The streets get meaner

Early in “All the Flowers Are Dying,” the newest Matthew Scudder novel, the unlicensed private detective briefly sums up his literary life: “It had been over thirty years since I put in my papers and retired from the NYPD, and shortly thereafter I’d retired as well from my role as husband and father, and moved from a comfortable suburban house in Syosset to a monastic little room at the Hotel Northwestern. I didn’t spend much time in that room; Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon, around the corner on Ninth between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth, served as a combination of living room and office for me. I met clients there, I ate meals there, and what social life I had was centered there. I drank there, too, day in and day out, because that’s what I did back then.”

This seemingly extraneous bit of back story is as good an example as any of the ingenuity, some might say deviousness, of Scudder’s creator, Lawrence Block. The use of specific locations should tip readers who are new to the series that the novel will have as much to say about Manhattan’s mean streets as Raymond Chandler’s books have to say about ours. Additionally, newcomers will suppose correctly that something pretty awful must have happened to Scudder way back when, sluicing his slide into alcoholism, and that over three decades other things must have happened for him to step far enough from the brink to look backward with objectivity. (For full details, there are 15 previous novels worth perusing.)

For Scudder’s fans, the paragraph serves as a reminder that their hero has been aging in real time, as is appropriate for a character who has remained consistently, believably human since sipping his first bourbon and coffee and solving his first murder in the 1976 novel, “The Sins of the Fathers.” It may also call to mind some of the series milestones, particularly the excellent 1982 entry, “Eight Million Ways to Die,” which closes with the detective at an AA meeting, finally announcing, “My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic.”

Scudder’s major step toward self-redemption made a satisfying close for the novel, but it posed a problem for Block: What to do for an encore? It took the normally prolific author another six years to realize that he could continue the series by having Scudder search for “something to put in the empty places alcohol used to fill.”

For the last 10 novels, the still-sober detective has been doing just that, eventually establishing a nuclear family of sorts by marrying a former call girl, now the proprietor of an antique shop, forming a brotherly bond with a likable, if murderous, Irish bar owner and unexpectedly becoming a second father to a clever, good-hearted young African American who audits classes at NYU when he isn’t assisting in crime-solving. To keep the Scudder saga tense and edgy, and maybe to make it clear that he’s not writing cozies, Block has countered his hero’s personal progress with a gallery of molesters, tormentors and homicidal maniacs, all as chilling as they are fully realized, whose methods of operation have grown more appallingly vicious and ugly with each book.

In the last series entry, “Hope to Die” (2001), a diabolical villain performed acts of such depravity he made Hannibal Lecter look like a Dick Tracy reject. Even worse, the maniac was so cunning that the best Scudder could do was battle him to a draw. In “All the Flowers Are Dying,” this disturbing serial killer known only by pseudonyms with the initials AB (a tribute to his ideal, the macabre artist Aubrey Beardsley) returns to town with a plan to make the detective pay for his previous interference.

Block, who couldn’t write a dull scene even if he tried to, is in fine form here as he threatens to destroy everything his heroic but always human sleuth has struggled to create. He takes his sweet time establishing the setup, shifting smoothly from Scudder, engaged in an intriguing investigation of a friend’s mysterious new lover, to the sociopath AB in Virginia, witnessing the execution of a stranger that he has successfully framed for rapes and murders he himself committed.

When AB hits the Big Apple and begins his cat-and-mouse routine with Scudder, Block’s conversational style quickens, keeping us riveted to the story while misdirecting us from clearly presented but cleverly disguised portents of things to come. A few words of warning: Those with a low tolerance for minutely detailed sadomasochistic behavior may want to skim past several of AB’s murders. And, considering the extraordinarily suspenseful final events leading to the confrontation between the detective and his stalker, those with weak hearts may want to try some other novel altogether. *