Can almost smell & feel these places, dialogue seems so authentic, need bourbon in hand for this one ( )

Tightly-written gritty noir detective story. Loved it. Block is a craftsman. ( )

Matt Scudder fue policía de Nueva York. Ahora es un detective sin licencia que saca las castañas del fuego a sus amigos. Se divorció de su mujer, y ahora vive en un modesto hotel del West Side. Pero su verdadero hogar se encuentra en cualquiera de los bares de su zona; la clientela habitual forma su familia. Corre el verano de 1975, y Matt anda comprometido con varios favores a amigos. En primer lugar, debe salvar de sospechas a Tommie Tillary, un hombre de negocios de ropas estridentes cuya mujer ha sido asesinada. Matt Scudder no dejará de beber ni un instante, pero se mantendrá lo suficientemente lúcido como para encontrar la solución, hallando la inspiración en el fondo de la botella.

The very best kind of book, a story that rattles along, prose that jumps off the page and a heart that beats so strongly through the tale that it almost hurts. ( )

The sixth Matthew Scudder novel, “When The Sacred Ginmill Closes,” is a tightly written journey into the gritty realism of bars and after hours clubs of New York City. Scudder, here, is practically drowning in booze and even notes at one point that, when he sets out for home, he ends up in a bar. Most days, he doesn’t even know how he got home. Much of the action in this book takes place in a couple of nearby bars and, if it is not taking place in the bars, it is taking place with the guys

Scudder is hanging out with in the bars. In one bar, a pair of masked men with guns enter, holding up the place. In another, the books are stolen, meaning the real books, not the one that the IRS sees, the one that shows the take before the skim. Pretty much all the action takes place at night as Scudder deals with blackmailers and others. Even when he is checking out a client’s home to see where the burglars went and what they did, he can’t keep his hands off the client’s booze.

This may be one of the darkest and gloomiest of the Scudder novels. It is also one of the tightest, focusing on a few days in Scudder’s life as he deals with a few odd cases that are thrown his way from murder to blackmail to masked robbers. What sets this book apart from many other books out there is how realistic the dialogue and action is. Nothing in it is over the top. Nothing in it is purely something that only happens in books or movies. When the guys gather to figure out how to deal with the blackmailers, their reactions are authentic. They are truly a bunch of amateurs.

All in all, it is, without any question, a five-star read, but all of the Scudder series is fine work. It is detective fiction, but involving a most unusual detective. One without an office, without a secretary, without a license. One who doesn’t really know what fee to set when doing favors for friends or friends of friends. Scudder was once a cop, but lost the taste for it after an innocent girl got shot in a shoot-out with the bad guys. One could say he’s drowning in guilt. After he was cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting, he left the force, left his wife, left his suburban home, and makes it one day at a time, one drink at a time. There are probably few, if any, detectives in literary history who are as carefully and as deeply developed as Block’s Scudder is. He is as real as they come, warts and all.
A terrific read. ( )