Review: A Short Scudder Mystery Beginning In A Bar
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 27, 2014
Out the Window is a terrific Matt Scudder short by Lawrence Block.  Scudder is a former NYPD detective who tried to stop a robbery when he was off duty, but his shot went wide of the target and ended a nine year old girl's journey through life. Scudder fell apart, lost his family, made friends with a bottle of scotch and then another bottle of scotch.  He picks up cases as a private op here and there.In this story, he frequents a bar where Paula works, Paula who sometimes walked through her shift "like a ghost through walls."  Sometimes she had a brittle smile with tabs of amphetamines behind it.  This career probably wasn't why she came to New York:  "You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee."Paula lived on the seventeenth floor and sometime after four she swung out of a high window and four seconds later there wasn't enough left of her to perform an autopsy on.  "They scooped her up with a spatula and a sponge and then they hosed it all down."With her apartment locked and the chain on, the cops call it suicide, but her sister doesn't like it and hires Scudder to investigate.Yes, it's a locked room mystery, but it is told with wit and depth and good old fashioned storytelling skills.  Bring on some more of this stuff.  It's good.