When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s a heck of a thing, reading the last book in a series when the previous book was the last one and there’s still eleven books to go. I mean, it’s a good thing that I know, for a fact, Lawrence Block did not read my review of Eight Million Ways to Die and then decide to return to form for When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes in response to my complaints.
I understand that Eight Million was supposed to be Matthew Scudder’s final act. With Sacred, we get to go back to the beginning: Matt the drunk, Matt the guy who does “favors” for friends, Matt the guy who tithes wages and time alike in whichever random church he comes across when he needs to sit for a spell.
But Block’s approach to the old Matt is in the style of the new Matt, which is to say, Sacred is a more nuanced, complicated story than any of the four books leading up to Eight Million. It’s a kind of transition novel, in that we get our old familiar Matt to guide us through this new kind of Matthew Scudder mystery.
I say all of this without having read any of the other books in the series yet, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. But I fully expect to have a different itch scratched by those books. Which means I’ll miss the old Matt. So it was nice to see him again, one last time.