I can’t keep up with the slicks like I used to, but those front-section “Readings” in Lewis Lapham’s Harper’s magazine could be pretty memorable.
One sample from the late 1990s I can’t shake had Bruce Springsteen sounding like an English professor — presumably a novelty — as he was quoted trying to understand what would drive a reader to return to the mystery novels of Erle Stanley Gardner again and again. The comfort of traveling that plot-driven groove? The pleasure of something familiar you don’t have to think about much?
I think about it. That’s because I find myself returning again to the crime novels of Lawrence Block. It’s summer, I tell myself. I deserve a break. I’ll get back to the top-flight cultural criticism of Geoff Dyer’s “The Last Days of Roger Federer” when the weather’s cooler.
This is the Matthew Scudder series I’m talking about. Boozy, gritty, even down-and-out. A haunted ex-cop, divorced father of two, living alone in a Manhattan hotel room when the city was a far different place. Base human nature was a bit more in flower, you might say.
He’ll seek shelter from it in the occasional church pew — preferably empty, preferably Catholic, as they tend to keep later hours — just sitting there after tithing out of his halfway ill-gotten gains.
The lingering — in coffee shops, in diners, in bars till closing time — is a big part of the appeal. The leisurely pace. It can almost be read as a lament for the disappearance of downtime from American life.
When I last encountered him in “Eight Million Ways to Die,” Scudder was drinking coffee by the gallon and hitting A.A. meetings. Now, in “When the Sacred Ginmill Closes,” published in 1986 but set in 1975, his coffee is more likely to have bourbon in it. “A bourbon drinker’s a gentleman,” he’s told. Those were different times.
And when was the last time anyone invoked Dave Van Ronk? There’s the book’s title, and then there’s a scene of late-night record spinning, with our hero, stunned, moved, taking in the 1973 lyrics to “Last Call,” which appear in full.
In part: “I broke my heart the other day. / It will mend again tomorrow. / If I’d been drunk when I was born / I’d be ignorant of sorrow.”
As Scudder’s friend puts it, “Jesus.”