One Last Round for April

What I’m Reading

The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder, by Lawrence Block (2023). I’m faced with a tricky proposition in recommending this book, which I am absolutely doing. For one thing, it doesn’t come out until June 24, which also happens to be the author’s eighty-fifth birthday. (Preorders, as always, are welcome.) For another, I’m urging it on a very specific audience, namely people who have already made Matt Scudder’s acquaintance—and have ideally read most if not all of the books and short stories in which the character appears. Luckily, I fit both bills.

Scudder first appeared in The Sins of the Fathers (1976), and the alcoholic ex-NYPD cop turned quasi-private eye has walked the streets of the Big Apple ever since, aging in something close to real time. Larry Block, meanwhile, has embraced the changes in the publishing business to release adventurous books like Dead Girl Blues (2020), among the darkest work of his career (and is that saying something), and last year’s The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, in which he addresses the many challenges facing his long-running character Bernie Rhodenbarr by saying, “Fuck it, PARALLEL UNIVERSE!”

This latest book is even more inventive, in that it is exactly what the title promises: a fictional character telling you his life story, or at least all the bits that Block chose not to include elsewhere. Scudder purports to be a real person in these pages, one whose exploits have been turned into fiction by a novelist—and Scudder isn’t entirely happy with some of the changes that scribe has wrought. (We even hear from Block occasionally if indirectly in his instructions to his subject.) It’s evident from his handling of this meta approach that Block hasn’t lost much speed off his fastball. But for devoted readers (like me), there’s an element of pure wish fulfillment at play. The book is essentially a chance to tug the sleeve of a character we’ve gotten to know quite well and offer to buy him another cup of coffee before he heads out, to hear an additional story or two and ask questions long wondered about. It’s an impressive trick that requires decades of work on the part of both writer and reader to carry off. You need to know Matt Scudder in order to appreciate this book, and if you know Matt Scudder you’ve already ordered it.

What I’m Watching

No Bears (2022). The Criterion Channel is the exclusive streaming home for this remarkable film, which is yet another reason to sign up for the service. (Who else would bring you, in the same month, this movie and a lineup of erotic thrillers including 1994’s Dream Lover, featured in my survey of Hitchcock movies not directed by Alfred Hitchcock?) Jafar Panahi plays himself, an Iranian filmmaker barred from leaving his homeland because of his political beliefs. Undaunted, he journeys to the Turkish border so he can direct a docudrama remotely. As that project takes unexpected and disturbing turns, Panahi finds his presence—and his images—drawn into village life in ways that illuminate his own standing in Iran. A powerful work of art. (And on the day that I’m composing this come reports that Panahi has been allowed to leave Iran for the first time in fourteen years.)

What I’m Drinking

Time to sing the praises of another book at which I got a sneak peek. Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir, available May 23, is a gorgeous volume, and I’d say that even if my name didn’t appear in it several times. Eddie—my friend, colleague, Turner Classic Movies host, founder of the Film Noir Foundation, and imbiber extraordinaire—spotlights fifty cocktails, some classic, some original, each one linked to a classic film noir. It’s written with Eddie’s usual erudition and verve and it’s beautifully laid out, making it a cocktail book you can actually read from cover to cover. I christened it with one of Eddie’s creations, the Sailor Beware, crafted to commemorate Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948). As Eddie writes: “I felt it needed to be done in the true Wellesian spirit: something brash and startling, using ingredients rarely if ever combined, assembled in a totally unexpected way—and then I’d walk away before I finished making it.” (Time now for a gratuitous reminder that Orson is a recurring character in the novels of Renee Patrick.)

Sailor Beware

1 ¼ oz. Irish whiskey
¾ oz. brandy
½ oz. green chartreuse
½ oz. Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
absinthe rinse
lemon peel twist

Stir the first four ingredients, then let them rest in the mixing glass. Rinse a Nick and Nora glass with absinthe. Strain. Express the oil from a lemon peel over the surface, rub the peel on the rim of the glass, then place in the drink.

