The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder

Lawrence Block: “What was Matt’s family like? How did he spend his childhood? What steered him toward the NYPD, and how did he get all the way from the Police Academy to a detective’s gold shield? Who were the influences and what were the experiences that made him the man we’ve come to know? These were important questions. There were certainly stories to be told, but that didn’t mean I was the person to tell them. If Matt Scudder was to have a memoir, he ought to write it himself.”

So Block passed on the assignment to his most enduring fictional character, and the result—The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder—is a remarkable document, at once a convincing bildungsroman and the indispensable capstone of an outstanding series. Since his 1976 debut in The Sins of the Fathers, Matthew Scudder has aged in real time, so, too, remarkably enough, has his creator.