David Trevor here. Had an inquiry the other day from a fellow who has begun reading  the Matthew Scudder novels in order, and wants to fit in the Scudder short stories so that he goes through the entire series in chronological order. The short stories are all gathered together in one volume, The Night and The Music, where they appear in the order they’re written, but he couldn’t tell when they were published in relation to the novels.

I furnished this list of stories with their publication dates:

• Out the Window, 1977
• A Candle for the Bag Lady, 1977
• By the Dawn’s Early Light, 1984
• Batman’s Helpers, 1990
• The Merciful Angel of Death, 1993
• Looking for David, 1997
• Let’s Get Lost, 2000
• A Moment of Wrong Thinking, 2002
• The Night and the Music, 2002
• Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen, 2011
• One Last Night at Grogan’s, 2011

Is it important to read Matthew Scudder in order? LB has pointed out that he wrote them in order, but what choice did he have? As far as the stories are concerned, some readers have told us they regard The Night and the Music as a sort of episodic novel, the eighteenth in the series. (That link is to Amazon, but TNATM is also available at Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.)