I’ve since become friends with Howard Mandel, the jazz authority, but hadn’t yet met him when he got in touch through my agent; Howard was promoting a local jazz festival, and thought a short jazz-oriented piece from me, featuring Matt Scudder, might provide a nice highlight for the festival program. “The Night and the Music” was the result, more a vignette than a story, but I liked the way it turned out, and the sense it provided of Matt and Elaine and their particular part of the city. Over the years, it’s come to be my performance piece; I tent to trot it out when a short reading is called for.
The next three stories are similar in structure. In each, Scudder looks back on an incident in the past, from his days first as a patrolman and then a detective with the NYPD. In “Looking For David,” it’s the killer’s motive which only comes to light years later, when Matt and Elaine encounter him in Florence. “Let’s Get Lost,” its title drawn from Chet Baker’s haunting song, recalls an ex-officio bit of police work, dating back to when Matt was a married cop and Elaine his hooker girlfriend. And “A Moment of Wrong Thinking” puts the spotlight on Vince Mahaffey, the veteran plainclothes officer with whom Matt was partnered in his early days in Brooklyn. There are references to Mahaffey in several of the novels, but this gives us a closer look at him.
All three of these stories appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
“Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen” was inspired by the final episode of The Sopranos, and was written to be the text of a limited-edition broadside produced by Mark Lavendier. Aside from that appearance, it is published here for the first time. Like “The Night and the Music,” it’s more a vignette than a story, but chronicles an important and perhaps surprising development in Ballou’s life. (Though Elaine swears she saw it coming…)
Finally, “One Last Night at Grogan’s” brings Matt and Elaine Scudder together with Mick and Kristin Ballou for an evening rich in nostalgia and revelation, one more night with music. The story was written specifically for inclusion in this volume, and has never appeared anywhere before.
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Lawrence Block, The Night and The Music
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