Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Night and The Music
    The Night and The Music
    The Night and The Music
    Ebook254 pages4 hours

    The Night and The Music

    By Lawrence Block

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Lawrence Block’s 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). And it’s MattScudder who’s been largely reponsible for Block’s lifetime achievement awards: Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), The Eye (Private Eye Writers of America), and the Cartier Diamond Dagger (UK Crime Writers Association).
    But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it’s all here, from a pair of late-70s novelettes (Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady) through By the Dawn’s Early Light (Edgar) and The Merciful Angel of Death (Shamus), all the way to One Last Night at Grogan’s, a moving and elegiac story never before published. It was short fiction that kept the series alive on the several occasions when the flow of novels wass ingterrupted, and short stories that took Scudder down different paths and showed us unmapped portions of his world.

    Some of these stories appeared in such magazines as Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, and Playboy. The title vignette, The Night and the Music, was written for a NYC jazz festival program; another, Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen, has appeared only as the text of a limited-edition broadside. And the final story, putting Matt and Elaine at a table with Mick and Kristin Ballou in a shuttered Hell’s Kitchen saloon, has its first appearance in this volume.

    Several stories look back from the time of their writing, with Scudder recounting events from his former life as a cop, first as a patrolman partnered with the legendary Vince Mahaffey, then as an NYPD detective leading a double life. In Looking for David, Matt and Elaine are on vacation in Florence, where they encounter a man Matt arrested decades earlier; now Matt finally learns the motive behind a brutal homicide.

    Along with the eleven stories and novelettes, The Night and The Music includes a list of the seventeen novels in chronological order, and an author’s note detailing the origin and bibliographical details of each of the stories.

    Brian Koppelman, the prominent screenwriter and director (Solitary Man, Ocean’s Thirteen, Rounders) and a major Matt Scudder fan, has sweetened the pot with an introduction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLawrence Block
    Release dateSep 29, 2011
    ISBN9781937387310
    The Night and The Music
    Author

    Lawrence Block

    Lawrence Block is one of the most widely recognized names in the mystery genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He received the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association—only the third American to be given this award. He is a prolific author, having written more than fifty books and numerous short stories, and is a devoted New Yorker and an enthusiastic global traveler.

    Read more from Lawrence Block

    Related to The Night and The Music

    Related ebooks

    Hard-boiled Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Auto Eroticism

      Nov 13, 2020

      Auto Eroticism
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: David Heska Wanbli Weiden

      Dec 9, 2020

      Little did I know that, in September, just two weeks after the release of my novel, I’d be sitting in my home office in Colorado giving a reading in front of a computer, and that a completely naked eighty-year-old man would appear on the screen. The

      5 min read

    • Article

      Taking Back Control

      Mar 1, 2024

      Taking Back Control
      21 min read

    • Article

      September’s BOOK CLUB

      Aug 4, 2022

      It’s been a decade since Hannah was at Oxford, yet she’ll never forget it. Her room-mate, April, was killed by one of the university porters. Now he’s dead and Hannah wonders if she helped send an innocent man to prison. But if Hannah digs too deep,

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Many Hats Of Kate Atkinson

      Oct 1, 2018

      KATE ATKINSON PAYS CLOSE ATTENTION TO history—and how it repeats itself. In the best-selling writer’s 10th novel, Transcription, an unlikely spy, Juliet Armstrong, receives an assignment that will alter her life forever. With a complicated structure—

      3 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of An Ending

      May 14, 2019

      In Search Of An Ending
      6 min read

    • Article

      Bret Easton Ellis: ‘James And The Giant Peach Changed My Life’

      Jan 14, 2023

      Bret Easton Ellis, 58, is the author of nine books, most recently White (2019), a memoir of culture and politics that describes, among other things, the impact of reading Thomas Tryon’s violent 1971 horror classic The Other when he was seven years ol

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Stupid Classics Book Club

      Apr 23, 2019

      The Stupid Classics Book Club
      11 min read

    • Article

      Penguin Pride.

