A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block

 

A somewhat different take on combining "funny" and "crime." Probably more successful than the Hiaasen I read last night--which was not Best Hiaasen, this was Very Good Block--though they weren't really going for the same things: Scudder is a Very New York character, and his stories are Very New York stories, which are both very different (even if they're occasionally laugh-out-loud funny) than Hiaasen's Very Florida novels. This book is very late-1980s/early-1990s (copyright 1992, but that's not absolutely dispositive) and there are things that are occasionally jarring, like the AIDS crisis still being a crisis and Donald Trump being thought of as a successful developer, but those are just like artifacts. The story itself is really hardboiled/noir, all twisty and corrupt, there's even a porn film at the center of it--a snuff porn film, but hey--which really kinda feels like a throwback to Chandler. This is a novel after Scudder stopped drinking, so his recovery (lots and lots of AA meetings, apparently in New York, then, you could find one just about any time of day or night) is kinda a central motif, though many of the other recurring characters are present. The novel turns on Scudder being more morally gray than I think he really thought he was capable of, it'd be interesting to read these in order and see whether and how that came to matter; alas, I'm reading these as I find them and thanking the Great Perhaps for the opportunities.