Lawrence Block: Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
Generally available for the first time in over 25 years, the mystery Grand Master's rarest novel!
In the late sixties... I wanted to write some frankly erotic books that would be fun to write, and might even be interesting to a reader with a three-figure IQ. My agent found an enthusiastic publisher, and I did three books in all, publishing them under a female pen name, one I'd used earlier on a pair of lesbian novels.

Ronald Rabbit was initially intended to be a pseudonymous paperback original. I wanted to write an epistolary novel, but not the traditional series of narrative letters from a single character in the manner of Richardson's Pamela. Instead I was inspired by Mark Harris' comic souffle, Wake Up, Stupid, and my good friend Hal Dresner's hilarious The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. Each tells its story through the medium of the collected correspondence of the protagonist, letters written to him as well as letters written by him, and that's what I wanted to do in Ronald Rabbit.

I wrote Ronald Rabbit in four days... One letter kept leading to another. I was completely caught up in the realization of the havoc that could be wreaked by a single manipulative maniac with a typewriter... -- LAWRENCE BLOCK

Lawrence Block: Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. Subterranean Press, ISBN: 1892284561 (January, 2000), $16.00.

Lawrence Block: Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man (USA 1971)

From the Publisher:
YOU think YOU'VE got problems?
Well, how would you like to get a letter from your ex-wife's lawyer threatening a lawsuit over a measly few months' alimony? And then be fired from your job as editor of Ronald Rabbit's Magazine for Boys and Girls simply because the magazine had ceased publication six months ago? And then go home to find your wife has run off with your best friend -- and your bank account? And that you are being evicted from your apartment?

What do you do then, when you are left with nothing but your lurid memories, your itchy libido and an unemployed typewriter?
If you are Laurence Clarke, our trepid hero and the world's most cunning linguist, you immediately plunge into not one but seven simultaneous and overlapping love affairs that would boggle a satyr. And you set into motion the most outrageous, insanely complicated and deviously horny series of inter-locking plots and counterplots since Machiavelli began his nursery school.

How did these maniacal manipulations bring together the erstwhile publisher of Ronald Rabbit, his depraved but virginal secretary, six little schoolgirls who should have had Polly Adler for a housemother, two ex-wives who were usually too prone to argue, one landlord, two law firms, various bystanders, and a partridge in a pear tree?

You'll have to read the incredible letters of Laurence Clarke to find out, but we will admit to one thing:
We lied about the partridge.

LAWRENCE BLOCK, shown on the back jacket pretending to read a filthy book to his two innocent children, has written several novels under various aliases, low ceilings and threats of exposure. He divides his time between a New York apartment and a farm in New Jersey, and his activities in both places are too nefarious to contemplate. However, any resemblance between Lawrence Block, author, and Laurence Clarke, hero of RONALD RABBIT IS A DIRTY OLD MAN, is entirely.

Lawrence Block: Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. WARNING: This book must not be read in a water bed. You'll laugh yourself seasick. A Special Kind of Novel. Bernard Geis Associates, ISBN: 0870350277 (October, 1971), 179 p., $5.95.