A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

This is not the eighteenth Matthew Scudder novel. But it is the nineteenth Matthew Scudder book, and it's not too far from novel-length. (My half-assed cast-off puts it at about 34k words.)

If that's confusing, you may have missed my post a few weeks ago about The Night and the Music, a 2011 collection of all of the Scudder stories to that point. There has been, as far as I know, only one Scudder story since then: this one.

A Time to Scatter Stones was published in hardcover last year by Subterranean Press, and it finds Scudder and his girlfriend Elaine older than we last saw them -- how old, exactly, author Lawrence Block doesn't say, but "pushing seventy" would be fair for Scudder. (From which side? That's another question. [1])

Like a lot of later Block, it's quieter and more elliptical than his earlier books; he wrote a lot of mysteries in the '70s, then a bunch of thrillers, and has settled down to something that still fits in the universe of crime fiction but goes its own way. Scatter Stones is full of conversations, mostly between Matt and Elaine, about various things -- a lot of them circling around addiction and recovery. (Matt has been a recovering alcoholic for over thirty-five years at this point; the plot, such as it is, is driven by a support group Elaine is part of for former sex workers.)

Elaine was a high-class call girl for a long time, retired for a couple of decades at this point. But she's recently started attending a support group for women who worked in prostitution -- informal, without an official name, but mostly called the Tarts. And there, she's met a younger woman, Ellen, who is trying to get out of that life.

Ellen has one client who won't take no for an answer. The guy she knows as Paul is pushy and assumes she will do what he says, in that male way, and she's deeply worried about him. She's already moved out of the apartment he knows, but it's clear he's actively trying to find her. She needs someone to stop him -- and hopes Matt will be that guy.

Now, as I mentioned above, Matt is somewhere fuzzily in his seventies. He's been retired as a cop for forty-plus years and basically retired as a sometimes unlicensed private eye for at least a few years. So his resources aren't what they were. But he's pretty sure he can find one guy and get him to lay off.

That's the core of the plot: Matt does chase after "Paul," and obviously he finds things, or else there'd be no book. But, again, Scatter Stones isn't a thriller. It's more interested in relationships, and there's a particularly...well, quirky, one among Matt, Elaine, and Ellen by the end of the book. Since this is a book driven by conversations, that's entirely appropriate -- and it aligns with the interests we've seen in Block's other new books of the past decade.

All in all, it's the kind of book you'd expect to be published by a small press: a quieter novella in a once-very-popular series, thoughtful and interesting rather than thrilling, by a fine writer who has seemingly left behind the usual concerns of hitting specific markets. It is unabashedly a book for Matthew Scudder fans, in a way the novels generally aren't, but that's just fine: we're the only ones likely to seek it out, and I expect most or all of us will enjoy it when we do find it.

I definitely did. And it's good to see Block still experimenting, still changing things up in his writing. He's even older than Matt -- born in 1938 -- and we all want to believe that we, too, will continue to be vital and interesting when we get that old. 

[1] According to the timeline from the first few books, Scudder had been a cop for about ten years and then off the force for some unspecified time by 1976. That would put his birth sometime in the early '40s at the latest, making him at least 74 in 2019. One Scudder site pegs his birth ito 1939.