A Drop of the Hard Stuff

This is the third book by Block that we’ve reviewed, the first in a year and a half. It’s the 17th book in the Matt Scudder series which began in 1976 with The Sins of Our Fathers. East Coast Don (ECD) raved about Eight Million Ways to Die from 1982, but I was none to excited about the 1986 title When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes. ECD promised to get back to the Matt Scudder series soon, but he never did. After reading the latest book, I am ready to read more of Block – this was a very good book which definitely held my interest all the way through. The character development was excellent, and Block was masterful in keeping the suspense alive all the way through. I didn’t see the end coming until he wanted me to. Even then, the conclusion was not quite what I expected – very good stuff.

I’ve never read a book quite like this one. We know that Scudder is a flawed former cop, a theme that keeps getting repeated in these books, now working as an unlicensed PI – think of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger, and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. This is a flashback novel to 1962 when Scudder is in his first year of sobriety, and his sobriety is fragile, so he goes to AA meetings every day, sometimes more than one a day. Block obviously knows the inside of AA since he writes about it with such clarity. If you’ve ever been curious about what AA is all about, what goes on in AA meetings, and what the “12 steps” are, then this is the place to learn because Block takes you through the process. While Jack continues to struggle with step one, his grade school chum, Jack Ellery, is working on step nine. Ellery has been sober for a couple years. Step one is “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.” As Block explains through Jack’s struggles, there’s a lot that goes on between step one and step nine, which is “make direct amends” to the people that have been harmed by the alcoholic, “whenever possible, except when to do so would injure to them or others.” Ellery was murdered when he was in the process of making his apologies and reparations for his past sins, and his sins were many, including one murder. Since he himself was such a bastard and had harmed so many people, his attempted amends were not always met with compassion by the people to whom he was reaching out. Ellery’s AA sponsor Greg Stillman decides that the 9th step ought to include a warning against doing anything that would harm the one making amends.

 With the journey into AA, Block also spends a little time on spirituality, including an alleged quote from Buddha, “It is your dissatisfaction with what is that is the source of all your unhappiness.” Those are words of wisdom. This book gets my strong recommendation.