“When Lawrence Block is in his Matt Scudder mode, crime fiction can sidle up so close to literature that often there’s no degree of difference.”
~Philadelphia Inquirer
“One of the very best writers now working the beat. Block has done something new and remarkable with the private-eye novel.”
~Wall Street Journal
“Block’s prose is as smooth as aged whiskey.”
~Publishers Weekly
“One of the most complex and compelling heroes in modern fiction. Thrillers don’t get better than this.”
~San Diego Union-Tribune
“After twenty-five years in the business, Matt Scudder still strolls New York’s mean streets as if he had personally laid the cobblestones.”
~Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
“Matthew Scudder is the kind of mystery anti-hero who turns mere readers into series addicts.”
~Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Much more than a mystery. A book about men, about booze, about New York, by one of the surest, most distinctive voices in American fiction.”
~Martin Cruz Smith
“Scudder is an original and these pages ring with all the authenticity of a blast from a .38.”
~Anniston Star
“Blocks characters, the bar-flies and the cops, are as much flesh and blood as any mystery writer’s working today.”
~Greensboro News and Record
“Consistently tasty and surprising, full of smart, ringing dialogue and multiple textures. If you prefer true grit, Matt Scudder’s your man.”
~Seattle Times
“One of the most hackneyed phrases that reviewers can use is to compare a writer to Chandler or Hammett. Perhaps the time has come to change that benchmark to include Lawrence Block.”
~Book Page
“Block is a rarity, a craftsman who writes about the sleazier aspects of life with style, compassion and wit.”
~Denver Post
The Matthew Scudder Stories
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The Night and The Music - The Matthew Scudder Stories
Copyright © 2011 Lawrence Block. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author or publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
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Version 2011.09.21
Growing Up With Matt Scudder
by Brian Koppelman
Out the Window
A Candle for the Bag Lady
By the Dawn’s Early Light
Batman’s Helpers
The Merciful Angel of Death
The Night and the Music
Looking for David
Let’s Get Lost
A Moment of Wrong Thinking
Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen
One Last Night at Grogan’s
About These Stories…
Contact Lawrence Block
an appreciation by Brian Koppelman
Right around the time I turned fourteen, in 1980, I convinced my parents to let me take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan by myself, so I could go to the Mysterious Bookshop on West 56th Street. And it was there, in Otto Penzler’s place between Sixth and Seventh avenues, that I first met Matt Scudder.
Mysterious was an intimidating place, especially for a bookshop. There was a step down entrance, and a heavy door that swung shut behind you. Once inside, it was dead quiet: no elevator music playing. No friendly info desk. No other customers either. Just a silent bearded guy behind the front counter who had an uncanny (and slightly disturbing) resemblance to Stephen King’s 1970s author photo. I’m telling you, for a place designed to sell books, it was pretty damned intense.
I was mostly reading spy books back then. But on the day I took my maiden solo voyage on the LIRR Port Washington line, I was looking for something else. I just didn’t know what, exactly. Which was a bummer because that meant I was going to have to talk to spooky Stephen King behind the counter, and he was reading and seemed very involved in his book and not at all in the mood to be disturbed by some teenager from Nassau County.
So I just kind of stood around aimlessly until his eyes hovered for a moment above his book. And then I gutted up and asked him for a recommendation.
“What do you like?” he asked.
I mumbled something along the lines of “A bunch of stuff. ”
“You into funny books?”
“Not really,” I said, "I guess I like when it feels like it’s really happening.”
“Oh,” he said, “You might be ready for something hard boiled.”
Hard Boiled. I had never heard the phrase before. But it sounded just right. Especially if it was something I had to "be ready" for.
“Yes,” I said, “give me something hard boiled.”
And he reached up behind the counter and grabbed three books.
“This is what you need,” he said. And he held out the books—The Sins Of The Fathers, Time To Murder and Create and In The Midst Of Death. “They’re by Lawrence Block.”
I paid for them, headed back to Penn Station, caught the next train, found a seat and started reading Sins before the train had even begun to roll.
Fifty-five minutes later, I almost missed my stop.
My mom picked me up from the station, but I don’t think I said two words to her on the drive home; I just kept reading. And I remember walking in our front door, nodding to my sisters and continuing on to my bedroom reading the entire way.
