The Next-to-Last Page: November 2021

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With one troubling footnote, this is the strongest novel in the series so far. It’s stronger even than the first, and that’s saying something.

The central mystery here is compelling: a prostitute hires Scudder to help her get away from her pimp, Chance. He agrees, expecting a showdown, but the pimp is fine with it. He thinks of himself as treating his “girls” well, and he figures he’ll simply find new ones if they leave. A day later, when the Kim is murdered, everyone assumes it’s Chance. In part to clear his name, but ultimately for reasons he himself can’t figure, Chance hires Scudder to solve the murder.

For most of the novel, it’s crickets. Scudder interviews anyone with even a tangential relation to Kim, and he seems to turn up nothing. In place of the routine, non-player-character-spilling-the-clues approach of even some of the earlier Scudder novels, though, we get to see Scudder here as someone who understands how to interview. Amplifying a theme of the first novel, Block has Scudder pushing characters for their impressions. He’s building a narrative as much as collecting clues. He’ll ask something like, ‘what kind of job do you think such a man would have,’ or ‘what kind of shoes might he wear?’ He knows he won’t get definitive answers, but he also knows he can get more than a particular source might be inclined to give.

We also get some interesting back-and-forth with the cops, with a jaded one in particular. Joe Durkin is the cop Scudder almost remained, a guy who drinks a little too much and who’s a pretty good but over-extended detective. He looks like someone who will come back in future novels rather than one of the disposable cops in earlier novels who were willing to do Scudder a favor for old-time’s sake. Durkin wants Scudder back on the force. Scudder, seeming really to enjoy his company, wants his help as he gets closer to solving the case.

But the real power here, power that makes this work of genre knock on the door of full-blown literature, comes in the way Scudder deals with his alcoholism. The book before this, A Stab in the Dark, showed Scudder that he couldn’t handle his booze as well as he thought. Here, he’s begun to accept that he needs to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, but he enters that world the way he entered churches. He’s in, but not of the meetings. “I’m Matt. I’ll pass,” he says every time, refusing to accept the grace he cannot convince himself he deserves.

It’s not a straight line either. He makes it eight days sober, then he stumbles. He starts again, and he wrestles with it. At a narrative level, it’s a brilliant device. He’ll go through a dramatic moment – discover a dead body, avoid a hit or make a connection that had eluded him – and, when the adrenaline ebbs, he’ll have to fight off the need for a drink. The scenes of him almost giving in (set against the scenes where he does) have an emotional power that contrasts with the different energy of the procedural.

More than narrative effectiveness, though, this works as genuine character building. Like any Chandleresque detective, Scudder has always held back from us readers. We glimpse his vulnerability, but he pulls it back whenever it’s about to spill out. He’s in love here, sort of, with the ex-lesbian sculptor Jan from the last novel, but it’s as much a fellow-recovering-alcoholic partnership as a romantic one. They’re two wounded people trying to help each other, and Jan – 90 days sober to his eight – is the stronger and abler one.

All that culminates [SPOILER:] when Scudder ends the novel, having solved the crime, and finds he’s still aching for a drink. He’s done the seemingly impossible – he’s tugged on a handful of seemingly insignificant clues (a missing ring, a murdered transsexual’s estranged brother) and revealed that a vicious Colombian gang murdered Kim as a message to her emerald-smuggling boyfriend) – but it’s not enough. He still wants to get drunk. And, in a sequence of powerful scenes, he buys a drink, comes close to drinking it, and walks out. Then, at an AA meeting, dizzy from the effort, he stands up and declares, “My name is Matt. I’m an alcoholic.” With that, he bursts into tears, and the novel ends.

Look, I know that there are literary novelists who get at similar moments of inspiration more subtly, but this one works. We know this man, and we know what it costs him. And we seem to know how it relieves him, too.

So, as I said of the first in the series, this seems to be as good as genre-series noir gets, up there with Walter Mosley once he hit his stride with the third of his Easy Rawlins novels. That said, Block seems to exacerbate a peculiar blind spot around prostitution and its human cost. I’m not going to get preachy about his bringing in all sorts of prostitute characters. That’s part of Scudder’s turf, the underbelly of 1980s excess, but he seems to see it all in a bottom-line morality. Chance the pimp isn’t such a bad guy because he does treat the “girls” well. He takes their money and makes them dependent on him, but he lets them continue to express themselves. They sleep with guys all the time – Kim even “tips” Scudder with a nice roll in the hay even as she is off to see her still-secret boyfriend and hoped-for husband – and it never takes a toll. One, a would-be writer, does it as much for research as for the money.

I don’t mind the material – you sign on for that when you pick up noir – but I mind the way Block so casually treats this sex work as demeaning with being dehumanizing. It just feels as if he’s missing the opportunity for extending his impressive sympathy to the women caught in that situation.

That blind spot aside, this one really is terrific. I think I’m on for at least one more right away, and possibly more.

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