FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
Something like four years separate the first three of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels from the next two. The fourth in the series, A STAB IN THE DARK (Arbor House, 1981), begins as usual in Scudder’s favorite bar-restaurant, where he’s approached by Mr. London, a prosperous insurance exec with an unusual problem.
Nine years ago his daughter had been the sixth of eight victims of a psycho killer known as the Icepick Prowler. Recently the perp has been caught and confessed to having slaughtered all the women—except Number Six, for whose murder he has an unshakable alibi.
As chance would have it, Scudder had been briefly involved with that crime back in his cop days. Now he’s offered a sizable fee to reopen the old case and try to track down the copycat who committed the one ice-pick murder the Prowler didn’t.
Even in the earliest Scudder novels Block tended to reduce plot to a bare minimum and concentrate on relationships, the sense of the city, and characters, first and foremost of course that of Scudder with his alcohol problem. These tendencies continue in A STAB IN THE DARK, which is a bit longer than any of the earlier Scudders so that many readers might expect more in the way of plot complications.
What they get is fewer. Fueled by frequent pit stops for bourbon, our unlicensed PI proceeds methodically through various Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods. Almost halfway through the novel he describes his method, which is reminiscent of Simenon’s Maigret: “You gather details and soak up impressions, and then the answer pops into your mind out of nowhere.â€
There’s no violence along the way except yet another encounter with a teen-age mugger which, like the similar encounter in THE SINS OF THE FATHERS, has nothing to do with the plot.
This time however, it’s connected with two of the book’s themes. One is the decline and fall of the city. A madman known as the Slasher has been carving up passersby on First Avenue. A 13-year-old boy has recently shot two women behind their ears. There’s been an upturn in muggings. “It’s wonderful how the quality of urban life keeps getting better.â€
The other is the effect of drinking on Scudder’s reactions to a violent situation. These elements create a context for the scene which didn’t exist in THE SINS OF THE FATHERS. Ultimately Scudder finds the ice-pick killer’s imitator, whose motive for murder takes a lot of believing although it helps us understand why this time there’s no question of private vengeance.
Block manages to integrate the single violent episode in the novel with one of its main themes, but as far as I can tell he fails to do so with an episode of a radically different nature. In the midst of his investigation Scudder becomes involved with an alcoholic woman who’s been going to AA meetings. During one of their conversations she quotes the last six lines of Dylan Thomas’ “A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London.†I’ll limit myself to the first and last lines of the six.
“Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter….
After the first death there is no other.â€
Scudder is oddly moved by the lines: “There’s a door in there somewhere if I could just find the handle to it.†Later he visits a bookstore and finds the complete poem. “I read it all the way through….There were parts I didn’t think I understood, but I liked the sound of them anyway, the weight and shape of the words….â€
The subject never comes up again. Except for the obvious connection that the woman whose murderer he’s seeking is the daughter of a man named London, I can’t find the ghost of a link between “A Refusal to Mourn†and this novel. To hunt for one, you need only google Thomas’ name and the title of his poem.
Another theme Block hints at but doesn’t pursue has to do with legal ethics. Relatively late in the novel, Scudder gets in touch with the attorney assigned to defend the genuine Icepick Prowler.
“….Anybody crazy enough to want to could get him off without a lot of trouble….[I]f I made a fight the State’s case wouldn’t stand up….There’s lawyers who think the advocate system means they should go to bat for a guy like [the psycho killer] and put him back on the streets….Again between ourselves, I think lawyers with that attitude ought to be in jail alongside their clients.â€
It’s almost as if Block had foreseen Martin Scorsese’s version of CAPE FEAR (1991), which takes off from the premise that a lawyer (Nick Nolte) assigned to defend a sadistic rapist (Robert De Niro) threw the case because he knew what a menace his client was.
Many law professors had something to say about that movie and most of them took the position that Nolte’s character was a Judas, a traitor to the legal system. My own take can be found in Chapter 8 of my book JUDGES & JUSTICE & LAWYERS & LAW (2014). I do wish Block had had more to say on this issue.
He does have more to say about his protagonist. Scudder still lives in the same bleak hotel room, still tithes, still drops into churches at odd moments: “I didn’t say any prayers. I never do.†He continues to dip into that Lives of the Saints book we’ve seen in earlier novels. “The martyrs held a curious fascination for me. They’d found such a rich variety of ways of dying.â€
But clearly he’s drinking more than ever, to the point where we live through a blackout with him. Despite his involvement with a woman who’s trying AA, he doesn’t feel that route is right for him. At the end of the novel he and the woman put their relationship on hold by mutual consent and life goes on.
EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE (Arbor House, 1982) is the fifth Scudder novel and at least twice as long as most of the previous four. At the time, Block seriously considered ending the series with this one. As he explained to interviewer Ernie Bulow, “Although each of the five books is a novel, complete in itself, it seemed to me as though they constituted one five-volume novel, and that had come to an end….†(78)
Scudder is hired by a top-tier call girl who wants to break with her pimp and start life over but is afraid he’ll retaliate by having her disfigured or killed and brings in Matt as her go-between. The pimp, a cultivated black Vietnam veteran known as Chance, who lives in a converted firehouse and has a connoisseur’s taste in coffee and African art, assures Scudder that the woman is free to leave him. The call girl takes Scudder to bed as a sort of bonus.
