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.”

   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.”

   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.

   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….”

   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.

   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.”

   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:

   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.’”

   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.”

   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.

      —

NOTE: All page numbers refer to Lawrence Block & Ernie Bulow’s book of conversations AFTER HOURS (University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

BRETT McKINLEY – Just Plain Scum. Cleveland Publishing Co., Australia, digest-sized paperback original, no date stated.

   Okay, I just couldn’t resist a title like that. Even on a saddle stitched booklet of fewer than a hundred pages wrapped in an indifferent cover. Ultimately, I had to read it, and…

   Well for what it is, Just Plan Scum ain’t bad. It ain’t good, mind you, but it recalled to me the Doc Savage books I enjoyed in Junior High, with characters as colorful and flat as the pages in a comic book, and a fast-moving, unlikely story told in plain, functional prose.

   Scum starts well, with

   I like that. It promises imminent action and a bit of humor, and it could go anywhere from there.

   Where it goes is to a band of free-booting veterans of the Civil War—Yanks and Rebs alike — known as The Company, guided by the loose but firm reins of Johnny Lee, a pulp hero in the best tradition: invincible, right-minded and colorfully costumed. He’s also surrounded by a few faithful lieutenants, each with a special trait that recalls the myrmidons of Doc Savage or the Shadow.

   The story that follows serves them well: raiding Apaches, lovely women, brave soldiers, a double-dealing Officer, and action action action action. It left a cloying aftertaste, and the vague suspicion that too much of this would give me brain decay, but that was quickly rinsed by reading a real book.

   And as I put Just Plain Scum on the shelf somewhere between Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and Hud, it was with a sense of deep down pleasure that my library is big enough for all three.

R. DJÈLÍ CLARK “A Dead Djinn in Cairo.” Novella. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi #1. First published online by Tor.com. Also available in Kindle format, May 2016.

   In an alternate history version of Egypt, circa 1912, Fatma el-Sha’arawi, a special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities has a problem to solve: who, or what, killed the djinn, twice as tall as a human with aquamarine scales, whom the authorities have found lifeless and drained of blood in his apartment.

   The first thought is that he has been killed by the ghuls that have been infesting the city, but if that were the case, they would never have left his body behind. A closer look suggests that he committed suicide, but since djinns are nearly immortal, the question as to why has no answer.

   Fatima’s world is now a strange steampunk conglomerate of exotic Cairo and demons from another plane of existence. It seems that forty years ago, a mystic by the name of al-Jahiz bore a hole to the Kaf, another-realm of magic, allowing not only the djinns and ghuls to cross over, but angels (of some variety) as well, perhaps better described by the following paragraph:

   There are flying machines, mechanical beings, and a clockwork threat to Fatima’s entire world, but with a kickass female priestess’s assistant named Siti, worldwide catastrophe is narrowly averted at nearly the last instant.

   I apologize for giving the ending away, in a very general sense, but it’s the telling that’s the more important here. This is a world of enchantment that Fatima lives in, one that is fascinating to visit but you really wouldn’t want to visit there:

   There is a definition of the word “enchantment” that describes what’s happening here, isn’t there?

JAMES MITCHELL – Smear Job. David Callan #4. G. P. Putnams Sons, hardcover, 1977. Berkley, US, paperback, 1978. Previously published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, hardcover, 1975. Corgi, UK, paperback, 1977. Ostara Publishing, UK, softcover, 2016. Note: Although there were only four books in the series, they were the basis for four British TV series starring Edward Woodward between 1967 and 1972, plus a film in 1974 and a TV movie in 1981.

   No matter how reluctantly he serves, Callan is British Intelligence’s most effective agen, but not even he can see the connection between the paperback edition of Das Kapital he is ordered to steal in Italy and a German girl strung out on LSD and sex in Ls Vegas.

   The answer is an inverted sort of public relations ploy, one that’s expected to be very useful in making an official in another country’s government see things a little differently.

   While all the details tend to make the suspense grow but slowly, a sub-plot involving a poeer-hungry US congressman and his partly alienated daughter does much to liven things up. Equally involved are the manipulations of individuals and governments that can’t help but leave behind the usual sour taste required by this sort of spy fiction.

   Foxes and Fossils is a group brand new to me, but their version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is one I’ve already listened to several times over:

   The highlight of my recent reading has been Way of the Lancer (Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1932) by Richard Boleslavsky and Helen Woodward, an autobiographical novel of Boleslavsky’s experiences (and, I suspect, those of man others that he incorporated and told as his own) for — and against — Russia in the first World War.

   It’s an intriguing account, Boleslavsky was not a Russian but a Pole; his nation had been dominated by Russia since about 1750, and when the Great War got serious, Russia promised Freedom to Poland if her sons would fight for Russia. Austria promised roughly the same thing, so regiments of Poles fought for both sides, against enemies who were often their brothers.

   Boleslavsky describes an interesting vignette off weary, “victorious” Poles escorting even wearier defeated Austrians to POW camps and finding relatives in their midst, tiredly catching up on the news as they slog through the mud to no place in particular.

   Boleslavsky, incidentally, was a Polish soldier, but not a Lancer. He passed the war as a film-make, attached to the Lancers, doing semi-documentary propaganda films. After the War, he gravitated to Hollywood, where he directed some truly remarkable movies, like The Garden of Allah, with Dietrich and Boyer, and the cynical, moving 1936 version of Three Godfathers, and others.

   His Hollywood debut was Rasputin and the Empress (a portrait of the breakdown of Imperial Russia that must have seemed very real to him), the only film to star all three Barrymores. It’s an interesting show, but not a great one. John seems ticked off that he didn’t get to play Rasputin, and sulks through the whole movie with marked disinterest until the scene where he gets to kill Lionel, which is really quite memorable.

