Introducing Dave Brandstetter

Originally published in 1970, this was the first book in Joseph Hansen's series featuring private eye Dave Brandstetter. The series would ultimately run for twelve books, through A Country of Old Men, which appeared in 1991. Dave Brandstetter was an insurance company investigator, but, inevitably, he wound up investigating a murder or two in each of the books in the series. What set this series apart was the fact that Brandstetter was, if not the first, then certainly one of the first openly gay detectives to populate the world of the private eye novel. At a time when the genre was still populated by macho, tough guy and often homophobic detectives like Mike Hammer, Brandstetter stood apart as a tough, smart private dick whose love life was a major theme of the series.

Entertainer Fox Olson had just achieved his life-long dream of success with a successful radio program and a certain best-selling book in the offing when his car plunged off a bridge during a violent storm. The car is found under the bridge, but Olson's body is not. Olson's widow insists that the body has simply washed down the river and will be discovered in due course. She adamantly insists that Dave Brandstetter's company should pay the insurance benefit. Virtually everyone agrees with the grieving widow, but Dave is reluctant to pay a claim when there is no body. Brandstetter ultimately comes to believe that Olson is still alive and that his death was faked. And in spite of the obstacles that virtually everyone places in his wake, he is determined to find the truth at the bottom of Fox Olson's disappearance.

At the same time, Dave is grieving the death of Rod, his long-time lover, who has recently succumbed to cancer. The question becomes whether Dave can fight through the pain and heartache that threatens to immoblilize him to follow the threads of a complicated case. This is a book that should appeal to anyone who enjoys private-eye novels and who is looking for a well-written and unique approach to the genre.

Another Early Classic from Lawrence Block

This is among the best of Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series, which is saying quite a lot. Set in the mid-1970s, it finds Scudder divorced, working as an unlicensed P.I. in New York City and essentially living in the bars that dot the neighborhood around his small hotel room.

The book opens with the brazen robbery of an after-hours saloon that happens to be owned by some scary Irish brothers that no smart person would ever think to screw around with. Matt is present at the time of the robbery and the owners ask him to look into it, offering a $10,000.00 reward for info leading to the robbers. At virtually the same time, the wife of a casual barroom acquaintance, Tommy Tillary, is murdered. Tillary becomes a suspect and asks Matt to help clear him. If all that weren't bad enough, another of Scudder's friends is being blackmailed and wants Matt to help arrange the payoff.

As the book progresses, Scudder works on each of the three problems with varying degrees of commitment and interest. Each of the three cases is interesting in and of itself, but as always in these books, it's the setting and the characters, especially Scudder himself, that keep you coming back and that make you regret it every time you come to the last page. Lawrence Block has created in these novels a world and a cast unlike any other--for my money easily the best, the most vivid and most interesting of any in crime fiction. I've read this book at least three or four times by now, and I'll be anxiously waiting for it again the next time I make my way through this series.

Lawrence Block/Matthew Scudder: An Appreciation

I first met Matthew Scudder sometime in the latter 1980s when I stumbled across a paperback copy of When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. I was hooked from the opening paragraph and when I finished the book, I set quickly about the task of finding every other Lawrence Block novel I could lay my hands on.

Thankfully, there were a lot of them. Beginning in the middle 1950s, Block has had a very prolific career, producing something in the neighborhood of fifty novels and a hefty collection of short stories. Through the middle 1960s, he wrote a number of stand alone pulp novels with titles like A Diet of Treacle and Grifter’s Game. Happily, some of these earlier books have now been revived and reprinted as part of the Hard Case Crime series and are thus available again for the first time in years.

In 1967, Block created his first series character, Evan Tanner, in The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Three years later, he produced the first of four books featuring Chip Harrison in a series that was obviously a tribute to the work of Rex Stout. And then, in 1976, Block introduced Matthew Scudder in The Sins of the Fathers.

Scudder, a divorced alcoholic ex-cop who had left the force after a tragic accident, is an unlicensed private detective who does “favors for friends” who pay him for his time and efforts. He lives in a tiny hotel room, “the size of a walk-in closet,” in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, and through the early books in the series, he wrestles with his demons, particularly his alcoholism.