It’s a fine concoction. Raise one in honor of the Czar of Noir, who has not only joined the exalted ranks of Cecil B. DeMille, Tyler Perry, and Guy Ritchie in getting his name in the title with this book, but who will also be receiving a Raven award from the Mystery Writers of America tonight in recognition of his film preservation work.

Book: The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, by Lawrence Block (2013)

There’s any number of slightly unusual things about the latest novel from Lawrence Block. Take this review, for starters, which is running well in advance of the book’s Christmas Day release. One wants to do one’s bit to beat the drum.

Then there’s the fact that Block, the prolific Mystery Writers of America grand master who nonetheless has in the past stooped to answering questions for lesser websites, is publishing the book himself, with the eBook sold exclusively through Amazon. A forward-thinking type, Block.

But the oddities continue on the book’s pages – er, screens – you know what I mean. Bernie Rhodenbarr is still a gentleman thief and connoisseur of locks (“The Poulard is the one they advertise as pickproof. Well, most of the time it probably is.”), and he remains as tight as ever with his lesbian lifemate Carolyn Kaiser. Only Bernie is now more a contented small businessman, trying to make a go of his used bookstore and only pilfering on consignment; in this case, a grab bag of historical curiosities that obsess a collector including one of the titular spoons. A murder occurs, of course, but this time Bernie is scarcely suspected by longtime nemesis Ray Kirschmann of the NYPD. Instead, Ray brings in Bernie as an unofficial consultant of sorts, seeking a burglar’s eye view of the crime. Could our man possibly be abandoning his larcenous legacy and ambling toward the straight and narrow after all these years?

The plot is Block’s typical well-oiled machine, the mechanism functioning so smoothly that it permits you to enjoy the book’s many incidental pleasures. In fact, Spoons is almost more comedy of manners than caper, with Bernie and Carolyn discoursing on assorted conundrums like how one meets prospective partners in this day and age; how one, ahem, passes the time with them once met; and the social intricacies of ordering Chinese food in Manhattan. There’s also fun to be had at the meta level, with Bernie offering sly critiques of crime fiction by Block’s contemporaries and struggling with the niceties of selling physical books in the e-reader era.

A breezy confection all in all, exactly the sort of thing you’ll want to read come the Yule in whatever format you fancy.

Q&A: Lawrence Block

Truth be told, I didn’t think the man was serious. And yet here we are.

When Lawrence Block turned up on Twitter I began following him at once. But then I’ve been following him for years, ever since I picked up Eight Million Ways to Die when I was in high school and read it twice in one summer. That book served as my gateway to crime fiction, and I’ve never looked back. I read every other book Block wrote about Matt Scudder, the recovering alcoholic ex-NYPD detective turned occasionally licensed private eye. Not to mention the ones about genial thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, and the professional killer Keller, and many more, some published under other names. He picks up one of those names anew with Getting Off, which I reviewed last week.

On Twitter, he said he was looking for opportunities to guest post. I responded at once. As I said, I didn’t think the man was serious. And yet here we are, with another VKDCQ&A. The world is a mysterious place.

Q. What can you tell us about Getting Off?

That I can’t recall ever having more fun writing anything. I fell utterly in love with my lead character, and enjoyed every minute I spent with her. That doesn’t always happen.

Q. You’re returning to the Jill Emerson pseudonym after several decades. What made this a Jill Emerson book, as opposed to an Andrew Shaw or a Sheldon Lord? Are these alter egos at all like characters? To put it another way, do you know what Jill has been doing these last few years? Teaching at a small liberal arts college in New England, perhaps?

Andrew Shaw and Sheldon Lord were just pen names. Jill Emerson was something beyond that, though it would be hard saying just what. Add in the fact that I liked – and indeed still like – all seven of the Jill Emerson books.

I wanted an open pen name for the book for the same reason I wanted the “A Novel of Sex & Violence” subtitle: so that no one would pick up the book by mistake, hoping for something fluffy about a charming burglar and his stubtailed cat. This is not to denigrate the Burglar books or their readers, and indeed I’m sure there’ll be plenty of overlap. But I got email calling me to account for the erotic content of Small Town, by people who felt they’d been ambushed, and I didn't want that to happen again. I want to sell books, but only to people who are likely to enjoy them.