   Boleslavsky also directed one of the two Three Stooges movies you should make an effort to see: Fugitive Lovers (MGM, 1933), a dandy little thing about Robert Montgomery as an Escaped Con being pursued with cold precision by C. Henry Gordon, catching a bus with aspiring chorus girl Madge Evans, who is herself being pursued by dumb, possessive, aspiring gangster Nat Pendleton. Also onn board are Ted Healy and his stooges,whose time onscreen is mercifully brief.

   Boleslavsky fills the film with sudden cuts and jarring camera angles that seem avant-garde even today, and make Citizen Kane look antiquated before its time. And he maintains the pace and drama quite nicely throughout, right up to a howling blizzard that had my teeth chattering despite the fact that it was done entirely inside a studio. You should look for this one.

PAUL BISHOP “Bandit Territory.” PI Blue MacKenzie. Novelette. First published in Paul Bishop Presents… Bandit Territory: Ten Tales of Murder & Mayhem, edited by Paul Bishop (Wolfpack Publishing, paperback, 2019).

   What I cannot tell you, first of all, is whether or not this is Blue MacKenzie’s first appearance in print, or if it so happens that it is, whether there are or will be future cases for him to tackle.

   Blue may be the first fictional PI to also be a bodybuilder, as well as a Vietnam veteran and a former CIA agent. Now at a formidable 275 pounds of pure muscle, he certainly isn’t the kind of guy I’d care to have been hired to track me down.

   In “Bandit Territory,” the lead story in the anthology edited by Bishop with the same name, he’s been hired by a music producer to find his number one client, a singer by the name of Charity Ross. Her latest CD is almost ready to released, but she’s disappeared and is now completely out of sight.

   The trail leads Blue to a defunct bodybuilding outfit being investigated for fraud by the FDA. While the connection is not clear, the owner has disappeared the same night as Charity. No coincidence that.

   Paul Bishop, the author and a 25 year veteran of the LAPD, has also written a number of full length crime novels, and his smooth, easy style of telling a tale, even short ones, goes down well, with an every so often knack of coming up with an especially pungent observation or clever choice of phrasing. If there are other stories about Blue MacKenzie, I’d definitely like to know about them.

WAGON WHEELS. Paramount Pictures, 1934. Randolph Scott, Gail Patrick, Billy Lee, Monte Blue, Raymond Hatton, Jan Dugganq, Leila Bennett, Olin Howland Based on the novel Fighting Caravans by Zane Grey, serialized in Country Gentleman between November 1928 and March 1929. Director: Charles Barton.

   This is a remake of the 1931 film Fighting Caravans starring Gary Cooper, with stock footage taken from the earlier film, or so I’m told. And at a running time of less than 60 minutes, some of it is taken up by the time it takes to sing several songs, “Wagon Wheels” being one of them, there’s not much space left to tell a story.

   Which is that of a wagon train of settlers heading for Oregon Territory to begin new lives, if they can make it. Indians, snow-covered mountain, wide rivers and more all lie ahead of them, complicated by the nefarious plot against them by a fur dealer who would like to delay the settling of the new land for several more years.

   Randolph Scott is the head scout for the party, while Gail Patrick is the love interest, a widow with a small boy (five year old Billy Lee, who in several ways nearly steals the show). Scott repeatedly tries to warn her off from going, but she manages to thwart all his efforts to do so.

   There’s not much more to this movie than this, but Randolph Scott was Randolph Scott, even some 85 years ago at the age of 36.

MIKE LUPICA – Jump. DiMaggio #1, Villard, hardcover, 1995. Kensington, paperback, 1996. Pinnacle, paperback, 2002.

   I like Lupica’s crime novels, and his sportswriting as well. He’s not bad on ESPN, either. He’s written three novels inn the [investigative TV journalist] Peter Finley series, and this has the feel of a series as well.

   DiMaggio has an illustrious last bane (if he has a first nae I missed it) and had a much less lustrous career in baseball than his namesake. now he’s a lawyer, and specializes in investigations involving sports figures — at which trade he’s de Man.

   He’s got a dandy coming up. The young, black successor to Michael Jordan has just been accused, along wth a white teammate, of raping a white woman. The accuser waited a year to come forward, and the team’s owners want Dimaggio to find out the truth, preferably that she’s lying.

   As he starts sorting through everyone’s dirty laundry, he finds that no one is clean and pure, and that to some there are secrets worth killing for.

   Lupica is a smooth, facile writer. A pro. He has the good sense to write what he knows, sports, and his knowledge and insight deepen the book considerably. The story is told from multiple viewpoints — DiMaggio, the accused, the accuser, a sleazy tabloid journalist — and told very effectively.

   The book paints a telling portrait of big-time athletics and athletes, and is far from one-sided in its depictions. It’s an easy read but a good one, and I hope he does more DiMaggios.

Editorial Update:   It is not easy to say for sure, but I do not believe that Mike Lupica wrote another DiMaggio novel. He’s written several dozen books, almost all involving sports, including a series of YA mysteries, but Jump appears to have been a one-and-done for DiMaggio as a series character.

   The first post on this blog was 13 years ago today. That seems like a long time ago, and yet it seems like yesterday.

   Here’s the link: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=6

   Since WordPress itself has changed over the years, I decided to do some very minor re-formatting, otherwise all is the same as it was 13 years ago.

   Since than there have been 7,281 posts, 39,704 comments approved, and 8,956,901 spam comments foiled.

   Thanks to all who’ve stopped by, left comments, and even many of you who have contributed. I couldn’t have done this without you!