Matthew Scudder’s Page

August 1, 2012

Everyone asks, so although it appears elsewhere on the site, this page should have it as well: a list of the Scudder series in order:

THE MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVELS
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS Amazon B&N Audible
TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE Amazon B&N Audible
IN THE MIDST OF DEATH Amazon B&N Audible
A STAB IN THE DARK Amazon B&N Audible
EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE Amazon B&N Audible
WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES Amazon B&N Audible
OUT ON THE CUTTING EDGE Amazon B&N
A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD Amazon B&N
A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE Amazon B&N
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES Amazon B&N Audible
THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD Amazon B&N
A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN Amazon B&N
EVEN THE WICKED Amazon B&N Audible
EVERYBODY DIES Amazon B&N Audible
HOPE TO DIE Amazon B&N Audible
ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING Amazon B&N Audible
A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF Amazon B&N Audible
THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC Amazon B&N Audible

July 14, 2012
Keith Dixon takes a long look at The Night and the Music:

Lawrence Block’s The Night and the Music has a kind of finality to it that his many readers will be sorry about. Not a finality suggesting that he’s about to hang up his pen, but that it might be closing time for his most famous creation, Matt Scudder….

Block is one of the easiest writers to read that you’ll ever have the good fortune to come across. He doesn’t seem to write prose so much as invite you to listen to him (or Matt Scudder) talk. You’re engaged in a conversation. And while admittedly you can’t talk back, you don’t mind because Matt’s voice is so calm, rational and entertaining that you wouldn’t want to interrupt the flow anyway. In this passage Matt is examining the spot where a young girl he knows had apparently leaped to her death:

After a while I walked over to her building and stood on the pavement in front of it. The florist’s truck had moved on and I examined the street where she’d landed. There was, as Vinnie had assured me, no trace of what had happened. I tilted my head back and looked up, wondering what window she might have fallen from, and then I looked down at the pavement and then up again, and a sudden rush of vertigo made my head spin. In the course of all this I managed to attract the attention of the building’s doorman and he came out to the curb anxious to talk about the former tenant. He was a black man about my age and he looked as proud of his uniform as the guy in the Marine Corps recruiting poster. It was a good-looking uniform, shades of brown, epaulets, gleaming brass buttons.

There are several clever tricks in this straightforward passage. First, he begins by saying ‘After a while’. He’s not specific – he doesn’t say ‘At two o’clock’ or even ‘ten minutes later’. What the vagueness of ‘after a while’ achieves is to suggest that actually he’s not on any timetable or agenda – he’s an ordinary guy with an interest in the deceased girl, but his actions here are unmotivated.

There’s more, and it adds up to a perceptive examination of the book. Click here to read the whole piece

May 24, 2012
Benoit Lelievre has a look at In the Midst of Death:

I hadn’t planned on fucking his wife.

There was a point where I hadn’t even considered it, and another point where I knew for certain that it was going to happen, and the two points had been placed remarkably close together in time.

Hard to say exactly why it happened…

“Writing a series without an expiration date, like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux or Lawrence Block’s Scudder’s is a breakneck thing to do. There are so many ways to get boring and repetitive and yet, if your character is your trademark, he’s also your lifeline. While the two first Scudder novels, THE SINS OF THE FATHERS and TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE, were rather straightforward murder investigation, Lawrence Block raises the stakes and offers something completely new for the third installment of his series. There is a murder investigation to IN THE MIDST OF DEATH, but it’s part of a larger, deeper, more complex narrative that shows the strength of the chains that binds the ex-cop to his old life. Scudder is not just an wounded observer anymore. That’s my kind of character progression. With masterful patience and timing, Block shows you the other half of Matthew Scudder for a few hundred pages. The part he doesn’t want you to see.

