiction today.
Deservedly back in print and unabridged, this GIRL is about two guys who team up to pull a real-estate con over on a wealthy businessman in the small town of Olean, New York. Their game is this: The businessman had been burned before in a phony deal that left him $20,000 poorer for a plot of worthless land, so the boys offer to buy it back for pennies on the dollar and make him think they’re about to strike it rich with mineral rights or the like. Their hope is to get him smelling so much green that he won’t want to sell, but instead to buy the deeds to all their land – to which they have no true ownership, of course. By the time he’d be able to figure it out, the guys would abscond with $100 grand.
But to make it work, they need an assist from someone on the inside. Enter Evelyn Stone, the man’s own secretary and sometime bed partner. She’s feeling jilted after he promised to marry her but never came through, so she’s only happy to help rub his nose in it. But despite knowing better, one of our two con artists falls for her; we’ve all seen too many movies to know this setup can’t turn out all too rosy, though watching it unfold is fascinating either way.
Indeed, I had a fairly good idea where events were headed, although not to the extent that Block so masterfully presents. He takes what could have been a complex-to-the-point-of-confusion plot and boils it down to a no-nonsense style that is dialogue-driven, with language that cuts so fast and loose, you have no choice but to be buckled in tight for the duration of the trip. Plus, the novel’s first-person narration puts you right in the thick of it. When you hear the term “pulp fiction,” GIRL is exactly what it refers to – a story where the lines between good and bad are paper-thin, where characters can (and do) turn on a dime, where you can get away with lines like “I wanted to make her purr.” And Block makes it seem so effortless that the end result is nothing short of timeless.
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