Onyx reviews: The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder by Lawrence Block

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 07/16/2023

There have been biographies written about fictional characters. In some instances, the biography is a novel that purports to recount the life of the subject, but in other cases, writers assemble the "known" facts about a fictional character and recast them into a pseduo-biography. Much rarer are autobiographies purportedly written by long-running series characters themselves.

Lawrence Block has been writing about Matthew "Matt" Scudder for nearly half a century, starting with The Sins of the Fathers in 1976, through seventeen novels and a number of shorter works. His fictional story in the novels begins shortly after he quit his job as a NYPD detective. His marriage has failed, he's a more-or-less functional alcoholic, he lives in a hotel and makes money as an unlicensed investigator. Over the course of the series, he evolves and ages. He gets sober, and his attendance at AA meetings while he continues to "help out friends" becomes a running subplot. He also occasionally reflects on incidents from his past life as a cop, but much about his early days remained unknown, until now.

Scudder knows about the novels that have been written about his cases, but he also knows they're fictionalized. Fiction requires a certain structure and symmetry that real life rarely possesses. He's also aware of some inconsistencies in his story from book to book—his birthday, for example, or whether a certain life-altering bullet was fired uphill or downhill. This book isn't really meant to set the record straight. Although he establishes his real date of birth once and for all, he admits there are many things he doesn't remember clearly. Time, alcohol and age have a way of blurring memories. The existing novels, though, speak for themselves for the most part, and he wastes little time revisiting those cases, except for a few momentous incidents.

Scudder is a self-aware writer. He knows he can write (he attributes his advancement with the NYPD in large part to his ability to write incident reports that record what happened in a way that makes readers feel present), but he's not entirely sure why he's writing this account and he questions whether anyone is going to want to read it. It feels like he has begrudgingly agreed to a classroom assignment; however, once he begins, he finds himself remembering or rediscovering things about his early days. He had an older brother, for example, who only lived briefly. Scudder never met him, but he knows that the loss of a child profoundly affected his parents. What comes as a revelation is how that loss also affected him, in ways he's never before considered. His wife Elaine, who is reading what he writes, is astonished to find out about his brother. The fact he's never mentioned him is revealing, she believes.

Authors sometimes create brief or detailed biographies of their characters before they begin to write about them, but this is no five-page summary of a life. Over the course of this 200+ page book, Block—via Scudder—dives deep into a character he probably knows better than any of his other fictional creations. It reveals much about Scudder's relationship with his parents, how he ended up on the police force, how his career advanced and why he ultimately decided to give up his gold badge. He is open about how he fell in love with his first wife and how that marriage ultimately fell apart.

According to Block, the autobiography began after he received a request to write 4000 words about Scudder's life. Once he started writing, the assignment grew and grew into this 65,000-word book, longer than any of the first three books in the series.

As to Scudder's question about whether anyone will be interested in reading his account of the first 35 years of his life, the answer from this reader is a resounding yes!