Arctic Light

... and I didn't sign up for all these feels!

I remember enjoying these books but I really didn't remember how slow and introspective they are, let alone how much of any given book is a full-on punch in the feelings. Actually, I think what they're reminding me of the most right now is the Vlad Taltos books, maybe because I just read those. But also, they're both books in the action/mystery genre which are also slow-paced meditations on being a decent person in an imperfect world, both with protagonists who are flawed and a little bit criminal, who are striving mostly for minimizing the harm they do, rather than being good. (And who somehow stumble into "decent" by accident anyway.)

My previous times reading this series were haphazard and out of order; I read various books off and on throughout my teens and early 20s, but I don't think I've ever actually sat down and read them through in order (well, okay, this time around, I skipped a couple of the 1970s books because the library didn't have all of them) and this is bringing me a fresh appreciation of how these books have one of those arcs where the protagonist starts out miserable and alone, and slowly accretes a circle of loyal people around him. And I guess we all know how much of a sucker I am for that.

I can't get over how much I love Matt. It's one of those "despite, or even because of his flaws" kinds of things, because in some ways he's terrible (and I don't mean the drinking, I'm really more thinking of things like his corruption and cheating and the like), but he kind of just sneaks past all your defenses and dodges in there and is just so goddamn decent that you can't not just want everything to work out for him.

I love how characters from previous books tend to come back in later books, and I also love how the author has a real knack for capturing real-feeling little emotional moments -- the only specific example I can think of off the top of my head is that thing where you meet someone and sometimes you just click, for no reason either of you can figure out, but there are actually a lot of those types of things in these books, those oddly specific and yet strikingly relatable moments that make you go, "Yes, that feel! I know that feel. I've had that one."

It's also one of those series that makes you feel like this is a world you want to inhabit and people you want to hang around with, even when some of them are terrible, and terrible things are happening. You know, there are some series I've noped out of after a book or two because I found the narrative POV simply unpleasant. And then there are series that really make you feel the author's affection for all the characters, and for people in general, no matter what kind of people they are. This is one of those. There are definitely places where it stumbles, and things I'm uncomfortable with. But also, there are things like ... nearly everyone that Matt is around is openly racist and often sexist and other *ists, but it's interesting to me how even going back to the earliest books, Matt never says those things; the author doesn't put those words in the narrator's mouth or the book's narrative voice, and it's pretty clear, even early on, that Matt is comfortable, and unapologetically so, about associating with people from just about any demographic, even though a lot of the people he hangs around with wouldn't want to hang out with each other. There is also just a sort of background level of, idk, awareness of things like using the right pronouns for people, or what exactly was going on with the AIDS crisis in 1991 and how it was changing, that makes you get the feeling that, while the author probably is not in those scenes, he must, in a pre-internet world, have done what Matt does, hanging around with a lot of different people, actually listening to them.

This is one of the middle books in Block's Matthew Scudder hard-boiled PI murder mystery series. I reread this book recently enough (in the last couple of years) to remember whodunnit, but I read it again this week just to appreciate the intricate murder mystery plotting. It's a very 80s book and particularly 80s in its character archetypes (the recovering alcoholic PI, the call-girl girlfriend, the streetwise teenage sidekick) but it's dated in a way that's mostly charming, and the misdirects/fakeouts in this book are so well done. Mainly I just wanted to take a careful look at what he did and how.

Below the cut I'm going to mention a few highly spoilery technique notes. I'm not going to summarize the plot so much as just mention the things I think it did particularly well. Still, if you like murder mysteries and you like to be surprised, it's worth reading this one unspoiled, because it's very well done.

( Some fairly major spoilers )

So after reading A Long Line of Dead Men and enjoying it, I went and got some more of the Scudder books from the library. I own a couple of random ones, and I've read a lot more, but I haven't read most of them in decades and I've forgotten almost everything. Thus far I've read Eight Million Ways to Die (published in 1982) because I was under the mistaken impression that it was the first book in the series. Turns out it's like book 5, oops. So now I'm moving on to A Time to Murder and Create (1976), which is book 2 (the earliest one in the series that the library had).

Eight Million Ways to Die doesn't have as well-crafted a mystery plot as A Long Line of Dead Men (the mystery, which involves murdered prostitutes, actually feels somewhat random and not very well set up) but the characterization is much better, sharper and more literary with less of a "80s TV movie of the week" feeling to it. It's also got an incredibly wrenching day-by-day description of going through the early days of breaking a severe alcohol addiction. The author is either working off personal experience or read a lot of memoirs. I'm simultaneously taking mental notes for writing Ward, and just really wanting to give the protagonist a hug.

The books are, obviously, quite dated in some ways, but one thing that I find interesting about them is a level of casual background diversity that I wouldn't have expected for books of their era (the ones I've been reading were written between the mid-70s and early 90s). I mean, given that they're hard-boiled crime novels, a lot of it is the kind of diversity that you don't precisely want, but it still interests me that even as far back as the 70s, and maybe earlier, Block populates the background of his world with racially diverse people and gay people and so on. I'm particularly surprised by how many background LGBT characters he has, in an era when you just don't really expect that from genre fiction all that much. And yeah, some of them are prime examples of What You Don't Want, but there's also things like a character's offhand mention that he bought his house from a gay couple and so forth, or the protagonist dropping in on a mostly-gay AA meeting -- it's just a very casual part of the world. There's a trans woman in Eight Million Ways to Die, who is a dead prostitute because of course she is, but I also noticed that she's consistently referred to with female pronouns and, while the way that some of the (non-protagonist) characters talk about her is ... very 80s ... there's also a lot of narrative sympathy for her in the book and, in general, the feel you get from the book is that both the protagonist and the book itself are fine with gender reassignment as a thing. This from a book published in 1982. It's kind of like ... I wouldn't exactly hold these books up as great examples of representation, particularly by modern standards, but Block also clearly recognizes that he and his protagonist live in a world that's full of black people and LGBT people and women, all of whom are just people, and his books reflect that, which I appreciate since it's definitely not a given from a white dude born in 1938.

So yeah, so far I'm finding that Block is a similar author to Dick Francis in that his books are dated but not nearly as dated as I was expecting considering the era in which he was writing. (As opposed to the vaguely similar John D. McDonald books, which I also read and enjoyed back in the day, and tried rereading a couple of years back and ... yeah. Nope. The Suck Fairy has been there big-time.)

The library also had a few of his really early ones from the late 50s and 60s, reprinted with their gloriously cheesy pulp-era covers, so I picked up a couple of those too. I hope that Killing Castro is as amazingly bonkers as the title and premise suggest.