Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
When the main character of a novel has things all figured out, but there’s still half of the novel left to go, it’s hard to buy in. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad in any other kind of story, but when it’s a mystery told in first-person, that lack-of-page-count can kind of make it hard to willingly suspend one’s disbelief.
And then there’s the jaded cynic in all of us who knows better than to accept the first “solution” to come along, even if the main character is willing to accept it. Don’t get me wrong, I like an unreliable narrator, even and especially when that narrator is the main character in the book. But I want that unreliability to stem from good writing, not just from stacking up tropes.
Truthfully, though, that’s not even my biggest problem with Time to Murder and Create. I didn’t like the ending at all. As denouements go, it put heavy emphasis on the “anti” in “anticlimax.” I call myself jaded and cynical, and certainly I wouldn’t be satisfied by a whiz-bag Hollywood-style ending filled with blood and mayhem. But something more than just, well… I don’t want to give anything away. I get the impression Block wrote himself into a corner, and decided to go ‘realistic’ (you know, “gritty”) instead of farcical.
On the other hand, do we really read books like this for the story itself? Or do we devour them for their tone, mood, that aforementioned grit? I guess the latter. This second Matthew Scudder novel’s got all that. And I’ll keep reading them.
It could be the case I’m judging this book against the better ones he wrote later. And yet, by the time he’d written Time to Murder, he’d already written, literally, more than 50 other novels. So it shouldn’t have read like a sophomore effort.