Book Review

By Derryll White

Block, Lawrence (1992).  A Walk Among the Tombstones.

Lawrence Block is a master of the dark, the noir side of thought and life.  Matthew Scudder, ex-cop, ex-alcoholic, ex-husband, weaves his way through New York’s black back alleys looking for answers.  He has his own moral code – those that exploit deserve to be used, those that kill deserve to die.  Matthew Scudder makes it real, the base and destructive nature some individuals have.  It’s not a world most of us choose to recognize but what does one do when a personally precious life is stolen?  Scudder acts!

“One million dollars cash or we kill your wife!” All of us would pay, then the bastards kill her anyway.  Reading this, thinking about this, is a dark time of the soul.  What would the reader do?  Scudder is an anti-hero, a force that acts out, or enacts, many of the possibilities a reader might entertain but not know how to act on.  Vicarious?  Possibly, but also a conscious reach within – what would I do?

Lawrence Block is an exquisite craftsman with each piece of the story flowing to an unimaginable conclusion. The language and tone are solid, gritty, dirty in the way back alleys are. Block makes the reader believe.  If you haven’t already, give him a try.

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Excerpts from the novel:

TRAFFICKING – “Either case, the product is dirty.  It kills people, or it’s the substance they use to kill themselves or each other.  One thing in my favor, I don’t advertise what I sell.  I don’t have lobbyists in Congress, I don’t hire PR people to tell the public the shit I sell is good for them.  The day people stop wanting drugs is the day I find something else to buy and sell, and I won’t whine about it and look for the government to give me a federal subsidy, either.”

DARK NATURE – We went to an Italian restaurant, and over espresso I told her about Kenan Khoury and what had happened to his wife.  When I was finished she sat for a moment looking down at the tablecloth in front of her as if there were something written on it.  Then she raised her eyes slowly to meet mine.  She is a resourceful woman, and a desirable one, but just then she looked touchingly vulnerable.

“Dear God,” she said.

“The things people do.”

“There’s just no end, is there? No bottom to it.”  She took a sip of water.  “The cruelty of it, the utter sadism.  Why would anyone – well, why ask why.”

POLICE WORK – One thing that hasn’t changed a bit since I got out of the Police Academy is the amount of paperwork the job entails.  Whatever kind of cop you are, you spend less time doing things than you did establishing a record on paper of what you’ve done.  Some of this is the usual bureaucratic horseshit and some comes under the general heading of covering your ass, but much of it is probably inescapable.  Police work is a collective effort, with a variety of people contributing to even the simpler sort of investigation, and if it’s not all written down somewhere nobody can get an overview of it and figure out what it amounts to.

– 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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