“The novel starts as Scudder pays a visit to a blackmailing prostitute named Portia Carr on behalf of his client, a certain Jerry Broadfield. Only problem, she turns up dead a few pages later and Broadfield is arrested for murder. When visiting his client in jail, he claims he’s been set up by the police, because he collaborated with Special Prosecutor Abner Prejanian on a police corruption affair. The policemen Scudder still know in the force all think Broadfield’s an asshole and wish him a fate worse than death, regardless whether or not he killed Portia Carr. Smells enough like foul play for Scudder and he decides to dig deeper. When you go back to the life you walked away from, you can’t go back and not expect ghosts to gnaw away at you. Scudder puts the quiet and fragile inner balance he found in his drifting lifestyle on the line, so he can make things right for his client.

“Matthew Scudder is such a successful character because he keeps running away from who he is, but his line of work keeps bringing the truth back to him. He would probably live a peaceful life if he decided to be a brick layer, but he know how to do only one thing, sniff out the wolves in sheep clothing and putting them behind bars. While finding Portia Carr’s murderer is necessary to his investigation this time, it’s not what the novel is about. IN THE MIDST OF DEATH is about the illusion of the thin blue line. The more human and often uglier side of the police. What drove Scudder away from the force was his own fallibility, when he killed by mistake young Estrellita Rivera while pursuing robbers when off-duty. Being confronted to that trait in the policemen he meets for his investigation will weight extremely heavy on his shoulders:

A gradual process, death. Someone had stabbed her to death forty-eight hours ago in this very apartment, but her voice still answered the telephone.

I called two more times just to hear her voice. I didn’t leave any messages. Then I had another can of beer and the rest of the bourbon and crawled into his bed and slept…

Read the rest at at Benoit’s site, Dead End Follies

May 22, 2012
NEW POLICY—LB’S BOOKSTORE CAN NOW FILL INTERNATIONAL ORDERS!

Maybe we got sick of disappointing people. Maybe we got tired of apologizing.

Or maybe it’s just pure and simple greed. Always hard to rule that out…

Whatever it is, we’re now taking and filling orders from anywhere on the planet. We ship international orders by USPS Priority Mail, and the costs aren’t low, and there are forms for us to fill out. But if you’ve got the money, honey, we’ve got the time.

All of this is a result of our closing the old website store and opening anew on eBay, where LB’s Bookstore is better equipped than ever to serve you.

April 27, 2012
IT’S MATT SCUDDER AND HE’S BACK IN PRINT!

In a sense, he’s never been out of print. Mulholland’s hardcover edition of A Drop of the Hard Stuff is still selling well, and their trade paperback just joined it in the stores a month ago. HarperCollins have the rights to thirteen of the Scudder backlist novels and have kept them all in print (although, with fewer backlist titles in stores these days, they’re not always easy to find.)

But three of the Scudder novels, A Stab in the Dark, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and A Long Line of Dead Men, have been out of print for a while now. I managed to regain the rights, and earlier this year self-published them all as eBook editions.

But “print” sort of implies paper and ink, doesn’t it?

You know, that’s just what I was going to say. While I trust I’ve established my street cred as an eBook enthusiast, that doesn’t mean I’m eager for printed books to disappear—or for my books to cease to exist in that form. When I self-published The Night and the Music last fall, I was able to bring out a trade paperback edition close upon the heels of the eBook; both, I’m pleased to report, have enjoyed a very gratifying reception.

And now it’s my pleasure to offer the three books as trade paperbacks, in the same format as The Night and the Music. The same great team at Telemachus Press readied the books for production, and the good people at Lightning Source saw to the printing and binding, and here’s how they look:

Any questions? Ah, I see a few hands raised:

Will the books be in stores?

Not in brick-and-mortar stores. Online booksellers—Amazon and Barnes & Noble—will be able to supply them. And a handful of the leading mystery specialty booksellers are carrying the new books—and all of their copies are signed.

I was just about to ask how to get signed copies.

Great—go right ahead and ask.

Uh, how do I get signed copies?

