I met Lawrence Block on a pilgrimage I took to America to meet favourite authors. Larry is a thriller writer in his sixties who has created several series — one about a burglar who runs a bookstore, another about a spy who can’t sleep, a killer called Keller. But the books that won him accolades and awards are about Matt Scudder, a reformed alcoholic whose knowledge of New York is as fascinating as the life and times of this anti-hero detective. Block writes best in the mornings. When he’s writing he stays away from home, at places that offer him hospitality, which he invariably acknowledges in his books. He’s an inveterate traveller and has visited India. Tall, clean shaven, articulate, occasionally tough, always slyly funny, a great reader Lawrence Block opened up about Matt Scudder in a Vietnamese restaurant as I scribbled furiously.

“I began developing the Scudder series towards the end of ’73, and it’s no secret there were parallels between my alcoholism and the character’s at the time. I had separated form my first wife in July of ’73 and mo-ved back to New York and was living in a hotel on that same block as Scudder, who had at an indetermin-ate point in time, separated from his wife, family and was living alone in the city. “Scudder is a detective who has a decidedly loose interpretation of justice and morality. He doesn’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with bribes to policemen, for example. One of his best friends is a murderer. His girlfriend is a prostitute. All of that is a little unusual for the genre. “Although each of the first five Scudder books is a novel, complete in itself, it seemed to me as though they constituted one five-volume novel, and that had come to an end, at the end of Eight Million Ways to Die, when he comes to terms with his alcoholism.

“Then I wrote When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a more ‘writerly’ book than some of my others. It’s a little more of a novel in character and mood and place than anything else I’d done. “The seventh book Out on the Cutting Edge happened when I was riding a train from Luxor to Cairo, suffering badly with dysentery and insomnia. Insomnia was sort of inevitable on this train, especially given the dysentery. Mine and everyone else’s. “With Out on the Cutting Edge, my agent offered it at auction, and during the auction he asked, ‘Would you be comfortable with a two-book contract? Are you going to be able to write more about the character?’ And I said,’Yes’. Since then I’ve not really had any trouble writing about Scudder.

“I’ve known a lot of people who have done stuff of one sort or another and I’ve found that my feeling for them don’t mesh with what they have or haven’t done. That’s not much different from Scudder. “In A Walk Among the Tombstones there are some nasty people, and even there, with the ultimate villain, there is one exchange where a sort of conversational window of opportunity opens and the humanity of the person is briefly revealed. So, even with psychopaths, there’s a person present and they us-ually got that way because somebody beat the shit out of them or abused them”. Most of the 16 Scudder books are available here. So lose yourself in New York, Lawrence Block, crime, punishment and the all too humanness and fragility of life.