A Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It does.
That won’t have made any sense unless you read my review of the previous Scudder novel, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse. But don’t worry, I’ll explain it to you: I ended by saying “we’ll just have to see if the next book gets nastier, dances faster.”
There have been milestones in this series of books, some of them obvious, some of them more like mood changes or shifts in tone. The obvious one was when Matt stopped drinking and starting going to AA. And then there was the time he decided to kill a man. And here, we’ve hit another one. They’re coming more frequently, these shifts. Almost one per book– we’re well out of the formula that paced us though Matt’s early novels.
Which is not to say we still don’t have violence against women, cases with no clues that Scudder somehow pursues anyway– it’s just that now the violence is varied and Matt’s resourcefulness is as much other people as it is his own doggedness. TJ is back, Matt’s girlfriend plays a part- and the people who don’t help? Block shuffles them out of the picture, out of the country. These Scudder novels, as they get bloodier, are getting tidier too.
I say that, but then then hacking scene in the hotel room went on longer than I thought was necessary, and I don’t know that I needed the end with him and his girlfriend playing Gift of the Magi (they’re words, not mine).
But that’s okay, I guess. Matthew Scudder is becoming a human being, not just a detective novel trope. And it only took ten novels.
Still seven to go.