You can order them online from LB’s Bookstore. They’re $16.99 apiece plus $3.99 shipping. But if you buy the three-book set, they’re yours for $49.99 postpaid. (If you do the math, that’s a savings to you of about $13.)

Oh, I want a set! But I’m in school here in Toronto, and my sister’s back home in Taiwan, and my cousin’s in Sao Paulo, and my best friend’s in Stuttgart, and we’d all like to buy signed copies. And you only ship to U.S. addresses!

Ah, that was then and this is now. We’ll ship to you. We now ship internationally by USPS Priority Mail. Costs vary, of course, depending on where you are and the weight and measurements of your order (and as I type those lines I remember why we stopped filling overseas orders in the first place. Ah yes, it all comes back to me…) But we’ll ship to you anywhere in the world at our cost plus $1.99 per item handling charge.

Or there’s an alternative. These fine stores have signed copies, and will cheerfully ship them anywhere in the world:

Murder by the Book
3210 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 232-9995

Murder on the Beach
273 Northeast 2nd Avenue
Delray Beach, FL 33444-3705
(561) 279-7790

Mysterious Bookshop
58 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
(800) 352-2840

Mystery on Main Street
119 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
(802) 258-2211

The Poisoned Pen
4014 N Goldwater Blvd #101
Scottsdale AZ 85251
(888) 560-9919

Seattle Mystery Bookshop
117 Cherry St
Seattle, WA 98104-2205
(206) 587-5737

Any more questions?

I love the new covers, and they’ll look great on the shelf next to The Night and the Music. Any chance the rest of the series will be available in the same format?

Wouldn’t that be nice? Right now it’s not an option, but if things change I’ll be quick to carpe the old diem and hurry them into production.

Will you let us know if that happens?

Count on it. Meanwhile, just click on LB’s Bookstore and grab yourself a set of three. (And if you missed The Night and the Music, or someone swiped your copy, it’s right on the same page.)

January 5, 2012
Here’s a great new review of The Night and the Music from Scotland’s Russel McLean:

“It’s no secret that in my other life (that of an unrepentant writer of PI fiction), I have always acknowledged the debt I owe to Lawrence Block’s magnificent creation, Matt Scudder. So the moment I realised Block’s new collection of short stories, THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC, focused on the PI who used to do “favours for friends”, I was sold. Block and Scudder are a powerhouse combination, but I admit I was intrigued to see how this combination would work in the short story format, as a great deal of what I loved about the Scudder novels was the way that he would intertwine themes and ideas with the main action. Thus the novels were not merely about crime, but about alcoholism, about dealing with past sins and future change, and of course the evolving cityscape of New York. Its worth noting that before I ever visited NYC, my impressions were formed by constant viewing of NYPD Blue and of course the Scudder novels.

“This collection maintains all these elements from the Scudder series, and a whole lote more besides. THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC collates shorts from various sources and inspirations (which are detailed in Block’s intriguing afterward) and details moments from over 50 years of Scudder’s life. So here we meet Scudder as he was in his uniform days (in the very clever LET’S GET LOST) and see him through his alcoholic years, his first attempts at sobriety and his more sober senior years.

“The stories themselves range from clever mystery construction (OUT THE WINDOW) to odd and affecting viginettes from Scudder’s life (THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC and MICK BALLOU LOOKS AT THE BLANK SCREEN) to affecting glimpses of the transient nature of life in Scudder’s NYC (the quite wonderful, A CANDLE FOR THE BAG LADY) and a whole lot more besides. Scudder’s always been as much about character as he is about crime solving and here we get the evolution of a character through a series of short and often sharply penned stories that grip the reader from the first paragraph and linger for a long time afterward. As a reader, I tend to read short collections in gulps and it’s the rare anthology where I finish one story and then immediately start another. But with THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC, I found myself thinking, “oh, one more short won’t hurt” and suddenly realised I was closing in on the end of the book before I knew what was happening.

