Order EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE here
(also reviewed)
Order THE SINS OF THE FATHERS here
Order TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE here
Order IN THE MIDST OF DEATH here
Order A STAB IN THE DARK here
I turned off the light and got in bed again and thought about the dead hooker and the housing cop and the woman who'd been run over by the subway train, and I wondered why anyone would think it is a good idea to stay sober in this city, and I held onto that thought and fell asleep with it.
I had a weak spot for detective novels. There's a certain mastery to it. Whoever can write a solid detective series has understood how to write compelling genre literature. They use recurring setting and elements to explore themes that would be otherwise impossible to explore without the reader's trust and familiarity. Lawrence Block is an iconic crime writer running the long-standing and successful Matthew Scudder series, that got recently turned into a movie, starring the immortal Liam Neeson. EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE is the fifth novel in the series and considered to be the best by several fans. Did it live up to my monstrous expectations?
Kind of.
The novel picks up a short while after the magnificent A STAB IN THE DARK and Scudder's still struggling with the idea that he's now a self-aware alcoholic, drifting in and out of meetings, unable to speak. A young woman named Kim Dakkinen approaches him while he's having dinner at Armstrong's (Scudder's a creature of habit, he's always having dinner at Armstrong's) in order to request his services. The gig seems simple enough. She wants out of the prostitution game and she's too scared of her pimp in order to have a face-to-face chat with him. He's not violent, but he's mysterious and vaguely threatening. Scudder begrudgingly accepts to help her for a minimal fee, knowing all too well he leaves a little part of him out there, every time he takes a case.
So yeah, Lawrence Block is a master storyteller. There, I said it. He's not a stylist, but he's efficient enough and he does things with his novels that very few authors dare to do. For example, one of the most interesting characters in EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE is Kim's pimp, Chance. Not everybody can pull that off. Pimps, in detective fiction, are usually a poorly dressed parody of human beings or the scum of the Earth. Not in a Lawrence Block novel. Chance is an educated, mysterious,smart and inexplicably angry kid, who's making money on the black market, trying to find an acceptable moral angle to his daily activities. That choice alone made the interactions between the two most important characters of the novel so much richer and compelling.
"She wants out."
"Out? Out of what?"
"The life," I said. "The relationship she had with you. She want you to agree to...break things off."
We stopped for a light. He didn't say anything. The light changed and we went another block or two and he said,
"What's she to you?"
"A friend."
"What does that mean? You're sleeping with her? You want to marry her? Friend's a big word, it covers a lot of ground."
Another fascinating aspect of EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE that I only know Joe R. Lansdale (member of my literary hall of fame) can also pull off is how Block makes his narrative turn 180 degrees. If you read enough books, at one point you start knowing what's going to happen before it actually does because every author follows the same narrative patterns. Not Lawrence Block. In EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE, I thought I'd know what would happen in advance maybe two or three times and Block made the EXACT OPPOSITE happen, throwing a monkey wrench in my expectations. This is, ladies and gentlemen, how you keep your series fresh and your long time readers on their toes.
Part of that reckless approach to narrative patterns torpedoed my enjoyment of EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE, but just a little bit. It's still a magnificent novel, but I'd rank it second most interesting in the series after A STAB IN THE DARK. How did that happen? Who am I to challenge the Gods of internet novel rankings? What the fuck is my problem? Detective novels are primarily mysteries and part of the fun of mysteries is actually competing with the author and try to debunk the killer before the author does (and I did here, about six lines before Scudder did). But in EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE, I thought it was a little bit from the left field. It denied me the joy of putting it together. I'm splitting hairs here, but this kind of stuff's important to me, when I read a mystery.
Anyway, I love reading Matthew Scudder novels. It's a ritual to me, like renewing with a badass, self-loathing friend every couple months or so. EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE is a great addition to the series and is almost as satisfying as the masterful A STAB IN THE DARK. Read it for the terrific, unexpected plot twists, the rich, complex and subtle characters, but if you're a fan of the series, read it for Scudder, first and foremost, who struggles with his demons in a way he hasn't before and who develops new wrinkles to his personality because of it. EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE is a solid, rewarding detective novel you could as a read alone or as one of the high point in the series. Reading Matthew Scudder never gets old.