Resume Speed

Lawrence Block is a prolific writer who has been reviewed three times previously in the blog. While the reviews in our blog of his other novels have been lukewarm, this one is nothing but hot. Bill Thompson began the story on a bus which was taking him to Montana. Skilled as a fry cook, he hopped off the bus in a small town, found a diner that needed a new cook, and began a new life there. He was fleeing a town in North Dakota where he had an alcoholic blackout, and awoke with some evidence that he had been in a fight, and he worried that he had done something awful he could not remember. His new boss is Andy Page, and Andy is most impressed with Thompson’s skills and work ethic. Eventually, Thompson meets a new love interest, the librarian, Carlene Weldon. But Block could not put down the drink, and just as it is want to happen, his efforts to carefully control his alcohol consumption gradually and unpredictably slipped to dangerous proportions. Eventually, we learn that at some time in his past, he had murdered a man in one such blackout. Fearful of repeating that pattern, he was still unable to leave his bourbon alone.

The story and dialogue almost reads like a script from “Sergeant Friday.” It was short, direct, and to the point – and at the same time, as the character of Thompson was developed, the story was gripping. To use a cliché, this is a hard hitting work, while also being a short and easy read. Well done Mr. Block.

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.

When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes by Lawrence Block

East Coast Don reviewed “Eight Million Ways to Die,” the first of the Lawrence Block books reviewed in this blog. That was one was written in 1982, the fifth in the 18-book series, and originally, Block was going to end the series with that one. After a little research, I chose “When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes,” the 1986 book that revived the series and the hero. In this story, Scudder gets involved in some crime solving, but I was nearly halfway through when I realized I was just not interested in finding out how Scudder solved the mysteries and how the author resolved the various dissonances that he created with his characters. Simply put, it was not gripping enough to keep me interested.

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block

Pay attention boys and girls. I’ve come to learn that Lawrence Block has the rep as one of the few modern day noir authors that has successfully edged out from under the shadow of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. The is one of 18 (!) Matthew Scudder novels. Not that I should know all the modern day noir authors, but how did Block fly under my radar? This title came out in 1982.

Scudder is a former NYC cop who left the job because an errant bullet killed a little girl and his downward spiral destroyed his marraige. He now lives in a residential hotel and makes ends meet as an unlicensed PI while working oh so hard to keep from seeing life from the blackout-induced haze of a bottle of bourbon.

A friend of a friend connects Scudder with Kim Dakkinen, a Wisconsin-bred lovely who wants to get out of ‘the life.’ She is afraid to tell her pimp, so she asks Scudder to approach Chance with the news. Chance is terribly private person, a lover of African art and nothing like the comedic image of a pimp, but once Scudder meets him, the news is certainly OK with Chance. He wishes her well and appreciated her service. Life moves on.

Within a couple days, Kim is dead, hacked into smithereens by a machete in a downtown hotel. She wasn’t assaulted or robbed, just hacked to bits. The killer even took a shower afterwards and took the bloody towels. Obviously, the cops think Chance is behind the slaughter, but Chance hires Scudder to find her killer and an unlikely tango between Chance, Scudder, and the cops ensues.

A couple days later, another of Chance’s girls is dead of an apparent suicide. Is someone targeting Chance’s girls? A few days later, what appears to be a random transsexual waiting for sex change surgery is hacked to death just like Kim. The press is having a field day.

Scudder is trying to find the connection between the victims. A mink stole was left in Kim’s apartment and the hotel room, but a green ring, an emerald, was not on Kim’s hand. Scudder trades interviews and other clues with daily trips to AA, a fall off the wagon, and countless cups of coffee. On a venture into Harlem, he is mugged, but disarms the perp, knocks the kid out and breaks both the kid’s legs. A day or two later, a passerby after another AA meeting hints to Scudder that he should back off else he experiences the same broken legs.

It seems like so many PI stories are tales of an awfully flawed former cop. Scudder lives his days in “the smells of spilled booze and stale beer and urine, that dank tavern smell that welcomes you home.” The book is essentially told in 3parts: the day-to-day grind of AA, a certain level of hatred for what NYC has become, and of being in ‘the life’.” If books like this are reflections of the life of the writer, Mr. Block has seen a very nasty side of the human drama that he expertly exposes to his readers by seductively drawing us into the underbelly of New York. Block has another series about a contract killer named Keller, which I will explore next. But Scudder will again sit on my nightstand in the not too distant future.

East Coast Don