Book Review: "A Drop of the Hard Stuff"

"A Drop of the Hard Stuff" was written by Lawrence Block, who published his first novel in 1958.  Why I haven't read him before is beyond me.  He has written more than 50 books, novels, short stories, non-fiction, you name it.  Again, this book made someones "Best Crime Fiction of 2011" and thus made its way to my library list.

I really liked this book, not because of the crime but because of the characters and the writing.  The protagonist is Matt Scudder, a retired cop, an alcoholic who goes to at least one AA meeting a day and is just short of his one year sobriety mark.  The other main character is AA itself.  Now, I am not a stranger to the world of alcoholics and meetings and the Twelve Step program. But I have never gotten such an amazing, up-close, real depiction of the meetings and the process as I have in this book.  Not in any sort of preachy way, just in a matter-of-fact, this is how we do it, kind of way.  The meetings and the 12 steps are very important to Matt Scudder and several other characters and they become important to us, the reader as well. 

The novel takes place in Manhattan and Block obviously knows his city.  Descriptions of bars, liquor stores, hotels, streets are all finely tuned but gritty at the same time.  "I was tired and was all set to hail a cab until I remembered that it was the heart of the rush hour, and the traffic would be impossible. I didn't want to sit in an unmoving taxi while the lights changed and changed again, but neither was I ready to face the sardine-can crush of the rush-hour subway."  It reads simply yet gets the job done. 

From the beginning of the book, there is an air of sadness about it. The plot is simple but the thought process of Scudder is not.  Everything is colored with his quest for sobriety.  He sees everything, everyone through the haze of fear that he will take a drink. We really feel his desperation to be sober but we also feel the power alcohol has over him.  "One day at a time" was never made more real to me than in this novel, probably because Scudder talks about it more than most alcoholics I personally know.

Eventually pieces fit together and he figures out the mystery of the "random" murder and two other seemingly unconnected killings.  The nice thing about the ending is that unlike most cop/detective/crime novels, it is not a pat ending.  Nothing really gets resolved but it doesn't seem to matter.  We have been part of Matt Scudder's life (as fictional as it is) for a short while and if we have paid attention, we are a little wiser about the struggles of addiction.  Plus we got a good story at the same time. 

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