“Of course all of this emotional connection with Scudder may mean that the collection may not be the best starting off point for newcomers to Scudder (there’s a great deal of history to the character that might better require the breathing room afforded of a novel to elucidate the uninitiated) but that’s a minor criticism and Block handles any necessary exposition with grace and humour. The result is the feeling of dipping in and out of the life of an old friend. Which means that not every story centres on a crime or act of wrongdoing. Indeed, the title story is a brilliantly told mood piece that will deeply satisfy those who have followed Scudder on his journey through life. It is a rare moment of pure humanity in Scudder’s world and, along with moments such as MICK BALLOU LOOKS AT THE BLANK SCREEN (which has the double impact of justifying my adoration of the finale of THE SOPRANOS) serves to give the impression that Scudder is a lot more than just a PI, that his story doesn’t stop when we’re not reading about him.

“Along with A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF, this collection makes 2011 a banner year for fans of Scudder (and his creator, Block). You owe it to yourself to stop whatever it is you’re doing and read this collection straight away. As a portrait of not just a man but a city that changes with the years, you’re really not going to do any better.”

Russel D McLean for crimescenescotland, 04/01/11

November 1, 2011
Apple at last!

If you sit under the tree long enough…well, never mind. A month after The Night and the Music went on sale everywhere else, it finally cleared the hurdles in Apple’s iTunes store.

Now you can read it comfortably on your iPad, iPhone, or pop-up iToaster. Enjoy!

October 17, 2011
Update on signed copies

This past Friday we received the first copies of the trade paperback edition of THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC. I spent the weekend signing my name and packing pre-ordered books for shipment to America’s leading mystery booksellers—and to all of you who pre-ordered the book. They’re all on their way.

Well, not all of them. We still have books on hand, and LB’s Bookstore can supply signed copies for $16.99 plus shipping.

I’m afraid we’re not able to process orders for shipment out of the U.S. The following dealers, America’s leading mystery booksellers, are carrying The Night and the Music, and will be happy to fill Canadian and overseas orders.

Book Carnival
348 South Tustin Street
Orange, CA 92866-2502
(714) 538-3210

Dark Carnival
3086 Claremont Avenue
Berkeley CA 94705
(510) 654-7323

M is for Mystery
86 East 3rd Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94401
(650) 401-8077

Murder by the Book
2342 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77098
(713) 524-8597

Murder by the Book
3210 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 232-9995

Murder on the Beach
273 Northeast 2nd Avenue
Delray Beach, FL 33444-3705
(561) 279-7790

Mysterious Galaxy
2810 Artesia Blvd.
Redondo Beach CA 90278
(310) 542-6000

Mysterious Bookshop
58 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
(800) 352-2840

Mystery Lovers Bookshop
514 Allegheny River Boulevard
Oakmont, PA 15139
(412) 828-4877

Mystery on Main Street
119 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
(802) 258-2211

Partners & Crime
44 Greenwich Ave # A
New York, NY 10011-8347
(212) 243-0440

The Poisoned Pen
4014 N Goldwater Blvd #101
Scottsdale AZ 85251
(888) 560-9919

Seattle Mystery Bookshop
117 Cherry St
Seattle, WA 98104-2205
(206) 587-5737

Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore
2864 Chicago Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55407-1320
(612) 824-9984

VJ Books
PO Box 3111
Tualatin OR 97062

If you live near one of these splendid stores, you can drop in and pick up a signed copy in person. Odds are you’ll find something else of interest while you’re there, and have a good conversation in the bargain.

NB: If you’re a dealer and want to stock the book, or if you’d like to buy five or more signed copies for gifts or resale, we can offer you attractive wholesale prices. Just email us at lawbloc@gmail.com, and put “wholesale: att David Trevor” in the subject line.

The eBook is still $2.99 at Kindle and Nook and Smashwords, and we’re still waiting for it to go on sale at Apple.

