Fiction’s Matthew Scudder coming to Big Screen

By Dan Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — In a post on this page almost two years ago, I noted that Lawrence Block, master storyteller with a sense of Yiddishkeit and gumshoe charm, has fans all over the world, mostly in North America, where his detective novels have done very well over the years.

Block, who turns 76 in a few weeks, lives on the 12th floor of a building on West 12th Street in Manhattan, and this summer of 2014 he is seventh heaven. Why? Well, among other things, A Walk Among the Tombstones, the tenth book in his Matthew Scudder detective series, is soon to have its Hollywood premiere as a movie starring Liam Neeson. The premiere is set for September 19.

A Walk Among the Tombstones first appeared in print in 1992, and it’s been a long 22-year wait for a film version. Block couldn’t be happier he told me in a recent email.

Universal, the studio that made the film, has recently released a trailer and Block told me three things: “It’s a great trailer, Liam Neeson’s a great Scudder, and it’s gonna be a great movie.”

There are 18 novels in the Scudder series, and A Walk Among the Tombstones was the 10th book.

I asked Larry, who calls me his “landsman,”  if it was important to have read all 18 books to understand the movie and the Scudder character, and he said: “Well, I wrote them in order, but what choice did I have? Scudder is a character who ages in real time, and the events in one book have an influence on succeeding storylines. Even so, many readers report that the books work well in or out of sequence.”

Larry’s favorite book review of the book that is the basis for the movie? A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review, he recalls, wrote: “The next time that friends come to town expecting a personal tour of the real New York City, here’s what to hand them: a subway map, a fistful of tokens, and Lawrence Block’s big bruiser of a crime novel, ‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’.

Larry added: “Nowadays, of course, you’d  give out of town visitors a Metrocard, but the subways still ran on tokens when the book came out.”

I asked Larry, who often appears on TV talk shows and will certainly be doing some publicity for the movie when it opens in September, what’s next in his busy life, and he replied, without missing a beat:

“Well, I’ll turn 76 in a few weeks, and there’s more work to be done!”

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Danny Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan.  He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com