Some good news for Lawrence Block completists: One Night Stands, a long out-of-print collection of his earliest short stories (all predating the work in the giant collection Enough Rope, save for Block’s first story, “You Can’t Lose,” which is in ER.) will be reprinted as a trade paperback in fall 2008 by HarperCollins as One Night Stands and Lost Weekends.

Block fans who want to read — let alone own — everything the prolific mystery writer has done have a quite a task before them. One challenge is to simply get through the 60-plus novels under his own name. Another is to unearth those written under various pseudonyms, and still another is to track down out-of-print or uncollected work. Block has been helpful of late, working with publishers large and small to get much of his early work back into print. Through the likes of Crippen & Landru (who published One Night Stands), Subterranean Press (which brought out some gorgeous Evan Tanner books), Hard Case Crime (who have issued three early Block titles, with a fourth on the way) and larger presses like HarperCollins (which is in the process of issuing new paperbacks of the Tanner books), anyone who has exhausted Block’s Matthew Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr and Keller the hit man series can still find plenty to peruse.

One Night Stands, however, has been a bit of a holy grail. It went out of print almost instantly and now fetches significant prices if you can even find one in the rare book market. It was so rare and so valuable, in fact, that I ponied up for a sequel of sorts, in The Lost Cases of Ed London as much for the investment as for the chance to read the three early novellas it contains. Having missed out on One Night Stands, I was determined not to miss this. It was smart, at least at the time, for it too went out of print.

Now, the value of those books is in question. They’re certainly still rare, but the chance to read the stories within is not, for the HarperCollins collection will also feature the material in The Lost Cases of Ed London (that being the Lost Weekends part of the new collection’s title). No matter; I’m after then chance to read more of Block’s work. If my copy of The Lost Cases… won’t put my kid through college, so be it.

It’s quite a turnaround for Block, who for a long time dismissed his early work and seemed reluctant to let it back out into the world. As he writes in his latest newsletter: “My feeling was that collectors and the like ought to have access to these stories, but that I didn’t want them more widely available. But when nobody wrote me to tell me the stories were terrible, I began to change my mind.” When I asked him during an interview in February if there were other of his works that would be republished, he said, “ I don’t think there are any others I’d be happy to see reprinted, but greed does have a way of triumphing over principles, so we’ll have to see.”

In other Block news, the fourth Keller installment, Hit and Run, will be issued, also by HarperCollins, next June.

Lawrence Block reports that HarperCollins plans to reissue all eight of his novels about the sleepless spy Evan Tanner. Fans of Block’s two more popular series, the hard-boiled Matthew Scudder series and the more humorous Bernie Rhodenbarr books (or the even more recent Keller collections) might not be aware of this lesser-known but still satisfying character.

In Block’s own words, “Evan Michael Tanner (and I include the middle name because Google will tell you, if you let it, about one Evan Lloyd Tanner, who’s a prominent figure in the field of mixed martial arts) is a veteran of the Korean War who lost the ability to sleep in that conflict and has been awake ever since. He has a passion for lost causes, ranging from the restoration of the House of Stuart to the Flat Earth Society, and his facility for languages (plus all that extra time to study them) has rendered him fluent in just about everything. He earns his living by taking tests and writing theses for collegians with more money than brains, and functions as a sort of free-lance spy / secret agent under the nominal control of an agency so secret that the CIA doesn’t even know it exists.”

Block wrote seven Tanner books in the 1960s, then revisited the character (using a clever means of explaining his time away) in the 1998 novel Tanner on Ice. Block has said in the past that the book was probably a one-off and not to expect further visits from Tanner, but that resolve has cracked just a bit: “If you’re hoping for a new Tanner adventure, well, a month ago I’d have told you not to hold your breath. But lately I find myself wondering…” he writes in his e-mail newsletter.

Until then, there still are a few new Tanner-related words on the way: He wrote a new afterword for each book, so even those of us who have read the entire series will probably want to track these down.

The republication will happen quickly. The first two books, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep and The Canceled Czech will be out soon, while the rest will follow at the rate of two per month.