When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I didn't want one now, but there are the ones you want and the ones you need, and this came under the latter heading. I poured a short shot into the water glass and shuddered when I swallowed it. It didn't stay down either, but it fixed things so the next one did."

An excellent book about serious drinking! Well, not in the class of, say, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, but then I don't think Lawrence Block aspires to the literary stratosphere. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes truly deserves the mystery/crime literature nominations and awards it received in 1987. Rarely can one encounter more realistic depiction of heavy drinkers' psychological make-up. Reading this novel I felt I knew Mr. Scudder well; he was a real person rather than just a literary character. I did not quite have this feeling when reading other Scudder novels.

Scudder as well as some of his pals are "maintenance drinkers," people who need certain level of alcohol in blood to function as if they were sober:

"'You gentlemen will rush to judgment of the man who drinks a bit,' Keegan said. He took a miniature bottle from a pocket, twisted the cap until the seal broke, tipped his head and drank the whiskey down.
'Maintenance,' he said. 'That's all'"

This may sound sacrilegious to fans of classical crime drama but Mr. Block's writing in Ginmill reminds me of the best of Raymond Chandler. In fact, I think it is better. The writing reflects the general feeling of nostalgia (the novel is framed as recollection of events that happened 10 years earlier), the evocation of times that have long passed. We have a few chandleresque passages:

"Her laughter sounded like someone pouring a sack of broken glass down a staircase. It followed me to the door and out."

The unforgettable scene of nighttime drinking in Billie's apartment and listening to Dave Van Ronk's song would not be out of place in any book of serious literary fiction. Wonderful!

"And so we've had another night
Of poetry and poses
And each man knows he'll be alone
When the sacred ginmill closes."

Unfortunately, Ginmill contains a criminal plot as well, and this layer of the novel is not impressive at all. Matt Scudder has to solve three cases that involve his drinking friends and acquaintances: a murder committed during burglary, a strange stick-up in a bar, and the case of theft of accounting books from another bar. The denouement is particularly weak: in Nero Wolfe's style Mr. Scudder collects all characters involved and announces the guilty parties.

Well, four-and-three-quarter stars for a great novel about alcoholism, two-and-a-half for the mystery/crime storyline makes almost (I am in a good mood)

Three-and-three-quarter stars.

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