A few days later she’s found in a luxury hotel on Sixth Avenue in the Sixties, slashed to ribbons with a machete, her face hacked into “an unrecognizable mess.†A Hispanic clerk in the hotel, who may have recognized the slasher when he checked in, or perhaps was just an illegal immigrant fearing the law, mysteriously vanishes and is never found. Chance, the obvious prime suspect, swears he’s innocent and hires Scudder to clear him.
It’s one of Block’s most powerful springboard situations and, especially in view of the book’s length, one expects an equally powerful plot. Block doesn’t oblige us. Having just reduced plot to a bare minimum in A STAB IN THE DARK, this time he offers us even less. What he concentrates on is Scudder’s worsening problem with liquor, his interactions with various cops and lowlifes and the other women in Chance’s stable, one aspiring to be a poet, another to be an actress, a third flirting with suicide.
Block wants to paint a realistic picture of late-20th-century New York City, having Scudder read a parade of atrocity stories in the daily newspapers—stories that Block took from life. As he told Bulow, “Every day I would pick up a copy of the Daily News before I got on the subway,…and on the ride I would read about one outrage after another, and those would be the ones that I would specifically mention the next day. The city never failed me. It always supplied something for Scudder to read and remark about.†(89)
It’s small wonder if we empathize with the drunken rant of stressed-out cop Joe Durkin in Chapter Fourteen which gives the book its title:
“Bring back the chair and televise the fucking executions….We got the death penalty. Not for murderers. For ordinary citizens. Everybody out there runs a better chance of getting killed than a killer does of getting the chair. We get the death penalty five, six, seven times a day….You know what you got in this city, this fucked-up toilet of a naked fucking city?….You got eight million ways to die.â€
Any reader who imagines Block is thinking only of New York City is quickly corrected by what he told Bulow: “The faults that Scudder sees in the city, I think,…are universal these days. I think the whole country and the whole world is like that.†(55)
Scudder reads and is told about countless psycho-sadistic incidents, and eventually encounters one as a teen-age black mugger emerges from a Harlem alley and accosts him, clearly intending to both rob and kill him. In this entire long novel’s only brutal onstage sequence, Scudder smashes the kid’s face and breaks both his legs.
As we’ve seen, there have been similar mugging incidents in previous Scudders that were just as irrelevant to the plots of the books they appear in as this one is, but none were as deliberately sadistic as the one in EIGHT MILLION WAYS. It’s almost as if Block were trying to out-Spillane the Mick.
About two-thirds of the way through the book comes another slasher murder, the victim this time being a transsexual street whore hacked to death in a sleazy Queens sex-and-porn motel, a crime that at last returns us to the main thread of the plot. After a visit to the Parke Bernet art gallery Scudder channels Maigret, suddenly intuiting the truth without benefit of anything remotely resembling a clue. Then he sets himself up as the next target for the slasher, who appears for exactly three paragraphs and is quickly disposed of in a sequence that is something of a take-off of the shower scene from PSYCHO.
Didn’t this creep deserve a gruesomely painful end like his spiritual brother in the later Scudder novel A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, or at least something comparable to what the black mugger got earlier in EIGHT MILLION WAYS? The name of the person whose treachery ignited the whole mess is mentioned just a few times, and not only does he never appear onstage but at the novel’s end no one knows if he’s alive or dead.
Clearly the portrayal of the city was vital to Block in EIGHT MILLION WAYS, but at least equally important was the evolution in Scudder. Every so often he drops in at an AA meeting but, as Block told Bulow, “when it comes his turn to talk, he always says ‘My name’s Matt, I’ll pass.’â€
EIGHT MILLION WAYS ends differently. Eleven days sober and having come within an inch of returning to drink, he again attends an evening meeting at St. Paul’s church in his neighborhood. “I thought about…going back to my hotel….I’d been up two days and a night without a break. Some sleep would do me more good than a meeting I couldn’t pay attention to in the first place.â€
But he stays, and when it’s his turn to speak, “‘My name is Matt,’ I said, ‘and I’m an alcoholic.’†The final words of the book: “And the goddamndest thing happened. I started to cry.†For Block this scene is crucial. “Scudder comes to terms with his alcoholism and goes through catharsis there,†(78) he told Bulow . This explains why he seriously thought about abandoning his protagonist at this point. It’s the good fortune of millions of readers that he changed his mind.
The most important living writer of private-eye novels at the time EIGHT MILLION WAYS appeared was Ross Macdonald, who died a year later, in 1983. If some of the Lew Archer novels that propelled him to stardom were perhaps too densely plotted, EIGHT MILLION WAYS is clearly their polar opposite.
Could Block have been trying to create the most plotless PI novel possible? If so, he made it work. EIGHT MILLION WAYS is intensely engrossing from first page to last, and remains for Block himself and for a huge number of his countless readers one of the finest of the whole lengthy Scudder series.
The 1986 movie of the same name, starring Jeff Bridges and Rosanna Arquette, was the last feature directed by Hal Ashby (1929-1988), who had won a film editing Oscar for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) and had helmed such hits as HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) and COMING HOME (1978).
The script was co-written by the no less distinguished Oliver Stone. The big names didn’t help. LEONARD MALTIN’S MOVIE AND VIDEO GUIDE rightly calls the picture a bomb, with “only faint resemblance to Lawrence Block’s fine novel.†I won’t waste time or words summarizing its plot or detailing how it differs from the book. Masochists who wish to do so may consult Google.
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NOTE: All page numbers refer to Lawrence Block & Ernie Bulow’s book of conversations AFTER HOURS (University of New Mexico Press, 1995).