The Devil Knows You’re Dead by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
My least favorite, so far, of the Scudders.
Now, how should we do this, talk about the bad, first, close with the good? Or get the good over with since the whole point of writing bloggy “reviews” is to reflect… and let’s face it, I want to get the reflection done and move on to what I hope is a better next book in the series.
Fine, the latter. Still the same Block, delivering those sentences, those characters, that New York City. (Hey, reviewer, damn with faint praise much?)
I haven’t read many romance novels, so I’m going at this from a citizen-of-culture perspective, replete with having gorged on tropes and memes. The Devil Knows You’re Dead was less mystery, and more what a romance would be like if it was written for people who read gumshoe pulp.
There were two chief sins in this, the 11th Matthew Scudder mystery. One was Block’s sin of tossing in a convenient deus ex machina to “solve” the crime. That sin is not forgivable. I’m trying to forgive it, though, which is why I’m calling this a romance and not a detective story. The guy who gets killed and the effort to solve the crime are really not the point, I guess. And one could say that they’re never the point, that these Scudder books are all about one man’s existential journey. But come on. All that dirt dug up on the victim, and none of it means a thing.
The other sin is forgivable: Matthew cheats on his girlfriend. Not that I think cheating is okay. But this is a romance novel, and we’re supposed to see Matt struggle not with alcoholism, or angst, but instead struggle with being in love. So I get why it’s there. I don’t like it, but I get it.
Looking back over the last few Scudder novels, they seemed to be getting dirtier and nastier. But not quite grittier, which is what pulp is all about, and this book wasn’t dirty or nasty at all. I hesitate to wonder what the next few novels will be like, because, as much as I didn’t like this one much, I still liked the people in it. And I have this fear that Block is going to have to up the ante to recover from The Devil Knows You’re Dead. I’m not looking forward to it.
Except, you know. Of course I am.