      Jun 28, 2019

      Penguin Pride.
      16 min read

    • Article

      Dark Star

      Jun 2, 2022

      Dark Star
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jonathan Escoffery

      Dec 15, 2021

      This year, perhaps more than any other in my adult life, I’ve yearned for narratives that promise big things will happen in the lives of the characters they feature. The post A Year in Reading: Jonathan Escoffery appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Brandon Taylor: ‘Writing Is The Most Fun I’m Capable Of Having’

      Jun 3, 2023

      Brandon Taylor writes quickly. “I can type almost as fast as I can think,” he says. The first draft of his debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted Real Life, took him five weeks; last June he challenged a writer friend to a race. The friend had been 30,0

      5 min read

    • Article

      What We’re Reading: Writers And Readers On The Books They Enjoyed In May

      May 24, 2022

      In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they’ve been reading recently. This month, recommendations include Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novels, a guide to writing and some gripping spy novels. Tell us what you’ve been r

      4 min read

    • Article

      The 31 GREATEST BOOKS FOR MEN

      May 1, 2019

      Meet Rob. He’s the manager of a London record shop in which he and his sad friends make top-five lists, talk about mix tapes and obsess over albums by dead blues musicians. Then Rob decides to get in touch with five of his ex-girlfriends to find out

      8 min read

    • Article

      Roz Watkins

      Jul 6, 2023

      My latest book is The Red House. It’s mainly written from the point of view of a young woman, Eve, who survived (and witnessed) a family annihilation when she was just five years old. She saw her fifteen-year-old brother, who she adored, murder her m

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Night and The Music

    4/5

    7 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I had read most of these stories previously, and I have to say they stand up better alone than in a group. However, for the Scudder completist, this collection is a must.
    • 3/5
      Why Do We Read Romance Novels and Crime Fiction: “The Night and the Music” by Lawrence Block “I learned to like the music because I heard so much of it there, and because you could just about taste the alcohol in every flatted fifth. Nowadays I go for the music, and what I hear in the blue notes is not so much the booze as all the feelings the drink used to mask.”

      In the short-story “The Night and the Music” from the collection “The Night and the Music”

      Is that a fact only women read romance novels? I don't buy it. The same way I don’t buy only men read Crime Fiction. If safely exploring the brutal and violent world and the disproportionate threat women apparently face is the motive, perusing academic journals and scientific studies, even TV documentaries, makes more sense than reading stories and literature that feature brutal violence. Is it possible that one of the reasons women (and men for that matter) like reading about human violence and brutality is that it fascinates and even in certain instances titillates? Romance novels sell millions of copies - despite even its fans deriding the atrocious writing. Are the novel's largely female readership using the books as an indirect tool to make sense of (some) women's tendencies to be submissive sexually and willingly degraded by a dominant male? I don't think so. I even conducted a pool on my woman friends, and it’s a “fact”.

      If you're into what-turns-men-and-women-on-fictionwise, read on. If your sensibilities lie elsewhere, don't bother.
    • 4/5
      Great book, well written with excellent characterization. I'm going back to pick up a few others, even the ones I've read before.
    • 4/5
      Really excellent collection of Matt Scudder stories. My favorite, I think, was the one in which Scudder is approached by a lawyer who gives him a check for twelve-hundred dollars, the bequest of a bag lady Scudder didn't know, who had been murdered several weeks before. In his inimitable way, Matt seeks out why he and others might have been given the money and while he has really little to do actively with discovering who committed the murder, he is the instrument of its solution. Very bleak.

      The stories portray different periods of Scudder's career and evolution as a human being. Some have suggested that the last story may be the last in the Scudder series. I would hope not, for Block's genius is quite apparent in this collection
    • 4/5
      A few choice pieces for fans of the Matthew Scudder series about alcoholic ex-cop who does favors for people, investigating, but not a licensed detective. May not give a full picture of the character unless one has read several of the novels. The ending essays in which block traces the history of the series is interesting.
    • 4/5
      There's nothing amazing here, but it is still nice to see Block's old characters again.

    Book preview

    The Night and The Music - Lawrence Block

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1