Lawrence Block, Out on the Cutting Edge

crisp meringue & the literary uses of alcoholism

“Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing a point in Spanish.”

Writing hardboiled fiction is (sticking to the world of egg-preparation) like making meringue — fussy, subtle, disaster-prone. Overdo the world-weariness, add in a few too many Chandler-esque descriptions, and the whole thing collapses into self-parody. Even the genre’s masters (Chandler, Hammett, Ellroy) seem, at least half of the time, to be performing a kind of genre karaoke. Thanks to Nate the Great, even preschoolers can hum along (I took a bite of pancake. The telephone rang before I was done chewing.)  

There is, however, one practitioner turning out reliably crisp meringues. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series — twenty books and counting — is both a great crime series in its own right and a case study in how to make use of a genre’s conventions without being suffocated by them. Reading Block — shaking my head along with Scudder at some new depravity; trailing Scudder as he trails a suspect around Manhattan — I experience something akin to watching colorized historic footage: so this is how a hardboiled narrator is meant to sound! Decades of cultural accretion fall away within a single quietly confident paragraph.

One reason for the series’ greatness is easy to put your finger on: it’s Scudder’s alcoholism. In the first few books, which you can safely skip, Scudder — a divorced ex-cop and now unlicensed private investigator — is merely drinking too much. It’s only in the fourth or fifth book that Scudder joins AA and the series finds its groove: nightly church basement meetings; the siren songs of once-beloved bars; the constant need to explain that no, really, a Coke will be fine. 

What Scudder’s alcoholism does, literarily, is complicated. For one thing, it goes a long way toward solving an endemic problem of the crime series, which is: the detective’s lack of personal involvement with any particular case. Once an author gets through with imperiling his detective’s nearest and dearest, how is he to maintain a sense of personal urgency about this missing actor or that murdered lawyer? The investigator himself can only be hunted (I’m watching you, detective!) so many times. Usually, by book three or four, a feeling of case-of-the-week interchangeability has crept in: the detective, despite his protestations of really being haunted by this one, has ceased to care — and so have we.

But Scudder’s alcoholism gives the books a meta-plot (will he fall off the wagon and thus destroy his life?) and his investigations a meta-urgency: he needs to focus on each case because idleness, for an alcoholic, inevitably leads to drink. The witness interviews, the leads followed well past the point of rationality, become recovery steps in their own right. Scudder is habitually anti-entrepreneurial about the matter of compensation (“When it seems to me that your thousand bucks is used up I’ll ask you for more money, and you can decide whether or not you want to pay it”). Payment is extraneous. He solves crimes the way a man waiting in an oncologist’s office solves crossword puzzles: they keep his mind from torturing itself.

But what Scudder’s alcoholism does, at a more granular level, is to tune the books’ voice. The disease gives a reason for — and establishes the range of — Scudder’s particular location on the hardboiled spectrum. To be an alcoholic is, both as a matter of practice and of doctrine, to be humbled. It’s hard to get too inflated a sense of your own efficacy when you’ve been hospitalized repeatedly by a beverage. Thus does Scudder’s weary, self-skeptical voice (“I talked a little about the search for Paula Hoeldtke and about my work in general. I said it wasn’t much like her genteel English mysteries”) feel earned. He sounds exhausted and embarrassed but not because he’s imitating Chandler imitating Hammett imitating Hemingway. He sounds that way because being an alcoholic — surrendering to the bromides and meetings and sponsor check-ins — is exhausting and embarrassing.

Being an alcoholic, curiously, does for Scudder what alcohol does for a civilian: it lifts him an inch or two above his ordinary concerns. And conveying this distance — this state of both caring about the solution to a crime and knowing that it’s ultimately trivial — turns out to be one of the hardboiled voice’s great remaining uses. In Out on the Cutting Edge (the seventh book, and a characteristically excellent one) Scudder finds himself investigating a missing woman, and dating that woman’s former neighbor, Willa. One night Scudder and Willa are in bed (Block is mercifully tactful in writing about sex), and chatting about how the case is going.

“We were in her bedroom, stretched out on her bed, a Reba McIntyre tape playing in the kitchen. Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing a point in Spanish.”    

The greatness of that second sentence — its quintessential, irresistible Scudder-ness — comes down to two words: a point. Listen to that sentence with those words cut out of it: 

“Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing in Spanish.”

Without a point the argument becomes mere set decoration, the verbal equivalent of a dog barking in the distance. But with those words — loud voices arguing a point in Spanish — it becomes a sly joke, a mini-lesson in philosophy. They’re arguing a point — litigating and re-litigating some narrow grounds for disagreement. And they’re doing so in a language that Scudder doesn’t understand. It feels like the blazing center of the universe to them; it sounds like background noise to the neighbors. 

This double-ness is precisely how Scudder regards his own cases, his own urgent-seeming business — and this is what gives Block’s books their cool, compulsive energy. The details matter to Scudder — he wouldn’t be so dogged and effective a detective if they didn’t — but he recognizes too that in the broader wreckage of his life, in the pitiless churn of the city (Eight Million Ways to Die is the name of another good one), they don’t ultimately amount to much.

You might cry at this recognition (as Scudder does only once, so far as I can remember). You might laugh (though Scudder is more of a wry smiler). You just can’t drink.