Lawrence Block: The Night and the Music (USA 2021)

From the Publisher:
Since his debut in 1976 in The Sins of the Fathers, Matthew Scudder has been universally acclaimed as one of the finest creations not just of MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block's esteemed career but of the mystery genre as a whole. The star of 17 novels, two feature films, a graphic novel and most recently a standalone novella from Subterranean Press (A Time to Scatter Stones), Scudder is a brilliant creation whose humanity and painful struggle for redemption have given him a life beyond the page and a permanent place in millions of readers' hearts.

In The Night and the Music, Lawrence Block has compiled all of Scudder's shorter cases into one volume, from the Edgar Award-winning "By the Dawn's Early Light" (inspiration for the novel many consider the best in the series, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes) and the Shamus Award-winning "The Merciful Angel of Death" to the two substantial novelettes -- "Out the Window" and "A Candle for the Bag Lady" -- that kept the character alive after the first three novels fell victim to their publisher's dire straits. Also included is the nostalgic "One Last Night at Grogan's," written especially for this collection.

In the pantheon of crime fiction, Matthew Scudder has earned a place alongside iconic figures such as Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Lew Archer. This exceptional volume will remind you why.

The signed numbered edition will include everything in the trade edition, plus the novella A Time to Scatter Stones.
Limited: 500 signed numbered copies, bound in leather, including the novella, A Time to Scatter Stones
Trade: Fully cloth-bound hardcover edition.

Lawrence Block: The Night and the Music. The Matthew Scudder Stories. Dust jacket illustration and frontispiece by John K. Snyder III.. Subterranean Press, ISBN: 9781645240273 (September, 2021), 232 p., Trade Hardcover Edition $30.00, Signed Numbered Edition $50.00.

Lawrence Block: The Night and the Music (USA 2011)

From the Publisher:
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.

Lawrence Block: The Night and the Music. The Matthew Scudder Stories. With an introduction by Brian Koppelman. Telemachus Press, ISBN: 9781937387327 (September, 2011), 237 p., $14.99, eBook $4.99.