The Night and The Music
Read The Night and The Music Online
Authors: Lawrence Block
“When Lawrence Block is in his Matt Scudder mode, crime fiction can sidle up so close to literature that often there’s no degree of difference.”
~Philadelphia Inquirer
“One of the very best writers now working the beat. Block has done something new and remarkable with the private-eye novel.”
~Wall Street Journal
“Block’s prose is as smooth as aged whiskey.”
~Publishers Weekly
“One of the most complex and compelling heroes in modern fiction. Thrillers don’t get better than this.”
~San Diego Union-Tribune
“After twenty-five years in the business, Matt Scudder still strolls New York’s mean streets as if he had personally laid the cobblestones.”
~Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
“Matthew Scudder is the kind of mystery anti-hero who turns mere readers into series addicts.”
~Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Much more than a mystery. A book about men, about booze, about New York, by one of the surest, most distinctive voices in American fiction.”
~Martin Cruz Smith
“Scudder is an original and these pages ring with all the authenticity of a blast from a .38.”
~Anniston Star
“Blocks characters, the bar-flies and the cops, are as much flesh and blood as any mystery writer’s working today.”
~Greensboro News and Record
“Consistently tasty and surprising, full of smart, ringing dialogue and multiple textures. If you prefer true grit, Matt Scudder’s your man.”
~Seattle Times
“One of the most hackneyed phrases that reviewers can use is to compare a writer to Chandler or Hammett. Perhaps the time has come to change that benchmark to include Lawrence Block.”
~Book Page
“Block is a rarity, a craftsman who writes about the sleazier aspects of life with style, compassion and wit.”
~Denver Post
The Matthew Scudder Stories
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
The Night and The Music -
The Matthew Scudder Stories
Copyright © 2011
Lawrence Block.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be
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Visit the author’s websites:
http://www.lawrenceblock.com
http://lawrenceblock.wordpress.com/
Published by Telemachus Press, LLC
http://www.telemachuspress.com
ISBN: 978-1-937387-31-0 (eBook)
ISBN: 978-1-937387-07-2 (EPUB)
ISBN: 978-1-937387-32-7 (Paperback)
Version 2011.09.21
an appreciation by Brian Koppelman
Right around the
time I turned fourteen, in 1980, I convinced my parents to let me take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan by myself, so I could go to the Mysterious Bookshop on West 56th Street. And it was there, in Otto Penzler’s place between Sixth and Seventh avenues, that I first met Matt Scudder.
Mysterious was an intimidating place, especially for a bookshop. There was a step down entrance, and a heavy door that swung shut behind you. Once inside, it was dead quiet: no elevator music playing. No friendly info desk. No other customers either. Just a silent bearded guy behind the front counter who had an uncanny (and slightly disturbing) resemblance to Stephen King’s 1970s author photo. I’m telling you, for a place designed to sell books, it was pretty damned intense.
I was mostly reading spy books back then. But on the day I took my maiden solo voyage on the LIRR Port Washington line, I was looking for something else. I just didn’t know what, exactly. Which was a bummer because that meant I was going to have to talk to spooky Stephen King behind the counter, and he was reading and seemed very involved in his book and not at all in the mood to be disturbed by some teenager from Nassau County.
So I just kind of stood around aimlessly until his eyes hovered for a moment above his book. And then I gutted up and asked him for a recommendation.
“What do you like?” he asked.
I mumbled something along the lines of “A bunch of stuff. ”
“You into funny books?”
“Not really,” I said, "I guess I like when it feels like it’s really happening.”
“Oh,” he said, “You might be ready for something hard boiled.”
Hard Boiled. I had never heard the phrase before. But it sounded just right. Especially if it was something I had to "be ready" for.
“Yes,” I said, “give me something hard boiled.”
And he reached up behind the counter and grabbed three books.
“This is what you need,” he said. And he held out the books—
The Sins Of The Fathers, Time To Murder and Create
and
In The Midst Of Death.
“They’re by Lawrence Block.”
I paid for them, headed back to Penn Station, caught the next train, found a seat and started reading
Sins
before the train had even begun to roll.
Fifty-five minutes later, I almost missed my stop.
My mom picked
me up from the station, but I don’t think I said two words to her on the drive home; I just kept reading. And I remember walking in our front door, nodding to my sisters and continuing on to my bedroom reading the entire way.
Fake Stephen King had gotten it right. Matt Scudder was, indeed, exactly what I needed.
I blasted through all three books. I’m not sure how I was able to lock into Scudder so hard when our life experience was so far apart—I had never had a drink, had never killed anyone, either on purpose or by accident, had barely kissed a girl—but somehow he made sense to me.
Maybe it’s because there was nothing phony about Matt Scudder. When Matt wanted to drink, he drank. When he wanted to fight, he fought. And if he didn’t want to talk to you, he didn’t. Hell, even if you were his client, he wouldn’t try and charm you, wouldn’t promise to solve your case, wouldn’t even promise to tell you what he was doing to try and solve it.
Scudder was no innocent. He knew the world was essentially crooked. But that didn’t mean he had to bend to it. He might pay off a cop for information, but he wouldn’t lie to himself about what it meant, and the ultimate price he might have to pay for doing so.
To a teenager like me, just beginning to learn all the ways in which the world presses you to compromise the best of yourself, just starting to figure out that most grown-ups were liars, Matt Scudder’s refusal to play along with anyone else’s bullshit spoke directly to me. And Scudder was such a flawed, broken hero. All the spies I had been reading about were almost superhuman. Scudder was barely hanging on to whatever was left of his humanity, his skills, his character. He knew it. Told the reader about it. And I loved him for it.
I still love him for it. Some time after finishing
In The Midst Of Death,
I resolved to read every book ever written about Scudder. Unlike almost every other promise I made to myself in my teens, this one I’ve kept. Luckily for me, the books have only gotten better. At some point, consciously or not, Larry Block made a decision to fuse big giant chunks of himself with his character. And so Matt Scudder has aged, has quit drinking, has quit whoring, has quit...has quit almost everything, only to be lured back in again when something makes him angry or invested enough to care. And so I continue to care, even as my visits to the (now downtown) Mysterious Bookshop have become far less frequent, even as my time spent reading fiction has become far less frequent, even as my fourteen-year old self seems further and further away from who I am now.
I have a fifteen year old son. And two weeks back he took his first solo train voyage. This one to Washington DC. He needed a book for the journey. So I walked him over to the bookshelf, pulled down
The Sins Of The Fathers
and told him, “This is what you need.” He smiled. But not half as much as I did.
The last story
in this collection is about Matt and Mick Ballou. Over the past twenty years, their friendship has become the soul of the series and means more to me than any other friendship in fiction. It is the one nod to the romantic that Lawrence Block is willing to give us in the Matt Scudder books. The one nod to possibility, to hope, to brotherhood, acceptance, honor and truth between people. But mostly, there is forgiveness. The very act of those two men sitting across from one another late into the night is forgiveness. The talking, sometimes laughing, sometimes just sitting quietly until the morning light starts leaking in through Grogan’s windows, means that there is a safe harbor for each of us, where no one sits in judgment, where no one condemns, where we can be exactly who we are, ruined, sinful, wracked. They are flawed, Matt and Mick, but they are perfect. And when we spend time with them, we believe we are too.