October 11, 2011
Karen Woodward walks into Scudder’s world

“It was a joy to be drawn into Scudder’s world again. It’s one of those things you know is going to happen but is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment it occurs. One moment I was reading words and thinking about writing style and point of view and the next I was in the story, sharing Matthew Scudder’s thoughts, alive in his world.

“It was a thrill to read this collection of Scudder stories; this is Lawrence Block at his best. Here’s hoping he never stops writing.”

Read Karen’s whole review

October 7, 2011
Bill Crider catches up with Matt

“I’ve been keeping up with Scudder’s career for a frighteningly long time. I hadn’t, however, read all the short stories about Scudder. Until recently, that is. Now the stories have been collected in the e-book you see pictured here, and it’s only $2.99, making it the one of the biggest bargains you’ll ever find.

“As I said, I hadn’t read all the Scudder stories, but I’d read several of them, including the Edgar-award-winning “By the Dawn’s Early Light” and the Shamus-winning “The Merciful Angel of Death,” but some of the other things included here were hard to come by even for die-hard fans. And Block’s included a never-before-published story titled “One Last Night at Grogan’s” that’s guaranteed to make fans of the series a little misty-eyed.

“There’s also Block’s “Afterword,” an invaluable discussion of how the stories came to be written, plus an introduction and appreciation by Brian Koppelman. Put it all together and you have an irresistible collection. You’ll want this one for sure. Trust me.”

Read the full review at Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine

October 6, 2011
Heart-warming words from Mike Rogers at Library Journal

“It seems Block is having a hard time retiring; he’s already produced six books this year in his leisure time—thank the maker. This simultaneous ebook/paperback collects eleven stories featuring former New York–cop–turned unlicensed PI Matthew Scudder…A quicker, more enjoyable read you won’t find, and veteran Scudder fans will rejoice at sharing his adventures again. May Block—and Scudder—never retire.”

Read the full Library Journal review

October 4, 2011
James Reasoner makes a night of it with Matt and Elaine

“…Block has collected all the Scudder novelettes and short stories into a new volume called The Night and the Music, which he’s published himself as an e-book and a trade paperback. They seem to be in the order in which he wrote them, which makes for a very interesting look at the evolution of the character…My favorite, I think, is the title story, “The Night and the Music”, which has no crime element at all, but instead finds Matt and his wife Elaine talking and listening to music in various places around their part of New York. That may not sound like much, but this story is so elegant and evocative that it reminds me very much of some of Irwin Shaw’s stories. (Shaw being one of my favorite non-genre writers.)

“Also in that vein is the final story in the book, the recently written and fittingly titled “One Last Night at Grogan’s”, again not a mystery or a crime story. I don’t know if Block plans to write any more about Matt Scudder, and he may not know, either, but “One Last Night at Grogan’s” has a beautifully elegiac feel to it, and if it does turn out to be the series’ farewell, it’s a good one.”

Read the full review at Rough Edges

October 4, 2011
Julia Rachel Barrett sits down with Matt:

“…Matthew Scudder, former cop and private investigator, sits across the table from me at Grogan’s. It’s late and the bar will be closing soon. He doesn’t fidget. He doesn’t look away. To paraphrase Faye Dunaway to Robert Redford, his eyes aren’t kind, but they don’t miss anything.

“The booth in which we sit is tucked away in a dark corner, the seat worn smooth like a favorite leather slipper. These days he drinks sparkling water while I sip an expensive Scotch. I savor my drink, swirl the liquor around my tongue, feeling its warmth all the way down to my toes as I hang on his every word.

“Matthew tells me his stories in a dispassionate voice. It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s more as if he tossed off illusion long ago, having seen what we are capable of, the best and the worst and the inadvertent. We can’t fool him. He accepts both our action and inaction with grace and forgiveness.

