The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In order to write this review of a book I finished reading a few minutes ago, which itself was written in 1976, I had to go back and re-read my reviews for some of his other novels– if only to keep from repeating myself. Lawrence Block is just that kind of consistent, solid writer, that it would be easy to say the same things again and again about how he writes.
But one thing I said about his Keller series is also true for Matthew Scudder: “Block’s gifted at matching his prose style to the personality of his character. “
It’s 2016, 40 years since The Sins of the Fathers was written. By now, the whole alcoholic depressed ex-cop thing has gone from challenging to trite to cliched to trope. But give Block credit for, if not exactly inventing the archetype, or even perfecting it, at least not overusing it. Scudder’s burnt-out and washed up, but, in his own words, “If I didn’t [regard suicide as a sin] I probably would have killed myself years ago.” That prose style I mentioned doesn’t hit the reader over the head with angst- you get out of it however much you want.
This is your basic detective procedural, with enough lurid details to be pulpy but just enough moralizing to avoid lasciviousness. That’s a fine line to straddle, and it’s no wonder Block has won all those writing awards. This is, apparently “Urban Noir,” a lable which strikes me as unnecessarily redundant, but then you can’t call it “modern” to differentiate 1970s New York from the 1930s, I guess.
I’ve read a lot of Lawrence Block over the course of my own 40 years (I’m older than that but didn’t start reading him on day one, obviously) but for some reason never got around the the Scudder novels. But there’s 17 more to go– I expect they’re all good reads like this one; the hard part’s going to be finding a way to write 17 more unique reviews.