Book Review

By Derryll White

Block, Lawrence (1982). Eight Million Ways To Die.

This is a Matthew Scudder mystery, fifth in the series. Scudder is an alcoholic New York ex-cop turned unlicensed private investigator.

It is interesting how Block builds the Scudder character. The reader soon knows more about alcoholism and how Alcoholics Anonymous works than was probably ever wanted.  But the intense story does quickly embed Matthew Scudder in the reader’s mind as a tortured soul trying to do some good. It has a ring of truth and Block is quoted as saying: “I let him hang out in the same saloon where I spent a great deal of my own time. I was drinking pretty heavily around that time, and I made him a pretty heavy drinker, too. I drank whiskey, sometimes mixing it with coffee. So did Scudder.”

New York, the city, is another character in the novel. Block has lived in New York for a long time and was closely associated with the city. He fills in so much detail the reader soon feels familiar with the dim back alleys, the press of people, the dirt and the steam rising from the gutters. When Scudder wanders into a bar he categorizes as ‘Last Stop Before Detox’, the reader is already feeling that this is his or her own reality – ownership has been established through the osmosis of so much fine detail.

As a reader I keep on having to remind myself of when the book was written – more than 30 years ago. And the state of the world I find myself in today is curiously similar to the one that Block had charted a long time ago. Why haven’t we made a difference? Why is the totality of our greed the same? Why do we still have such a resistance to programs that will make things more equitable? What is wrong with us? I do appreciate writers who force me to ask and contemplate such questions.

The unknown is only oppressive if we don’t examine it, leave it to exist as a black cloud of unknowing. I guess that is why I like Matthew Scudder. He is a character that keeps on asking ‘why’? He doesn’t have answers, doesn’t even know why he goes to A.A. meetings. But he does know that he has to keep after the questions, has to disassemble and then reconstruct reality one piece at a time. Otherwise his world will blow apart.  And then he would be lost forever under the black cloud. I think a great many of us know something about that process – about conquering our own demons. Lawrence Block is very clear on this. We must learn to live with our own discomforts, our feelings, because our careless actions will kill us – not our fears.

Block demonstrates how the media shapes and pushes the scandalous nature of events. He even suggests a commonsense way to escape the loop of despair – don’t buy the papers. Throughout, however, he harvests the egregious message of how ‘eight million ways to die’ is possible in New York.

This is an interesting novel. Lawrence Block is a master of dark streets, grit and the human condition. When Matthew Scudder, at the end of the novel says, “I am an alcoholic” I somehow won a little something as well, perhaps a small boost to my dimming view of the capabilities of humankind.

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Excerpts from the novel:

EXPLOITATION – “She can go.”

“Just like that?”

“How else?  I’m not as white slaver you know.”  His tone put an ironic stress on the term.  “My women stay with me out of their own will, such will as they possess.  They’re under no duress.  You know Nietzsche?  ‘Women are like dogs, the more you beat them the more they love you.’  But I don’t beat them Scudder.  It never seems to be necessary.”

POLICING – “So I explain how nobody’s got the time to investigate a burglary any more.  You fill out a report and it goes in a file, but you don’t run around looking to see who did it.  Catching a burglar in the act is one thing, but investigating, hell, it’s low priority, nobody’s got the time for it.  She says okay, she can understand that, but suppose they happen to recover the goods? If she never reported the theft in the first place, how will the stuff get returned to her? And then I had to tell her just how fucked up the whole system is. We got warehouses full of stolen goods we recovered and we got files full of reports people filled out, stuff lost to burglars, and we can’t get the shit back to the rightful owners. I went on and on. I won’t bore you with it, but I don’t think she really wound up believing me. Because you don’t want to believe it’s that bad.”

UNITED STATES – “It’s a jungle out there and all the animals are armed. Everybody’s got a gun. You realize the number of people out there walking around with a piece? Your honest citizen, he’s gotta have a gun now for his own protection, so he gets one and somewhere down the line he shoots himself or his wife or the guy next door.”

THE NATION – Twice as many crooks and a third less cops and you wonder why it’s not safe to walk down the street.  You know what it is?  The city’s broke. There’s no money for cops, no money to keep the subways running, no money for anything. The whole fucking country’s leaking money. It’s all winding up in Saudi fucking Arabia. All those assholes are trading in their camels for Cadillacs while the country goes down the fucking tubes.”

PROSTITUTION – “You know what most poets go through? They teach, or they work a straight job, or they play the poetry game, giving readings and lectures and writing out proposals for foundation grants and getting to know the right people and kissing the right behinds. I never wanted to do all that shit. I just wanted to make poems.”

TITHING – What was I doing anyway? Why did I figure I owed anybody money? And who did I owe it to? Not the church, I didn’t belong to any church. I gave my tithes to whatever house of worship came along at the right time.

To whom then, was I in debt?  To God?

Where was the sense in that?  And what was the nature of this debt?  How did I owe it?  Was I repaying borrowed funds?  Or had I invented some sort of bribe scheme, some celestial protection racket?

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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