Friday, June 13, 2014

Book Review: A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Lawrence Block
1991
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I am a huge, huge Lawrence Block fan. My love affair with his books started about twenty years ago when my dear great aunt lent me her copy of Eight Million Ways to Die. Since then I’ve read everything Block has written that I could get my hands on.

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse is the ninth installment of the Matt Scudder series, which is Block’s best series by far. The Scudder books are not only extremely gritty murder mysteries but also a complex and realistic record of the main character coming to grips with his alcoholism.

Matt Scudder was a brilliant, if sometimes ethically questionable, detective in the NYPD who resigned from the force after a bullet he fired (while drunk and on duty) ricocheted and killed a little girl. Since then, he has been working as an unlicensed private detective and struggling to stay sober.

By the time of Slaughterhouse, Scudder is has been in AA for several years. He has a stable relationship with his girlfriend Elaine, resists drinking through the whole book, and pursues two cases at the same time: tracking down the producers of a snuff film and figuring out whether a wealthy lawyer did or did not kill his wife.

It’s a shame that this is the only Edgar that Block has won. Slaughterhouse is a perfectly good book, but my favorite Scudder stories are the ones earlier in the timeline (like Eight Million Ways to Die and When the Sacred Ginmill Closes), when he is in the initial fits and starts of his recovery from alcoholism. Block makes you suffer right along with Scudder as he goes through agonizing backslides which only make it that much harder for him to climb back up onto the wagon.

No matter how long he has been sober, Scudder is (and you are) always, always conscious of alcohol around him. He’s confronted with it all the time, like when he goes out to dinner and the dinner menu says, playfully, “A day without wine is like a day without sunshine!” When his cases aren’t going well, or he’s under stress, it’s doubly hard; the first thing he always fantasizes about is a glass of bourbon. Or a bottle of bourbon.

At one point in Slaughterhouse, Scudder meets a contact, a young cop, in a bar. The cop is drunk, argumentative, and clearly on the same path Scudder himself was on. After making one attempt to get their meeting to happen somewhere else, Scudder eventually chooses to leave the cop there in the bar. He feels guilty about leaving without making more of an effort, but his sponsor reminds him that, as an alcoholic, your first responsibility is not to drink. You cannot always save others because it may take all you have just to do that.

Blurb writers are always comparing Block to Elmore Leonard. I don’t know why they think this is a compliment, given how great Block is and how annoying Leonard is. I wish that Hollywood would stop making movies out of Leonard’s books and make a good movie out of one of Block’s. Eight Million Ways to Die was made into a movie, and it does star Jeff Bridges, who of course is fantastic, but the adaptation is disappointing. Instead of New York, it takes place in Los Angeles, where Matt Scudder definitely doesn’t belong, and Scudder has resigned from the police force because he killed a drug dealer, rather than a little girl, which is not quite the same thing when it comes to mental anguish.

For those who like mysteries but for whom the Matt Scudder series is a little too dark and/or explicit, Block’s Burglar series is tamer but just as well-written. The central character, Bernie Rhodenbarr, is a used bookstore owner by day and a burglar by night. He always manages to stumble across corpses while on his night job and has to solve the murders himself to prevent them from convicting him of the murder.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

4 comments:

  1. "8 Million Ways to Die" was a book before the brilliant film adaptation? I'm stunned. I do wonder if Elmore wrote the original dialogue in the classic warehouse scene, in which the word "f*ck" was used appx eight million times by the actors.

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    1. Indeed.

      On a somewhat related note, did you ever see the scene in "The Wire" where Bunk and McNulty are investigating a murder scene, and together they communicate and work out what happened by saying only the word "f*ck" to each other the entire time with different inflections? It's brilliant.

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  2. Hey Cthulhu --

    Anytime you recommend a book this strongly, I always try to put it on my list. My local library here in the 8th Dimension didn't have a copy of it, but they did have Time to Murder and Create.

    Fantastic! It's the second in the series and I can also recommend it highly. I'd never read anything by Block before, but he is definitely the real deal. I'm not the big mystery reader you are, so mainly have just read Hammett and Chandler. But he's close to their league if not in it.

    Fun fact -- he mentioned in the afterword that all his book titles are five words. It happened by accident but after the first few he just kept going with it.

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    1. That's awesome, Lord John! I haven't actually read Time to Murder and Create. But I will put it on *my* list now! I'm really glad you liked him.

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