I listened to this book in one sitting (in a car) today, fan as I am of Lawerence Block's Matt Scudder detective series. Block is one of the most prolI listened to this book in one sitting (in a car) today, fan as I am of Lawerence Block's Matt Scudder detective series. Block is one of the most prolific and honored mystery writers of all time, and as he is still writing at 84, he decided to complete an abandoned project he began many years ago: To have Matt Scudder tell his own story. Okay, you won't read this unless you are a fan of the series. Block has stopped writing Scudder "for good" at various times but succumbs to fan pleas once again to write yet another book. I've read them all. I want to check in with how he and Elaine and Mick and TJ are doing from time to time. They're aging, sure, but still alive! Don't you ever want to do that with a novel? See how they all are twenty years later?
And of course it is not up to the standards of the greatest entries of the series, probably 3 stars at best, but to a fan, it is satisfying, as that Scudder voice comes through, with some characteristic great writing and insights. Scudder is advised on the writing by a writing mentor, none other than LB himself, which is a little funny. He also gives us some background on his failed marriage, and the one serial killer who most shaped his life and career.
He doesn't have much to say about fan favorites TJ or Mick, maybe because we learn enough about them in the series itself, but he does talk in depth about his first partner, Mahaffey, who influenced him to make some of the ethical compromises (and even lawbreaking) that he made, usually to jail deserving criminals, but not always. His senior partner urged him to take a little money on the side. But he did take that money, again and again. And then we see his anguish about the incident--the accidental killing--that wrecked him, made him tithe each week in a church he didn't belong to, to a god he didn't he even know he believed in. He's not a saint, this Scudder, with his struggles with women and booze and guillt, but I like him. I don't recommend it to anyone but real Scudder fans, but I am one, and liked it....more
Bourbon-drinking Block clearly hated the Beats in his 1961 quasi-existentialist nod to Camus, which turns into more of a version of Reefer Madness thaBourbon-drinking Block clearly hated the Beats in his 1961 quasi-existentialist nod to Camus, which turns into more of a version of Reefer Madness than The Stranger. Kerouac and Ginsberg take their hits here as romanticizing the Beat life as a trip to counter-culture Heaven, as Block’s version of those days is a trip straight to Hell. Originally titled Pads Are For Passion (!!), the second book Lawrence Block wrote under the pseudonym Sheldon Lord.
Early on this is a kind of funny cautionary tale about a bunch of Greenwich Village teens/twenty-somethings getting "involved in" pot (that gateway drug to heroin, don’tcha know), so it’s kind of silly for a long time until it turns dark. Anita drops out of Hunter College and falls inexplicably in love with PTSD-Korean War vet Joe, who wants to drop out of society and turn on. Anita tries pot once at a party initiated by a Ginsberg-type poet ranting a terrible poem, and right away strips and has sex with Joe in the middle of the floor at the party (!!). Yeah, I hate how that happens, every time I take a hit on what Block calls a "marijuana joint." Reefer Madness, indeed! Be careful, boys and girls! Stop inhaling that weed! (It’s a wonder she does not simultaneously get pregnant from that one public sexual experience as a warning to all careful readers).
Treacle is British for molasses, which is what three girls who live at the bottom of a well in Alice in Wonderland survive on. Treacle as pot? the well, as some Village dive? I'll admit that there are moments in which I saw the roots of today's opioid addiction in this book, though it doesn't feel quite seriously cautionary or (certainly!!!) well-written enough as Winter's Bone or No Country for Old Men on the subject.
Later, as things turn to absolute crap, (because they have to! Because: Pot! and all these young people who don't want to get a job and settle down!) Joe’s psychotic roommate Shank, who has begun peddling heroin, sadistically, (so trigger-warning) rapes Anita and (spoiler alert--oh, come on, as if you will ever read it?!) kills a cop and someone else "on the road" (on the run).
Okay, this isn’t a great book, not nearly as good as Grifter's Game or Lucky at Cards, but I can see why they decided to include it for fans of Block and noir in the Hard Case Crime series, even though it is easily the worst Block I have read, maybe two stars or 2.5. It's a period piece by Lawrence Block! But I listened to it without stopping (it's a short book) and I will always remember it in conjunction with Kerouac’s On the Road and I’ll also always recall that campy hipster poem at the party igniting the drugs and sex.
I also like that it contributes to my sense that American noir is, besides its shadowy/pulpy exercise in style, a critique of capitalism in its send-up of a society that creates victims that can only dream of financial survival. Dealing and turning tricks on the way tot the American Dream??!!
Here's that neo-liberal dream unmasked, as an older man, one of Shank's victims, tells him:
"What a thing to be young! You can be anything you want!"
Boom, and literally boom, in the next moment. And finally, of Shank's gun:
"He could feel it: All that power. All that emptiness." Could have been written by Camus about Meursault in The Stranger, though (of course!!) Camus was a much better thinker and writer than Block, in this book, at least.
I did not hate the Beats or hippies as Block clearly did, but Treacle (terrible title!) is a darkly amusing (and then not so amusing) attempt at existentialist noir that I somewhat guiltily admit that I liked in spite of myself....more
Lucky at Cards is a pulpy noir story that is part of the Hard Case Crime series I just discovered re-releasing a lot of stand-alone books by classic mLucky at Cards is a pulpy noir story that is part of the Hard Case Crime series I just discovered re-releasing a lot of stand-alone books by classic mystery writers such as Ed McBain, Donald Westlake, Mickey Spillane and others. I am also simultaneously listening to two LOOONG books, Emma by Jane Austen and 11/22/63 by Stephen King, so I alternate those with comics and these fast hard-boiled books.
Lucky at Cards was published in 1964 as The Sex Shuffle by Lawrence Block under the pseudonym Sheldon Lord. I also just read another one of his novels, Grifter's Game, that has a pretty similar premise to Lucky at Cards: a grifter/con who meets girl who is unhappily married to a man who is older, heavier, balding, and rich. You get the feeling at Mystery Writers conventions that these guys sit around and play "what if" literary plot games. In Grifter's Game the Grifter gets grifted.
In Lucky at Cards we have a magician and card "mechanic" (or card shark/sharp) Bill "Wizard" Maynard who meets Joyce Rogers, a sort of femme fatale who wants to use him to get out of her unhappy marriage (and maybe she falls in love with him?), but she wants the money, too. We, of the dull what-if variety of plot-imaginers, think the obvious: Kill the old dog and live happily ever after! But Block sets this extra roadblock to the challenge; the rich old guy is a lawyer who is twenty years older than Joyce who suspects he might lose her. He writes in his will and marriage agreement that if she divorces him she gets nothing, and if he dies and she remarries she gets nothing. So how else can they get the love and money?
In the process, Mr. Rogers meets and likes Bill, and sets him up in a legit business and finds him a hot woman, an English teacher!! (Nice for English teacher readers, Lawrence!) and Bill/Wizard likes the woman and the job, but Joyce forces him to work out a way to get her husband out of the picture. And again, the grifter gets grifted, but!! the old guy sets up a card game as a way to resolve the issue, winner taking $50K AND the girl (a commodity only, our Joyce at this point). I won't tell you what happens, but I was (again) pleasantly surprised by the twist at the end, and surprised how good Block was even in these early pulp books. And you learn quite a bit about how to cheat at cards! Can't wait to impress my friends with my (underhanded) skills....more