Thursday, February 28, 2019

P. I. Matthew Scudder Returns in A TIME TO SCATTER STONES

I yield to no one in my admiration for Lawrence Block, and I firmly believe that his Matthew Scudder series is the best P.I. series that anyone has ever done, including the earlier masters Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Through the novels and the short stories that constitute this series, Block created an indelible portrait of New York City and of a haunted and flawed but ultimately unforgettable protagonist.

Scudder last appeared eight years ago in a collection of short stories, The Night and the Music, and the elegiac final story, "One Last Night at Grogan's," seemed the perfect place to leave Scudder who was now happily married, well into his sixties and, sadly, no longer able to walk the mean streets of NYC in the way that he once had as a younger man.

Many of us hoped, however, that Block might still have at least one more Matthew Scudder novel in his future, preferably something along the lines of A Drop of the Hard Stuff, which was the last book to appear in the series, but in which Scudder looked back to recount the story of a case he had investigated years earlier as a much younger man. Thus, like many other die-hard fans of the series, I was elated to learn that Block would be releasing a new Matthew Scudder novella in early 2019.

I really wish he hadn't.

A Time to Scatter Stones is a relatively short novella principally featuring Scudder and his wife of many years, Elaine. Some of the other characters who populated the Scudder novels are mentioned in passing, but they are all long gone or MIA for the case that Scudder now accepts.

It begins when Elaine, who Matt first met when she was a young call girl, suddenly joins a support group for prostitutes--something like Matt's A.A. groups, but not exactly. Elaine has been out of the game for a good many years now and has to be approaching seventy herself. One might wonder why she would suddenly decide to join such a support group but, as it turns out, it serves to get the plot started.

One day after a meeting, Elaine brings home a young woman named Ellen, who has been working as a prostitute but who has decided to leave the profession. The problem is that one of her clients, who she knows only as "Paul," won't take no for an answer and insists on still seeing her. Elaine hopes that Matt might be able to find the guy and set him straight.

Matt accepts the challenge and works the problem the best way he can, given his age and his lack of contacts on the police force now. Meanwhile, there's an underlying subplot that I won't describe for fear of spoiling the story, but which really did not work for me, especially at the end of the book. As a result, I have really mixed emotions about this novella.

On the one hand, it's not a bad story and, in fact, it would have been a fine story for Block to have included somewhere in the middle of The Night and the Music. And if it would have been placed ahead of "One Last Night at Grogan's," I would have been perfectly fine with it. Reading it now, though somewhat spoils what I assumed would be my lasting final memory of Matthew Scudder, and unfortunately, once you've rung the bell, you can't unring it.

I'm giving this novella four stars because I think that's a fair assessment, and because that's certainly what I would have given it had I read it under other circumstances. But having bought a copy of the signed, special limited edition of the book, I'm going to tuck it away with my other treasures and leave it there. When I next work my way through the Matthew Scudder series, I will be stopping with "One Last Night at Grogans."

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