A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is Scudder number eight. We’re still sober, though we don’t go to as many AA meetings as we used to. (By which I mean, “we” the reader; Matt still goes, he just doesn’t take us along as much as he used to.) This is not the same Matthew Scudder who started the series, but never fear: alcohol and bars and prostitutes are still around, still filling up pages. The irony is that in the first several novels, these things were just backdrops. Now they’re front and center, central to the plot.
And this novel reads differently from the others so far, another irony: you’ve got to be familiar with good old Matthew to understand him at all in this different kind of book. Instead of a cold-case, a distant client, a reluctant unlicensed private investigator working for a few bucks, Block gives us an actual bad guy, crimes happening recently enough to be in today’s papers, and a scared-as-hell recovering alcoholic.
That’s the genius of this novel, or the subtlety which I’m calling genius so I look smart cause I figured it out. Up until Ticket, Scudder didn’t really have all that much going for him. No real skin in the game. Camus’ Meursault if he lived in New York in the early eighties. But now, he’s being terrorized, and the best way for Block to show us, this how scared he is, is by having Matt be tempted to drink.
Oh, the scene is over pretty quickly, sure, and then Matt gets his own back and returns to his existential numbness (I am almost being literal, by the way). This is, after all, a mystery novel, not a Roman a Clef. Nevertheless, it makes those scenes when we do go to AA with Matt a little more comfortable.
A few old faces in this one, some from way back- since alcohol, bars, and prostitutes aren’t the backdrop anymore, the old familiar faces take their place. And New York’s the same cess-pit it’s always been, so if nothing else, home is still a place you can hang your hat, no matter what kind of shape it’s in.