TITLE: Dead Girl Blues
AUTHOR: Lawrence Block
218 pages, LB Productions, ISBN 9781951939649 (ebook, softcover, hardcover)
DESCRIPTION: A man walks into a bar. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s the precursor to a heinous crime: the murder and rape (in that order) of a young woman. The perpetrator and protagonist, at first known only as “Buddy,” narrates the crime and the rest of his life waiting to be caught without ever turning himself in.
MY RATING: Five stars out of five
MY THOUGHTS: Don’t read Dead Girl Blues if you’re looking for an action-packed thriller like Block’s Scudder or Keller books, or if you’re looking for the feel-good comedic hijinks of his Bernie Rhodenbarr series. If this book can be likened to any of Block’s work, it would be his early stand-alone crime books (many written under various pseudonyms and reprinted by Hard Case Crime in recent years). But even that comparison falls a bit short, because there’s really only one major crime in the entire story, and it happens in the opening pages. No, what Dead Girl Blues really is is a character study, a deep dive into the inner monologue of a man who committed a crime when he was young and who has spent the rest of his life waiting to be caught while not making any effort to turn himself in. As such, the book is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But if deep psychological character studies of unsavory personalities are your type of book, you won’t be disappointed in Dead Girls Blues.
The book starts exactly as the description says, with a non-descript man walking into a bar in Bakersfield, California. Not long after, he drives away with a drunk woman, and proceeds to murder and rape her. The crime is brutal, and Block pulls no punches in describing how “Buddy” feels before, during and after (although the author thankfully does leave out the gorier physical details). And as far as the bloody crimes so many early Block books are known for, that’s it. “Buddy” never commits another crime (and even unintentionally stops one), other than doing what he can to change his identity as he moves east – a trick much easier in the late 1960s than it would be now – and ultimately settles in Lima, Ohio.
The rest of the book is “Buddy” moving on with his life in his new identity: joining the Rotary and other service organizations, becoming the owner of a business, building a family … but always with an eye over his shoulder waiting for the police to show up. The tension in the book comes from the reader wondering along with “Buddy” (or John Thompson, the identity he settles into completely long before the end of the book) whether he’ll finally get caught, as DNA forensic science grows by leaps and bounds.
And that’s where the character study aspect comes in. We meet the lead character in the present day, as narrator, but know nothing about his present life because he starts his story with the worst moment of his past. His own analysis of why he did what he did, and how he continues to fantasize about it without ever again acting on the impulse, doesn’t endear him to the reader. His thoughts about what he’ll do if the cops ever do show up at his door don’t necessarily make him any more likeable, as he considers options from suicide to a killing spree. But the tone of the story shifts as he finds a woman he can truly love, adopts her young son, has a daughter of his own. He becomes the kind of neighbor any of us who grew up in small towns would recognize: family man, businessman, member of the bowling league. “Buddy” is totally reprehensible but John Thompson is very likeable. Exploration of that dichotomy, of how someone can be a murderer and a family man, is at the heart of the book and informs pretty much every page. I have to wonder: if we, as the reader, didn’t know what “Buddy” had done, would we feel friendlier towards John? Would we love him as much as his wife and kids and neighbors do? If Block had structured things differently, introduced us to John and his family in the present first before revealing the murder/rape much later, would the revulsion we feel for him from the start be replaced by shock at the depth of his secret? We can’t know, of course, because Block wrote the book the way he wrote it. But even with his story told in chronological order, there was a small part of me that wanted the John we get to know to continue with his family even as most of me wanted “Buddy” to pay for his crime. Block manages to elicit these conflicting feelings in me without resorting to baldly manipulative language. Liking John sort of creeps up on you, as much as becoming a family man creeps up on him.
There’s also something Block never addresses but which occurred to me as a reader: could John Thompson ever have come into existence if “Buddy” hadn’t done what he did? We are all a product of every decision we’ve ever made, every right/wrong/in-between thing we’ve ever done (on top of being a product of all the decisions made for and about us when we were too young to have control over our own lives, as evidenced in the backstory of John’s wife Luella), and it was running from his crime that led “Buddy” to change his name and to settle in Lima.
I won’t spoil the later developments or the end of the story for those who might be intrigued enough to read Dead Girl Blues when it comes out in late June. There are a few twists, quite a few well-written high tension moments, and no end of questions for the main character and the reader that propel the action forward. As said at the beginning of the review: this book isn’t for everyone, but I think fans of psychological horror/crime will enjoy it.