{"id":1716,"date":"2016-07-05T16:04:30","date_gmt":"2016-07-05T23:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1716"},"modified":"2017-12-18T08:30:59","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T16:30:59","slug":"review-the-sins-of-the-fathers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/05\/review-the-sins-of-the-fathers\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Sins of the Fathers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The Sins of the Fathers<\/a> by Lawrence Block<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But one thing I said about his Keller series is also true for Matthew Scudder: \u201cBlock\u2019s gifted at matching his prose style to the personality of his character. \u201c<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 2016, 40 years since The Sins of the Fathers<\/em> 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\u2019s burnt-out and washed up, but, in his own words, \u201cIf I didn\u2019t [regard suicide as a sin] I probably would have killed myself years ago.\u201d That prose style I mentioned doesn\u2019t hit the reader over the head with angst- you get out of it however much you want.<\/p>\n

This is your basic detective procedural, with enough lurid details to be pulpy but just enough moralizing to avoid lasciviousness. That\u2019s a fine line to straddle, and it\u2019s no wonder Block has won all those writing awards. This is, apparently \u201cUrban Noir,\u201d a lable which strikes me as unnecessarily redundant, but then you can\u2019t call it \u201cmodern\u201d to differentiate 1970s New York from the 1930s, I guess.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read a lot of Lawrence Block over the course of my own 40 years (I\u2019m older than that but didn\u2019t start reading him on day one, obviously) but for some reason never got around the the Scudder novels. But there\u2019s 17 more to go– I expect they\u2019re all good reads like this one; the hard part\u2019s going to be finding a way to write 17 more unique reviews.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: The Sins of the Fathers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-rG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1717,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions\/1717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}