The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I wondered whether it was worse for men to do the wrong things for the right reason or the right things for the wrong reason. It wasn't the first time I wondered, or the last."

The Sins of the Fathers (1976) is the first novel in Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series. It is a really good book and I am still not sure which way I will round the 3.5-star rating: towards just 'good' or rather 'very good.'

Matthew Scudder, an ex-cop, an excellent ex-cop, according to his past supervisor, makes his living as a sort of private detective - not an officially sanctioned one, though. He does "favors for people", and they give him gifts in exchange. He is also an alcoholic, high-functioning one; in other words, he is a maintenance drinker. We meet him when he sits in a bar, drinking coffee spiked with bourbon.

A small businessman hires Scudder to find out why his daughter was killed. The police closed the case because the young man who was apprehended after committing the murder hanged himself in his jail cell. The father have not had any real contact with the daughter for three years; he suspects she might have been a prostitute.

The novel reminds me a little of Ross Macdonald's works: it tells a very human story, a realistic one, where people are not good or bad - they are just human, with all their weaknesses and limitations, with their messed up personal lives, and, yes, with the sins of the fathers in their background. (Fortunately, these are not the usual, cliché sins like the ones employed in every other crime novel.) However, I see two differences between Block's Scudder and Macdonald's Archer: Scudder is a bit too good at human psychology, he just has a bit too much wisdom. Lew Archer is, in this respect, more human. Of course, Scudder's alcoholism balances the humanness. On the other hand, Archer is a bit too much of a straight-arrow guy.

As we all know, the clichés of a crime novel require that the protagonist must have some quirks: here, other than alcoholism, not only do we have Elaine with a heart-of-gold to whom Scudder turns when he needs human contact, but also a predilection which I have not encountered in crime novels before: Matthew likes churches, and compulsively tithes, quite nice amounts.

I like the prose: simple, effective, and evocative. Scudder's conversation with the killed woman's roommate is really well written - the dialogue sounds completely realistic. And one more good thing: Mr. Block presents small-scale corruption as the ubiquitous phenomenon that it really is, as a mechanism that makes world go round. I have just found out that I will round up my rating of

Three-and-a-half stars.


View all my reviews