rachelmanija | Entries tagged with author: block lawrence

scioscribe mailed me this book a while back, which has been lurking on my shelves until the moment when I felt like reading "the butt knife book."

Lawrence Block wrote some trashy lesbian pulp novels under the pseudonym of Jill Emerson when he was knocking out pseudonymous pulp. Getting Off, rather inexplicably, was a revival of the pseudonym written in 2011 for Hard Case Crime. Possibly he just wanted a Hard Case Crime cover with a butt knife. (Understandable.)

The protagonist is a young, gorgeous, hot serial killer who fucks men and murders them immediately afterward. Before she got into the habit of ALWAYS killing after fucking, there were five men she fucked who she didn't kill for various reasons, mostly because circumstances intervened to prevent her. She didn't keep track of them at the time, but when the book opens, she's decided that she really ought to keep her perfect fuck/kill record by tracking them down and killing them.

This plus Block's snappy writing would have made a fun pulp novelette. Unfortunately, it's a full-length book and not even a particularly short one. It feels very padded. There's only so many murders of douchey dudes you can read about in a sitting. It's like eating an entire box of Sees chocolates in a sitting, if they're all the same one and it's not even your favorite.

My other problem with the book is her motivation, which is that her father was raping her for her entire childhood, she eventually kills him, and after that murder gives her an erotic thrill. There isn't a ton of detail on the child rape but even a little is more than I wanted. I'd have preferred that either there's no trauma and she kills people because she's a homicidal maniac, or that she thought the world had too many assholes and she was on a mission to thin them out, or really almost anything other than child rape. That's a realistic explanation but it's otherwise not remotely a realistic book.

The lesbian angle comes in about three-quarters of the way in, when she falls for another woman who is totally fine with murdering. Unfortunately, by then I was pretty done with the whole thing.

Not one of Block's better books but its existence is probably worthwhile given that it brought us all the butt knife.

BEHOLD THE BUTT KNIFE!

tool_of_satan sent me a few Matthew Scudder novels as part of a giant package, thanks Dan, and after gobbling them down in a sitting, I ran to the library, checked out more, and read those. Then, as if I had eaten too much junk food, I felt vaguely nauseated.

When I was in high school, I enjoyed Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr “Burglar” novels, light-as-a-bubble capers featuring a gentleman jewel thief and a lot of banter. The Matthew Scudder novels are much darker, and I think I only read one or two of those.

Scudder is an alcoholic private eye, first actively drinking and later a sober member of AA. The portrayal of addiction and the work of sobriety is convincing and thoughtful, and that and mortality are the main and best themes of the series. Block’s dialogue is smooth, stylized, and often witty, and the prose and pacing give each book that hard-to-put-down quality.

Unfortunately, after reading a bunch in a row, I became increasingly put-off by the characters, both major and minor: minor characters for being stereotypical, and major characters for being sexist, racist, and smug. I am ninety percent sure that Matt and Elaine are not meant to come across as sexist, racist, and smug, but read enough of the books in a short enough period of time and they do.

These sorts of crime novels have limited roles for characters: criminals, cops, colorful local color, victims, detectives, friends and associates of the detectives, and people who are interviewed by the detectives. But given that, there’s no reason for, say, women to only appear as hookers but never as hackers.

( Pimps, hookers, criminals, victims, and white men )

This rant could have so easily been avoided. If Block had even, for instance, thrown in a couple black cops, a tough woman or two, and avoided the "racism = wit" and the horrendous "I will make my female and black characters voice my own sexist and racist opinions" stuff, I would undoubtedly still be reading these books and have even recced them to people who like that kind of thing.

It’s too bad. In many ways Block is a very fine craftsman. I hope that the Burglar books would hold up better – I seem to recall women having more active roles in them – but I’m scared to check.

ETA: Spoilers for latest Burglar book in comments.

A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

Getting Off, by Lawrence Block

Matthew Scudder novels, by Lawrence Block

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