Still, I could have managed that without a pen name. So I think what it comes down to is I just plain wanted to be Jill again. Go figure.

And it’s given me the opportunity to have dialogues with Jill, which I then get to post on Jill’s page of my blogsite.

Q. Getting Off is subtitled “A Novel of Sex & Violence.” And brother – or sister, as the case may be – that ain’t the half of it. In your experience, are readers more comfortable with violence than sex? How has writing about sex changed since Jill debuted with her lesbian novels? Who in your opinion writes about sex particularly well?

Some don’t mind sex, some don’t mind violence, and I have to hope there are some who can stand a healthy helping of both. The sex was very discreet in the first two Jill Emerson novels. It got a little more intense later on. I think the big change in erotic realism, if you will, happened in the late ‘60s, when a lot of mainstream novelists began writing far more candidly about sex. That was around the same time Jill published her middle three books with Berkley.

I don’t read enough these days to say who writes well about sex. Sixty or more years ago, without running into censorship problems, John O’Hara was writing scenes I found intensely erotic. He did it almost entirely via dialogue. You want a master class in the subject, that's where to go.

Q. Getting Off closes out what’s been a remarkably busy 2011 for you. Earlier this year you published A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the latest Matt Scudder novel, set in the early days of Scudder’s sobriety. You’ve written elsewhere about the challenges of revisiting the New York of the 1980s. But what about your own work? How much research did you have to do into what you’d already written about Scudder?

None that I can recall. I was writing about an unrecorded period in his life, so that gave me a lot of leeway.

Q. Your short story “See The Woman” appeared in the companion anthology to the videogame L.A. Noire. Did you see the game before you wrote the story? What kind of experience did you have with video games in general? Care to share any high scores? You’ve been an early adopter of many publishing advances – audiobooks, e-books. What do you think videogames have to contribute to storytelling?

No, I didn’t see the game, or even bother reading the descriptions. I just wanted to write a story that would work, and one that was right for the period. As for video games in general, I’ve had zero experience with them – unless you count a video matching game that I use as a form of time-passer to punctuate stretches at the computer. That is to L.A. Noire and Grand Theft Auto what simple solitaire is to tournament-level Duplicate Bridge.

Q. Perhaps your most impressive writing this year has been in your embrace of Twitter and blogging. What have you learned in your Year of Social Networking?

That the entire landscape of publishing has already changed beyond recognition, and that only an idiot would hazard a guess as to what the future holds. And it’s not just publishing and its world. That’s just the part of change that’s most evident to me. All changed, changed utterly – and it ain’t done yet, either.

Cocktail Q. In Getting Off, Kit Tolliver changes her cocktail of choice as quickly as she changes identities. Do the drinks tell us something about her persona of the moment? What can you infer about a person from what their poison is?

Good question, but I’m not sure I know the answer. Back in my drinking days I recall we attached significance to that sort of thing, but I don't know that it was warranted. You might even warm to someone because he smoked the same brand of cigarette. Does seem silly in retrospect, but then I’m talking from the standpoint of someone who hasn't drunk or smoked in a good many years, so what do I know?

I recently wrote something that called for the name of a trendy cocktail, and had no idea what’s new in that realm. So I Googled “trendy cocktails” and a couple of candidates presented themselves. (What did we do before Google?) Later I realized I should have done what Raymond Chandler did in respect to slang. He made it up so he wouldn't have to worry that it would be dated.

Movie Q. What movie best captures Hard Stuff-era New York?

Two Sidney Lumet films come to mind right away, Prince of the City and Q&A.

Baseball Q. There’s only one question I can ask an inveterate New Yorker like yourself, and I hope you don’t take Hillary Clinton’s politic way out. Mets or Yankees?

I don’t know that Hilary was being politic; my guess is she doesn't pay any attention to baseball. I pay more some years than others, and in either league I’m a New York loyalist, but my dad was a Yankees fan all his life, and so, albeit in a lackadaisical way, am I.