DEAD MEAT
The victim was a savagely butchered young Greenwich Village hooker. The accused killer was the homosexual youth who was her roommate. When the suspect hanged himself in his cell everybody was happy.
…except Matt Scudder. Scudder was being paid to find out the truth about the dead pair of unlikely lovebirds…no matter how many people it hurt, how many reputations it destroyed, how many seething secrets it exposed.
Matthew Scudder is an ex-cop who is now a private investigator. He won’t call himself a private investigator, because they require licenses and file tax returns and whatnot, and he doesn’t want to bother with any of that, in lieu of drinking and getting by on doing “favors” for “friends” for which he is paid under the table.
How did he get to this fallen state? A few years back, when Scudder was still on the force, two punks held up the bar Scudder was drinking at off duty, killing the bartender in the process. Scudder followed them out and shot them both, but one his bullets ricocheted and killed seven-year-old Estrellita Rivera. Scudder resigned from the force, left his family, and crawled into a bottle.
The Sins of the Fathers, as the title suggests, is entirely infused with religious themes, and while I’m no theologian, I’ll comment on this a bit. It isn’t just Scudder who’s fallen–in his universe, colors run from dark grey to black. But Scudder (and maybe the universe he inhabits) seems to draw distinctions similar to the Catholic concepts of venial and mortal sins. Some money under the table or a little infidelity, well, everyone does it. Murder, however, is a mortal sin and must be paid for in kind.
The Reverend Vanderpoel speaking to Matthew Scudder:
“Do you believe in good and evil, Mr. Scudder?
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you believe that there is such a thing as evil extant in the world?”
“I know there is.”
There are things that are absolutely evil, murder being one of them. But good luck figuring out what’s absolutely good. Most actions fall into the grey area. And I know I’m repeating myself, but in The Sins of the Fathers, the area is dark grey.
The book’s view of organized religion, personified by the Reverend Martin T. Vanderpoel, is bleak, but the bleakness is somewhat mitigated by Scudder’s insistence on tithing ten percent of his earnings to churches (he doesn’t care which) even though he’s not a religious man. The institution may be fallen, as are we all, but it does bring some solace to a deeply hurting man. There is no reconciliation of these perspectives, and perhaps there never can be.
Theologians and English majors looking for topics for essays, have at it.
Please don’t let these musings keep you away from the book. Like many great works of crime fiction, The Sins of the Fathers works on multiple levels, and one of those levels is as a 189-page paperback original, first published with an absolutely hideous cover. Mathew Scudder makes a stunning debut, or, more accurately put, Matthew Scudder makes his debut in a stunning novel.
Posts in this series
- Review: The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block (Matthew Scudder #1) (this post)
- Review: Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block (Matthew Scudder #2)
- Review: In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block (Matthew Scudder #3)
- Review: A Stab in the Dark by Lawrence Block (Matthew Scudder #4)
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I prefer the early Scudders; before he got bogged down with Elaine and his surrogate family. Sometimes Elaine can be as annoying as Spenser’s Susan Silverman. Well, maybe not quite.
But the hard-drinking, unlicenced Scudder who does favors for friends and flops out in his loew-rent hotel room after a bender is somehow preferable to the cleaner, antiseptic Scudder of the later stories. The latest, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, apparently takes place during the early rough and tumble times, but I haven’t read it yet.
I’ve yet to get to the Scudder novels–or anything by Block–and I’ve really no interest in ever reading the Spenser novels.
But I can’t help but note you really like your noir heroes to stay single, David. ;)
Whoa, buddy, Spenser is NOT my “noir hero”.
I read the first Spensers when I was about 12 or so, and liked them. Spenser may have been my introduction into the crime/detective genre (unless you include the James Bond and Sherlock Holmes books I’d read even earlier) but after discovering authors like JDM, Ross MacDonald, even Raymond Chandler, I quickly realized he was not the writer they were by any stretch of the imagination. The later Spenser books were almost like short stories padded to 350 page girth with big type and lots of blank spaces. And they were pretty dumb. Spenser almost became a caricature of himself, and his truly cringe-worthy dialogues with Susan were embarrasing.
I don’t know what your comment about my liking my “noir heroes to stay single” means. Care to elaborate?
Because I find the character of Susan Silverman idiotic that gives you some secret insight into my personality?
It’s just that you keep complaining about the notion that this or that crime genre protagonist has a steady gal. It seems like you want them to be fancy free and free for anything fancy, as Irving Berlin might put it. And if you don’t like cringe-worthy dialogues between the hero and a woman, why do you like Travis McGee? Because the woman always dies?
Seriously, dude, what the fuck have you been ingesting?
When did I complain about “this or that crime protagonist having a steady gal”???
Because I think Susan Silverman is idiotic and I prefer the pre-Elaine Scudder books translates to I want my fictional protagonists to be “fancy free and free for anything fancy?” What does that even mean? Is that some sort of cute way of inferring I have a problem with women or I want my “noir heroes” single because I’m gay or something?
Are you from Mars?
Incedentally, I wrote, concerning Gretel’s death in The Green Ripper, how we all sympathized with McGee and wanted him to wreak vengeance on the terrorists who killed her. Does that sound like I have an issue with McGee being involved with Gretel?
I don’t know what you’re implying with these comments/taunts, but you’re making me believe you have a serious problem deciphering the English language. You either twist what someone writes beyond recognition or simply pull ideas out of your ass.
How does your “significant other” resist the temptation to strangle you every day? Or do you tone down your talent for assholery when you’re talking to him/her?
Okay, you’re clearly very sensitive on this topic, and it’s easy to see why, so let’s drop it.
I’d like to drop you off of the Brooklyn Bridge, head first;-) lol And if Parker happened to be striding along at the time, he’d undoubtedly help me!
I am STILL trying to decide if you’ve ever read a single Parker novel. :)