TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE

Second of the publisher's hardcover reprints of the early Matt Scudder novels. In The Sins of the Fathers (1992/1976), Stephen King waxed on about the alcoholic p.i.'s cases; this one comes with an equally flattering introduction by Jonathan Kellerman, though the story's not as good—a relatively pat, if pungently saturnine, tale of blackmail and murder. As with many reprints of aged paperbacks (e.g., Bill Pronzini's Carmody's Run, p. 554), period-piece value outweighs the literary here. This Scudder is very 70's; boozing his days and nights away; casually bribing cops for the price of a "hat" ($25); willing—thanks to his (and the era's) ignorance about child molestation—to let a pederast go free. The case itself has a classic setup: A small-time hood hires Scudder to guard a package; when the hood turns up dead, Scudder opens the package to find four envelopes, three of them holding blackmail evidence—one on an "architectural consultant" with pockets deep enough to have bought his daughter off a manslaughter charge; another on a society wife with a secret prostitute past; the third on a would-be state governor with a yen for young boys. The fourth envelope contains $4,000 and a request that Scudder find the hood's murderer among the three. The p.i. visits each suspect, pretending to be their new blackmailer. Soon, two near-miss attempts—by car and by knife—are made on his life; then one suspect kills himself: case closed? Scudder thinks so, until an unexpected third attack sends him on a drunken bender and onto the trail of suspect number two: case closed? Not likely, in Scudder/Block's darkly ironic world. More than paperback hack work, but special only to die-hard Scudder fans—and for glimmers of what was to come.