LAWRENCE BLOCK “By the Dawn’s Early Light.” Matt Scudder. First published in Playboy Magazine, August 1984, Collected and reprinted many times. Winner of the Shamus Award for Best Short Story.

   Matt Scudder, of course, does not legally have a license to work as a private eye, or at least he doesn’t at the time this story takes place. That doesn’t stop him from taking cases such as the one in this story that PI’s always take on, with or without the proper credentials. This time around he agrees to help out a casual drinking buddy who’s being accused of hiring a couple of guys to kill his wife.

   As it turns out – and this is important – Scudder knows the fellow’s girl friend even more than he does the drinking buddy. What he’s hired to do — not having all of the resources the police do – is to ask around and see what people on the street know about, first of all, his client, but more importantly, the two guys who got caught and are now implicating the client. They never did the killing.

   Or so they say.

   This may sound way too complicated for a simple short story, and maybe it is, but Lawrence Block could write a story with a lot more going on, ten times as much, and he’s such a smooth talker (well, writer) you’d go along with it all in a heartbeat.

   And yet, I said complicated, and I meant it. Even while reading it and the 21 pages of the story are vanishing more and more quickly, and I’m thinking, he could have made a novel out of this. The structure? Exactly the same.

   There’s a hint of darkness in the ending, too. Maybe Playboy didn’t get too excited about it, but the story’s a lot tougher than what Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine was publishing at the time. Face it, though. Lawrence Block is a writer’s writer, and he always has been. This one’s a winner.