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The private eye with a taste for bourbon is a cliché sans pareil within American crime fiction but until Lawrence Block created Matt Scudder, it appeared that alcohol had no discernible effect on the human body. In my black and white memories of American crime movies, the hero could knock back spirits to a band playing and still punch out the bad guys and still cop off with the classy broad just before the final credits rolled. And when I started reading US crime fiction the story was much the same. I happened on Robert Parker's Spenser novels - by God could this guy Spenser drink! And yet, despite this, there was never any suggestion that this private eye as superman might just have a wee bit of a problem with the old bevvy. Now, Matt Scudder was a very different proposition. The first five novels, published between 1976 and 1983, chart Matt's drinking career as it develops into a very serious secondary occupation. Ex-cop Matt, working as an ad-hoc private eye, tends to weave down those mean streets. Haunted by too many ghosts, Matt slips into a pathological pattern of drinking and denial, assuaging his multi-faceted guilt by titheing his income to churches and lighting votive candles for the dead.
A Stab in the Dark, published in 1982, finds Matt mixing his bourbon with copious draughts of self delusion: Talking to Lawrence Block is easy. He's a friendly open guy who wears his many awards from fellow professionals lightly. In talking it's like he's speaking on Matt's behalf, as if Matt's busy just now and can't come to the 'phone. As it happens, I am phoning Block. I'm in Scotland, he's in London, on vacation with his wife. He doesn't have to be this nice but he is. Block's on a private visit, more or less. He's just spent a week at a writers' festival in Co. Kerry. God love the Irish, what a great idea. A week of US crime fiction. I suggest to him that Eight was the pivotal novel in the Scudder series. Matt's subsequent outings have seen him with the same problems and demons but now faced without the treacherous aid of the bottle. Block agrees, sort of... "I guess that's the way it turned out. I originally planned to finish with Matt after I'd finished that novel. The idea was for Matt to stop drinking and then that would be it." Block changed his mind: "I realized that I was interested to see how Matt would develop as a character after he stopped drinking, how he would cope. I still don't have a long term view of Matt. I find that I write intuitively in any case". The latest Matt, Even the Wicked, is published in the UK this September and Block reckons that he has one more Matt novel planned, and then after that? He's not sure. I've a feeling he's been here before with Matt. In one respect at least Block and Scudder have something in common. Block has no long term game plan in mind for Matt and the character has no great strategy for getting through life: "Matt doesn't have a fully delineated moral code, he more or less makes it up as he goes along". With crime fiction especially flavoursome in Hollywood at the moment we turn to discussing previous movie adaptations of Block's work. Like I said, a friendly, open guy. Also a tactful guy.
Eight was made into a movie in 1986. It was, dear reader, mince, pure mince. There was a character named Matt Scudder, the movie had the same name as the book, but after that? And then there was Burglar based very loosely on another one of Block's serial creations, And so to park benches. In the books, Matt's been known to rest his weary butt on a bench to think through a difficult case, especially after he stopped drinking and started staying out of saloons. Near where Block lives in New York there's Bryant Park. The local community are slowly winning the park back from the muggers, raising money to reinstate a little bit of green peace. Block was asked to sponsor a park bench. "I thought that a bench with my name on it would be a little, well, you know... So its Matt's name on the plaque. But I get to sit on the bench, it's a privilege thing." (Even the Wicked is published by Orion in September) LB Site contents copyright
2006 Lawrence Block
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