By far the darkest of Block’s series characters, Scudder spends the bulk of his time in saloons, denying—mostly to himself—that he has a drinking problem. When he does take a case, he tithes ten percent of the fee, most of which goes into the poor boxes of Catholic churches where he will often light a candle in memory of someone he’s lost. Matt is not a religious man, and he’s not entirely certain why he feels compelled to do this, but it allows him time to reflect in the quiet solitude of the churches he visits. The Catholics get most of his business simply because their churches are open more often than anyone else’s.

The cases he takes are always interesting and Scudder almost always resolves them, not by making great intuitive leaps, but rather by doing the hard, plodding work of the determined detective. You enjoy watching him do it, but mostly you read these books because of the great cast of characters that Block has assembled in this series, beginning with Scudder himself. As the series progresses, Block introduces a small supporting cast and then makes you care a great deal about each of their lives and their respective fates.

Block allows these people to age in real time so that by the time we see them in the sixteenth book, All The Flowers Are Dying, the survivors have all grown and changed, in some cases dramatically, from the characters that we first met as long as thirty years earlier. Most important, Scudder himself comes to a major transformational moment at the conclusion of the fourth book, Eight Million Ways To Die, and in the wake of that moment becomes a richer, fuller, and even more interesting protagonist.

I’ve read this series from first book to last any number of times now, and my own personal favorite is the eleventh, The Devil Knows You’re Dead. Matt is asked to investigate the murder of a young attorney, Glenn Holtzmann. The case appears to be open and shut: Holtzmann was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and was shot and killed by a mentally unbalanced street person. But the brother of the man the police have arrested asks Scudder to look into the case, and Matt discovers that, while the police have apparently arrested the right man, the victim was a man of many unexplained secrets. Once captured by the case, Scudder will not give it up until he has unraveled all of those secrets.

The mystery itself is fine, but what I love about this book is that it comes at a very important point in Matthew Scudder’s life, probably the most significant since the closing pages of Eight Million Ways To Die. The times are changing, and so are the people that surround Matt. Scudder is personally conflicted in a variety of ways that will resonate deeply with a lot of readers. And the way he reacts to those changes and conflicts is what makes him one of the most intriguing characters ever to inhabit the pages of crime fiction.

The sixteenth book in this series appeared in 2005, and Block has suggested that he may not write another. I hate to think that might be true. I’ve spent scores of hours in the company of these characters and the thought that they might not appear again is enormously sad. I understand that, ultimately, there will have to be a final Matthew Scudder novel; I just don’t want to have to face the prospect for a good long time.

Block would go on to create two additional series characters, Bernie Rhodenbarr who is a bookseller by day and a burglar by night, and Keller, a stamp-collecting hit man who would appear in a series of short stories and in one full-length novel. Bernie and Keller are much lighter and funnier characters, and they are both enjoyable reads. But Matthew Scudder remains Block’s greatest achievement.

Standing firmly in the company of the all-time greats, Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder will endure for as long as people read detective fiction. Every reader has his or her own favorite author and protagonist; these guys will always be mine.

Dick Francis, R.I.P.

Not even a month after the death of Robert B. Parker, the world of crime fiction loses another giant with the death Sunday of Dick Francis. The retired jockey, who turned to writing thrillers in his middle thirties, produced a steady stream of books over the next forty-plus years that never failed to entertain.

Most of the books were set in the world of British horse racing that Francis knew and obviously loved so well. Though he only rarely featured the same protagonist from one book to another, virtually all of his heroes shared the same characteristics. Typically they were in their mid-to-late thirties, as Francis was when injuries forced his retirement from racing. Often, like their creator, they were in the midst of some career change that had been forced upon them. They were quiet, modest, but extremely clever and capable men; almost always they were single, and inevitably the right women found them attractive and compelling.

Lurking in the background, and usually exposed only near the end of the book, was a deliciously malevolent villain, pulling strings from behind the curtain in pursuit of some grand scheme that often threatened to inflict gruesome damage on any number of victims and upon the world of horse racing as a whole.

In the end, of course, Francis's hero always exposed and thwarted the evildoer, albeit usually at great personal cost. While Francis's sex scenes were always fairly tame, he wrote great scenes of gut-wrenching violence that could give a reader nightmares for weeks after.

Best of all, Francis's work has stood the test of time, unlike the work of some other writers of his generation that already seems dated and uninteresting. Even now, nearly fifty years after its initial publication, one can pick up his first novel,DEAD CERT, or any of the many that followed and it will seem as fresh and new as it did on the weekend that you first read it.

Dick Francis leaves behind a body of work that will entertain readers for years to come. He will be sorely missed.