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| Lawrence Block |
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Recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder first appeared in 1976 in The Sins of the Fathers, but initially the novels in which he featured did not follow any chronological order. The series was supposed to conclude in 1982, with Eight Millions Ways to Die, which ends with Scudder introducing himself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. However, thanks to a promise made to an editor friend, the adventures of the former cop who works as an unlicensed investigator continued. In fact, one of Block’s masterpieces came out in 1986, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, while in 1991 his A Dance at the Slaughterhouse won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel. The sixteenth title in the series, All the Flowers are Dying, was published in 2005. Six years later came A Drop of the Hard Stuff, a long flashback in which Scudder, sitting at a table in Grogan’s Open House, before a Waterford tumbler full of club soda, tells his old friend Mick Ballou about Jack Ellery, one of his boyfriend friends from the Bronx, who died in the early 80s. Scudder and Ellery’s lives had taken different paths – the latter had become a cop, the former a thief – but they met up again in AA. Ellery had begun the Eighth Step of AA’s Twelve Step Program: finding and apologizing to people he has wronged in the past. The Ninth Step is dedicated to making amends for those wrongs. But someone silenced Ellery with two bullets to the head to get him to stop his confessions. To solve the case, Scudder gets a hold of Ellery’s list, yet the answer lies elsewhere, in new clues and old stiffs that force Scudder (“The true heir of the best of hard-boiled American fiction,” according to Gianrico Carofiglio), to come to terms with the truth.
Lawrence Block (1938, Buffalo) began his writing career publishing porn paperbacks in the 1950s under a pseudonym. The first of his “own” work to appear was the 1957 story You Can’t Lose. The prolific New York-based writer is best known for two long-running series featuring, respectively, Matthew Scudder, a recovering alcoholic and private investigator, and gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, who was played on the big screen by Whoopi Goldberg, in Hugh Wilson’s Burglar. Over the years he has written for television and cinema, and co-wrote the screenplay for Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, presented at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Block’s various pseudonyms include Chip Harrison, Paul Kavanagh, Lee Duncan, Sheldon Lord, Andrew Shaw, Jill Emerson, Anne Campbell Clark and Lesley Evans. |
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07/12/2011 ore 16:00
Jardin de l'Ange |
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