The Night and the Music
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Lawrence Block’s 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). And it’s Matt Scudder who’s been largely responsible for Block’s lifetime achievement awards: Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), The Eye (Private Eye Writers of America), and the Cartier Diamond Dagger (UK Crime Writers Association).
But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it’s all here, from a pair of late-70s novelettes (Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady) through By the Dawn’s Early Light (Edgar) and The Merciful Angel of Death (Shamus), all the way to One Last Night at Grogan’s, a moving and elegiac story never before published. It was short fiction that kept the series alive on the several occasions when the flow of novels was interrupted, and short stories that took Scudder down different paths and showed us unmapped portions of his world.
Some of these stories appeared in such magazines as Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, and Playboy. The title vignette, The Night and the Music, was written for a NYC jazz festival program; another, Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen, has appeared only as the text of a limited-edition broadside. And the final story, putting Matt and Elaine at a table with Mick and Kristin Ballou in a shuttered Hell’s Kitchen saloon, has its first appearance in this volume.
Several stories look back from the time of their writing, with Scudder recounting events from his former life as a cop, first as a patrolman partnered with the legendary Vince Mahaffey, then as an NYPD detective leading a double life. In Looking for David, Matt and Elaine are on vacation in Florence, where they encounter a man Matt arrested decades earlier; now Matt finally learns the motive behind a brutal homicide.
Along with the eleven stories and novelettes, The Night and The Music includes a list of the seventeen novels in chronological order, and an author’s note detailing the origin and bibliographical details of each of the stories.
Brian Koppelman, the prominent screenwriter and director (Solitary Man, Ocean’s Thirteen, Rounders) and a major Matt Scudder fan, has sweetened the pot with an introduction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This welcome expanded edition of MWA Grand Master Block's 2013 collection of the same name contains the complete short fiction featuring his best-known character, Matthew Scudder. The stories, which run the gamut from Scudder's early years as an informal investigator struggling with alcoholism to his eventual sobriety and marriage, include the powerful "A Candle for the Bag Lady," in which he investigates the seemingly random street killing of a bag lady who for no apparent reason had left him $1,200. Other highlights are "By the Dawn's Early Light," perhaps the best of the series, as well as the gentle and humane "The Merciful Angel of Death," in which patients at an AIDS hospice are suspected of dying sooner than expected. Familiar supporting characters such as Elaine Mardell and Mick Ballou appear throughout, as do the fully realized New York locales of Scudder's world. In an afterword, Block notes he wrote the elegiac final tale, "One Last Night at Grogan's," especially for this volume. This is essential reading for Scudder fans.