Fake Stephen King had gotten it right. Matt Scudder was, indeed, exactly what I needed.
I blasted through all three books. I’m not sure how I was able to lock into Scudder so hard when our life experience was so far apart—I had never had a drink, had never killed anyone, either on purpose or by accident, had barely kissed a girl—but somehow he made sense to me.
Maybe it’s because there was nothing phony about Matt Scudder. When Matt wanted to drink, he drank. When he wanted to fight, he fought. And if he didn’t want to talk to you, he didn’t. Hell, even if you were his client, he wouldn’t try and charm you, wouldn’t promise to solve your case,
wouldn’t even promise to tell you what he was doing to try and solve it.
Scudder was no innocent. He knew the world was essentially crooked. But that didn’t mean he had to bend to it. He might pay off a cop for information, but he wouldn’t lie to himself about what it meant, and the ultimate price he might have to pay for doing so.
To a teenager like me, just beginning to learn all the ways in which the world presses you to compromise the best of yourself, just starting to figure out that most grown-ups were liars, Matt Scudder’s refusal to play along with anyone else’s bullshit spoke directly to me. And Scudder was such a flawed, broken hero. All the spies I had been reading about were almost superhuman. Scudder was barely hanging on to whatever was left of his humanity, his skills, his character. He knew it. Told the reader about it. And I loved him for it.
I still love him for it. Some time after finishing In The Midst Of Death, I resolved to read every book ever written about Scudder. Unlike almost every other promise I made to myself in my teens, this one I’ve kept. Luckily for me, the books have only gotten better. At some point, consciously or not, Larry Block made a decision to fuse big giant chunks of himself with his character. And so Matt Scudder has aged, has quit drinking, has quit whoring, has quit...has quit almost everything, only to be lured back in again when something makes him angry or invested enough to care. And so I continue to care, even as my visits to the (now downtown) Mysterious Bookshop have become far less frequent, even as my time spent reading fiction has become far less frequent, even as my fourteen-year old self seems further and further away from who I am now.
I have a fifteen year old son. And two weeks back he took his first solo train voyage. This one to Washington DC. He needed a book for the journey. So I walked him over to the bookshelf, pulled down The Sins Of The Fathers and told him, “This is what you need.” He smiled. But not half as much as I did.
The last story in this collection is about Matt and Mick Ballou. Over the past twenty years, their friendship has become the soul of the series and means more to me than any other friendship in fiction. It is the one nod to the romantic that Lawrence Block is willing to give us in the Matt Scudder books. The one nod to possibility, to hope, to brotherhood, acceptance, honor and truth between people. But mostly, there is forgiveness. The very act of those two men sitting across from one another late into the night is forgiveness. The talking, sometimes laughing, sometimes just sitting quietly until the morning light starts leaking in through Grogan’s windows, means that there is a safe harbor for each of us, where no one sits in judgment, where no one condemns, where we can be exactly who we are, ruined, sinful, wracked. They are flawed, Matt and Mick, but they are perfect. And when we spend time with them, we believe we are too.
The Matthew Scudder Stories
There was nothing special about her last day. She seemed a little jittery, preoccupied with something or with nothing at all. But this was nothing new for Paula.
She was never much of a waitress in the three months she spent at Armstrong’s. She’d forget some orders and mix up others, and when you wanted the check or another round of drinks you could go crazy trying to attract her attention. There were days when she walked through her shift like a ghost through walls, and it was as though she had perfected some arcane technique of astral projection, sending her mind out for a walk while her long lean body went on serving food and drinks and wiping down empty tables.
She did make an effort, though. She damn well tried. She could always manage a smile. Sometimes it was the brave smile of the walking wounded and other times it was a tight-jawed, brittle grin with a couple tabs of amphetamine behind it, but you take what you can to get through the days and any smile is better than none at all. She knew most of Armstrong’s regulars by name and her greeting always made you feel as though you’d come home. When that’s all the home you have, you tend to appreciate that sort of thing.
And if the career wasn’t perfect for her, well, it certainly hadn’t been what she’d had in mind when she came to New York in the first place. You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee. We have that sort of greatness thrust upon us. When you’re as young as Paula Wittlauer you hang in there, knowing things are going to get better. When you’re my age you just hope they don’t get too much worse.
