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The 1992 novel Dance At The Slaughterhouse (amazon.com | amazon.ca), authored by the eminent crime fiction writer Lawrence Block, features his series character Matt Scudder, a recovering alcoholic private eye living in NYC. This was my first Lawrence Block novel, though it certainly won't be my last -- he's an excellent author and Scudder as a character is also great.
Scudder's recovery from alcoholism [and his relationship with his AA sponsor] features prominently in this story. In fact, Scudder hits an AA meeting at least daily or every ten pages in the novel. I paid careful attention to this intriguing character trait, since I've always been interested in how addictions factor into literary characters and how closely those addictions may have been mirrored in the author's own life. (Robert B. Parker's private eye Spenser dances often with a deep love of whiskey, and Parker's police chief detective character Jesse Stone is an outright alcoholic who battles his addiction daily, and usually without success (Jesse Stone's character was first brought to the small screen by Tom Selleck in Stone Cold (and shot on the Nova Scotia coast, actually; B and I ate dinner next to Selleck at a local restaurant last month during filming of the most recent made-for-TV Stone novel)).
With all that in hand and taken with my personal interest in spirituality, the following excerpt from Slaughterhouse really popped out at me. It underlines what for me has been a motivation for my own petty past addictions. In this scene, Scudder is having an all-nighter with an Irish mobster named Mick. Mick has been pounding back the Irish whiskey all night while Scudder has limited himself to Cokes and coffee. After several hours of conversation, they start talking about a sort of aha moment that they've both experienced. A sort of glimpse into the ultimate reality of the universe. And in this case, the experience sounds like some sort of confession on the part of the author. I wonder if I wrote to Lawrence Block he would confirm it for me.
Scudder's recovery from alcoholism [and his relationship with his AA sponsor] features prominently in this story. In fact, Scudder hits an AA meeting at least daily or every ten pages in the novel. I paid careful attention to this intriguing character trait, since I've always been interested in how addictions factor into literary characters and how closely those addictions may have been mirrored in the author's own life. (Robert B. Parker's private eye Spenser dances often with a deep love of whiskey, and Parker's police chief detective character Jesse Stone is an outright alcoholic who battles his addiction daily, and usually without success (Jesse Stone's character was first brought to the small screen by Tom Selleck in Stone Cold (and shot on the Nova Scotia coast, actually; B and I ate dinner next to Selleck at a local restaurant last month during filming of the most recent made-for-TV Stone novel)).
With all that in hand and taken with my personal interest in spirituality, the following excerpt from Slaughterhouse really popped out at me. It underlines what for me has been a motivation for my own petty past addictions. In this scene, Scudder is having an all-nighter with an Irish mobster named Mick. Mick has been pounding back the Irish whiskey all night while Scudder has limited himself to Cokes and coffee. After several hours of conversation, they start talking about a sort of aha moment that they've both experienced. A sort of glimpse into the ultimate reality of the universe. And in this case, the experience sounds like some sort of confession on the part of the author. I wonder if I wrote to Lawrence Block he would confirm it for me.
Not long before dawn he said, "Matt, would you say that I'm an alcoholic?"
"Oh, Jesus," I said. "How many years did it take me to say I was one myself? I'm not in a hurry to take anybody else's inventory."
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