“The memorable moments of Matthew’s life range from the relieved confessions of a guilty conscience to the random nature of good and evil, to dirty cops, and honest working girls, to the fellowship found in drinking alone. He even remembers the nights he can’t remember…”

Read the whole review

October 3, 2011
The first reviews are coming in…

From Randy Johnson’s five-star review on Amazon:

“I just finished this collection of stories about Matthew Scudder. It works as both as a companion to the novels and as an introduction to those unfamiliar with them. For me, it was the latter. I’d never read any of the novels and was delighted enough as I read them to stop and order the first two books.”

Read the full review at Amazon

From Dan Schwent’s five-star review at Goodreads:

“The final story in the collection threatened to yank silent tears from my manly ducts…If Lawrence Block never writes another Matthew Scudder book, One Last Night at Grogan’s would be a beautiful way to end the series.

“I can’t recommend the Matthew Scudder series enough and The Night and The Music is no exception!”

Read the full review at Goodreads

From David Belbin’s five-star Amazon review:

“This collection includes every short story that Lawrence Block has written about Matthew Scudder, so provides a kind of alternative chronology or companion to the Scudder novels. Block famously says he never knows whether a series is over, but the final story here, ‘One Last Night At Grogan’s’ has an air of finality about it…It’s a satisfying ending to a collection that will prove essential to Scudder devotees and an ideal introduction to those new to one of crime fiction’s most memorable, best written investigators.”

Read the full review at Amazon

For a preview of the Afterword for THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC, see the top post right next door at LB’s Afterthoughts.

Big news!

But first let me thank you all for the reception you’ve been giving GETTING OFF. The buzz in the social media continues to build, the coverage in blogs and traditional media is remarkable, the reviews have been more than generous—and y’all have been buying it, enjoying it, and telling your friends about it.

I love it when that happens.

I could fill this newsletter with reviews, but I won’t; I’ve posted plenty of excerpts on Jill Emerson’s blog page. But right now I have a new book to tell you about.

The title is THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC, and it’s a complete collection of Matthew Scudder short fiction, from a pair of novelettes written in the mid-1970’s to a brand-new story that’s less than two months old.

There are eleven stories in all. (My late friend Don Westlake would call it a thief’s dozen.) Nine of them have been published in magazines and/or collected in various anthologies. One piece, “Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen,” has appeared only as the text of a 100-copy limited broadside. And the final story, the elegiac “One Last Night at Grogan’s,” was written this summer and is published here for the first time.

There’s also a moving appreciation of the Scudder series by screenwriter/director Brian Koppelman, who tells what the books have meant to him since he discovered them as a teenager. And I’ve added an afterword that puts the stories in context and recounts some of the circumstances of their composition. There were times over the years when it looked as though Scudder and I were through with each other, and it was through short fiction that the series kept going.

And who’s the publisher?

Uh, well, I am.

Not, I assure you, out of dissatisfaction with my regular publishers. Mulholland Books did a spectacular job with A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF, and I’m delighted that they’ll be publishing my new novel next year. And the Open Roadies as well have served me superbly, bringing out 40+ backlist titles this year, along with three sparkling new eRiginals, THE LIAR’S BIBLE, THE LIAR’S COMPANION, and my memoir, AFTERTHOUGHTS. It’s been my good fortune to work with wonderful people at both of these firms. (And with Charles Ardai, who’s doing an amazing job at Hard Case Crime with GETTING OFF.)

Still, I wanted to take a shot at this one on my own. I’ve been publishing short stories for Nook and Kindle for a while now, but I wanted a more professional package for this book, so I enlisted the services of Telemachus Press. Their experts got the formatting just right and shepherded the book through ePublishing’s many circuitous paths, and now we’re good to go.

THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC is available as an eBook on all major platforms: Kindle, Nook, Apple, and Smashwords. The price is a low $2.99.

Prefer a hard copy? Online retailers can supply THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC as a Print-on-Demand trade paperback, with the gorgeous cover you see here. Or you can order a copy from your local bookstore. The price for this P–O–D version is $16.99.

Want it autographed? A dozen of America’s top mystery booksellers can supply signed copies. Here’s a list: