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Lawrence Block is worth the effort
Book Review
By Derryll White
Block, Lawrence (1981). A Stab In the Dark.
“…. most investigatory work is like that. If she just roots around enough, even a blind sow gets an acorn now and then. Or so they tell me.” – Matthew Scudder.
As with any genre, in Mystery it is fun (and instructive) to sometimes cast back to earlier authors now considered masters of their craft. Lawrence Block has written more than 100 books and seven collections of short stories. In doing so he perfected his craft, wrote very sharp dialogue and built remarkable characters.
Matthew Scudder, an ex-NYPP detective who has a very close relationship with bourbon, is a good example of Lawrence Block’s enduring characters. He embodies Block’s clear eye for detail, and brings it to the fore here where he is chasing a serial-killer’s 10-year-old trail.
Ask yourself how you would reconstruct an event, 10-years-old, that you had only been tangentially associated with. What would your sources be, your line of inquiry? A name, an address, a date – how would you assemble the collage and entrap the murderer?
The first thing Matt Scudder does is behave like a normal person. He makes lists. He talks to people. He treats them all like respected individuals and pays attention to their stories. Then he goes to the records repositories, checking weddings, birth dates, trying to verify names. The work is plodding and demanding, but Lawrence Block’s towering skill as a story teller makes Matt Scudder very interesting as he does it.
The second thing Scudder does is become remarkably intractable – exceedingly stubborn some would label it. That characteristic carries him through the withdrawal of his client, through the morass of his troubled personal life, to an ultimate resolution of the cold trail and revelation of the real murderer.
With all of his fallibilities and shortcomings, Matthew Scudder becomes a representation of every man. He fools himself into believing he is not an alcoholic. He uses his determination and investigative skills to achieve an outcome he can live with. That is Lawrence Block’s strength and the showcase for his considerable talent. He can take a deeply flawed character and negotiate a number of different realities to bring the reader face-to-face with his own shortcomings, loves, weaknesses and strengths. Lawrence Block is worth the effort to resurrect and read. You will not be sorry.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
OBSERVATION – Sixty or thereabouts. High forehead, rimless glasses over pale blue eyes. Graying blond hair combed to lie flat on the scalp. Sat five-nine or –ten. Say a hundred seventy pounds. Light complexion. Cleanshaven. Narrow nose. Small thin-lipped mouth. Gray suit, white shirt, tie striped in red and black and gold. Briefcase in one hand, umbrella in the other.
MEMORY – I couldn’t be sure the brick hadn’t been exposed previously, nor could I know how much of my mental picture was real. The memory is a cooperative animal, eager to please; what it cannot supply it occasionally invents, sketching carefully to fill in the blanks.
URBAN LIFE – It’s wonderful how the quality of urban life keeps getting better. ‘Pardon me, sir, but could you tell me how to get to the Empire State Building?’ ‘Fuck off, you creep.’ Manners for a modern city.
NEW YORK – All of the branch libraries have cut back on their hours, added closed days. Part of the financial pinch. The city can’t afford anything, and the administration goes around like an old miser closing off unused rooms in a sprawling cold house. The police force is ten thousand men below what it used to be. Everything drops but the rents and the crime rate.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
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