The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Around ten-thirty the doorman called upstairs to tell her that there was a police officer on his way up. [...] He wouldn't say anything until they were inside the apartment, but by then she already knew. The look on his face said it all."

Lawrence Block's The Devil Knows You're Dead (1993) is the eleventh novel in the Matthew Scudder series, and the sixth one that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. The readers who are into conceptual continuity of Matthew Scudder's life story will appreciate the book even more than I do. There are three main threads in the novel: the criminal plot, the thread focusing on Matt's sobriety, the AA meetings, and his daily struggles, as well the storyline about the women in his life, Elaine and others. I have the feeling that the emphasis on the two "personal" threads is more pronounced than in other novels in the series. Anyway, back to the plot.

A man leaves the luxury apartment in the evening to take care of something, promising his wife to come back soon, and then... The wife learns that he has been killed in an apparently random attack. The Holtzmanns were acquaintances of Matthew Scudder and his significant other, Elaine. A near-homeless Vietnam veteran is charged with the murder; all circumstances of the attack point to him. Yet his brother does not believe he is the killer and hires Matt Scudder to find out the truth. The plot is quite plausible and devoid of ridiculous twists and clichés, perhaps except one: the author resorts to a common literary gimmick:

"Something was playing hide-and-seek in my memory, something I'd heard or read in the past day or two. But I couldn't quite manage to grab on to it..."

To me, the best thing in the novel are three conversations that Matt has with various people. The first one, with the victim's boss, touches on various extraneous topics, such as publishing business and office politics; yes, it could be cut out, yet I learned a lot reading it. The conversation between Matt, the victim's wife, and Matt's lawyer is hilarious: it illustrates various clever ways of making obviously illegal activities appear legal. And, to me, the highpoint of the novel is when Matt's ex-lover explains her decision in the closing section of the story - a desperately sad, yet somehow uplifting paragraph.

On the negative side, despite my supposed wisdom accumulated with old age, I have never been able to understand the author's fascination with Mick Ballou, a recurring character in many Scudder novels and "a boring, stupid creep," to borrow language from Gen Z: Sure, people like this exist and need to appear in fiction, but why come back to the same person time and time again?

Three-and-a-half stars.


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