![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/A-DROP-OF-THE-HARD-STUFF.jpg\" "\\"A")
<\/a> Lawrence Block\u2019s Matt Scudder, who has walked down many a mean Manhattan street, notices a shop full of tourist gewgaws on this particular one.\u00a0 Back when he was a cop, back when he was still drinking, he bought a suit in that location, a clothing store that catered to cops. \u201cSomething\u2019s there, and then it\u2019s not,\u201d he observes \u2013 the shop is gone, in the past, like his job, his drinking and the premise of this novel.<\/p>\nScudder doesn\u2019t sit around in bars much anymore, but one night he\u2019s sitting with someone Scudder fans will remember in a place they will recognize \u2013 Mick Ballou, in Grogan\u2019s Bar.\u00a0 Grogan\u2019s is now an upscale bar in the trendy meatpacking district, and Mick is a career criminal gone corporate.\u00a0 When Mick asks whether Scudder has ever wondered what if his life had taken another path, Scudder answers with a tale that takes us into his past for 306 pages.<\/p>\n
He starts with his old neighborhood and a kid he knew named Jack Ellery.\u00a0 He lost track of the kid, and years later he catches him in a line-up from the cop side of a one-way mirror.\u00a0 The guy gets out of that one but spends time in prison.\u00a0 Somewhere near the first year of his sobriety, Scudder runs into the guy at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where \u201cThere\u2019s no charge for the seats,\u201d but that\u2019s because \u201cyou pay for them in advance.\u201d<\/p>\n
They took two different paths \u2013 and Ellery\u2019s been sober longer.\u00a0 This time period is full of tension in Block\u2019s seminal series, as Scudder transitions to sobriety. Block wrote some of the best books during Scudder\u2019s fictional struggles, and this one stacks up well against the best of those.\u00a0 Ellery has gone gungho for the program, working with a \u201cstep Nazi\u201d sponsor who is pushing him through the AA steps of sobriety.\u00a0 He wants to engage Scudder, but Scudder isn\u2019t much for socializing; he avoids Ellery at meetings and manages to miss his calls.<\/p>\n
Then the guy ends up dead.\u00a0 Scudder ends up taking on the sponsor as a client, because the sponsor thinks he pushed Ellery too hard on the step where the alcoholic makes restitution if he can \u2013 the past revisited.\u00a0 The sponsor thinks that someone Ellery tried to make things right with murdered him.\u00a0 Scudder takes a trip through the dead man\u2019s past, looking for the guy he did wrong who did him in.<\/p>\n
The trip takes us into the past as well, a place where things were that no longer are: pay phones and a pocket full of quarters, single-room occupancy hotels and phantoms that threaten Scudder\u2019s tenuous sobriety.\u00a0 A master of the hard-boiled genre, Block brings double tension to Scudder\u2019s journey \u2013 will he find the murderer? Will he drink again? Not the least of the appeal here are the hints of Scudder\u2019s intuitive process, where things that appear on the edge of his attention creep into consciousness on the way to his conclusions.\u00a0No one writes this stuff better; no one has done it more often than Lawrence Block. \u00a0 \u00a0A Drop Of the Hard Stuff <\/em>will satisfy fans as well as first-timers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before he roared off on a motorcycle, in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes, Bob Moyer left us a review of a book by and old favorite. By Robert Moyer A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF. By Lawrence Block. Mulholland Books. 319 pages. $25.99 Lawrence Block\u2019s Matt Scudder, who has walked down many a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[109,110,27,53],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mysteries","tag-lawrence-block","tag-matthew-scudder","tag-mystery","tag-robert-moyer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}