She worked the early shift, noon to eight, Tuesday through Saturday. Trina came on at six so there were two girls on the floor during the dinner rush. At eight Paula would go wherever she went and Trina would keep on bringing cups of coffee and glasses of bourbon for another six hours or so.
Paula’s last day was a Thursday in late September. The heat of the summer was starting to break up. There was a cooling rain that morning and the sun never did show its face. I wandered in around four in the afternoon with a copy of the Post and read through it while I had my first drink of the day. At eight o’clock I was talking with a couple of nurses from Roosevelt Hospital who wanted to grouse about a resident surgeon with a Messiah complex. I was making sympathetic noises when Paula swept past our table and told me to have a good evening.
I said, “You too, kid.” Did I look up? Did we smile at each other? Hell, I don’t remember.
“See you tomorrow, Matt.”
“Right,” I said. “God willing.”
But He evidently wasn’t. Around three Justin closed up and I went around the block to my hotel. It didn’t take long for the coffee and bourbon to cancel each other out. I got into bed and slept.
My hotel is on Fifty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth. It’s on the uptown side of the block and my window is on the street side looking south. I can see the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan from my window.
I can also see Paula’s building. It’s on the other side of Fifty-seventh Street a hundred yards or so to the east, a towering high-rise that, had it been directly across from me, would have blocked my view of the trade center.
She lived on the seventeenth floor. Sometime after four she went out a high window. She swung out past the sidewalk and landed in the street a few feet from the curb, touching down between a couple of parked cars.
In high school physics they teach you that falling bodies accelerate at a speed of thirty-two feet per second. So she would have fallen thirty-two feet in the first second, another sixty-four feet the next second, then ninety-six feet in the third. Since she fell something like two hundred feet, I don’t suppose she could have spent more than four seconds in the actual act of falling.
It must have seemed a lot longer than that.
I got up around ten, ten-thirty. When I stopped at the desk for my mail Vinnie told me they’d had a jumper across the street during the night. “A dame,” he said, which is a word you don’t hear much anymore. “She went out without a stitch on. You could catch your death that way.”
I looked at him.
“Landed in the street, just missed somebody’s Caddy. How’d you like to find something like that for a hood ornament? I wonder if your insurance would cover that. What do you call it, act of God?” He came out from behind the desk and walked with me to the door. “Over there,” he said, pointing. “The florist’s van there is covering the spot where she flopped. Nothing to see anyway. They scooped her up with a spatula and a sponge and then they hosed it all down. By the time I came on duty there wasn’t a trace left.”
“Who was she?”
“Who knows?”
I had things to do that morning, and as I did them I thought from time to time of the jumper. They’re not that rare and they usually do the deed in the hours before dawn. They say it’s always darkest then.
Sometime in the early afternoon I was passing Armstrong’s and stopped in for a short one. I stood at the bar and looked around to say hello to Paula but she wasn’t there. A doughy redhead named Rita was taking her shift.
Dean was behind the bar. I asked him where Paula was. “She skipping school
today?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Jimmy fired her?”
He shook his head, and before I could venture any further guesses he told me.
I drank my drink. I had an appointment to see somebody about something, but suddenly it ceased to seem important. I put a dime in the phone and canceled my appointment and came back and had another drink. My hand was trembling slightly when I picked up the glass. It was a little steadier when I set it down.
I crossed Ninth Avenue and sat in St. Paul’s for a while. Ten, twenty minutes. Something like that. I lit a candle for Paula and a few other candles for a few other corpses, and I sat there and thought about life and death and high windows. Around the time I left the police force I discovered that churches were very good places for thinking about that sort of thing.
After a while I walked over to her building and stood on the pavement in front of it. The florist’s truck had moved on and I examined the street where she’d landed. There was, as Vinnie had assured me, no trace of what had happened. I tilted my head back and looked up, wondering what window she might have fallen from, and then I looked down at the pavement and then up again, and a sudden rush of vertigo made my head spin. In the course of all this I managed to attract the attention of the building’s doorman and he came out to the curb anxious to talk about the former tenant. He was a black man about my age and he looked as proud of his uniform as the guy in the Marine Corps recruiting poster. It was a good-looking uniform, shades of brown, epaulets, gleaming brass buttons.
“Terrible thing,” he said. “A young girl like that with her whole life ahead of her.”