Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is me, Craig Ferguson. I'm inviting you to come
and see my brand new comedy hour. Well it's actually
it's about an hour and a half and I don't
have an opener because these guys cost money. But what
I'm saying is I'll be on stage for a while. Anyway,
come and see me live on the pads on Fire
Tour in your region. Tickets are on sale now and
we'll be adding more as the tour continues throughout twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Five and beyond.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
For a full list of dates, go to the Craig
Ferguson show dot com. See you on the road, my DearS.
My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast
is Joy. I talk to interesting people about what brings
them happiness. Welcome to the Joy Podcast. Welcome to the
(00:48):
Kids Super Studios here in Brooklyn. I am your host
Podcasts Craig Ferguson. My guest today is a great American writer.
If you don't know his work, you're in for a tweet.
And if you do know his work, you're in for
a treat. His name is Lawrence Block. He's a friend
of mine, but more importantly than that well, it depends
(01:08):
how you look at it. But he's just a great
writer and you should read him if you like to read.
And if you don't like to read, then just listen
to him talking today. And if you do like to
listen to people talking and like to, I'll let you
get on with it.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Here's Larry Block. You told me like.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Five minutes ago, ten minutes ago maybe when we were
walking outside in the intense feet while why we've got
a lot of beverages right, because we had got the
dates wrong for this recording. Specifically, you said it was Thursday.
I said it was the eighteenth. But Thursday is the seventeenth,
(01:48):
and so you were right about Thursday and I was
right about the eighteenth. I think we can agree that
that's fair.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
We're here now, that's the main thing, all right, There
you go.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So you said to me outside as we were walking
towards the subway to maybe go home and come back tomorrow,
that you are retired.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
You're not going to write anymore. Is that right? That's true.
I haven't written in gee, it's just about three years now.
I feel like I've heard that from you before, though, No, no, no,
there have been times I thought I was probably done
writing novels and that, but this is categorically different, and
it's it's curious in that in twenty twenty two I
(02:32):
wrote two novels in the course of the one year.
I wrote a book called The Burglar, The Burglar Who
Met Frederick Brown, which is a nice way. I think.
I haven't read that one. Oh well, what a treat.
You haven't a treat. I haven't stared, right, don't tell
me it. No spoilers, all right, no spoilers. But it's
(02:55):
it's a fitting volume, I think, to conclude the series.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
The Barney series, the Bernie series. Yeah, yeah, that's and
you've done with Scudder. Scudder, you finished a wild back, right, no.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I wrote, I wrote a final volume of that in
twenty twenty two. Also, I haven't read that either.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I thought the Scudder one that you finished with was
a drop of the hard.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Stuff that had been the last one. But then, so.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
That's why I thought you'd retired before, because you said, okay,
that's Scudder done.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
That well it seemed to be. But this the new book,
I thought i'd send it to you, and I clearly
did not. Sorry, maybe I go I'll get it tomorrow.
It's called the Autobiography of Matthew Scudder. I do not
have that. And what it is is a fellow that
(03:47):
approached me about doing a short like three or four
thousand word biography of Scudder, to write about the character.
And I thought, I don't want to do that, and
I thought about it a little more, and I thought,
(04:08):
if Anyone's going to write Scudder's biography, should be the
man himself. And I thought, I thought about it a
little more and realized that what I wanted to do
was a full length book and it would be Scudder
(04:31):
telling his story. And the premise was that I've been
approached to do this, that I the Lawrence Block for
years has been writing books about Matthew Scudder which have
represented slight fictionalizations of his cases and that and this
(04:52):
is his Scudder giving his own memories. Do you go
back over the books that you wrote for Scott particularly,
some of them are referenced, certainly, but it's more filling
in blanks than about his life and background and everything else.
(05:13):
It's it may be the most enjoyment and satisfaction I've
ever had sitting down, sitting down and writing it, and
it's you know it's it's kind of meta, which is
a word I generally avoid using because I don't think
I or anyone else knows exactly what it is. No,
(05:36):
it doesn't, you know. And and once it became the
marks up Zuckerberg's new name for uh, for Facebook, it
was even more reason not to use the word. But
that I kind of kind of is what it is conceptually,
(05:56):
it's a divice.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I've seen before though a few times people use it
from tank time in literature. I remember, uh Carvonicet used
it with Kilgo Trout, didn't he the other way around?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
All kind of kind of yeah, there was an awareness,
uh that way, But I think this is I had
thought that this was the first time that a writer
had who after a long standing series, had turned the
the I think it probably is not quite Oh, it
(06:32):
turned out that Seminon did something similar with McGray. Yeah.
I got a hold of a copy of that to
see what it was like. Unfortunately, well fortunately for my ego,
it was lousy. It was it wasn't real.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Honestly, a bit of Simon and a lot of those
make Gray books. I'm like, you've that could use a rewrite. Yeah,
a lot of a miss company out like one a week,
you know, but.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
This it wasn't terribly interesting. But anyway, I did have
a good time with it, and when I finished, I thought, well, gee,
that was nice. I wrote two books in the course
of a year. I'm pleased with both of them. I
had a good time doing them. I'll probably write more.
(07:20):
And as the weeks passed, it became clear to me
that I was wrong about that, that I was done,
that I felt really complete. This was a nice capstan
for this Scudder series. It was a nice ending to
the Bernie series, and I didn't want to write anymore.
I've been doing this all the time for sixty five years.
(07:46):
I've written more books than anybody could should read let alone.
Have you any idea how many of there are? Do
you know? Yes, because a fellow has done a marvelous
job compiling a bibliography for me, and his list of
(08:06):
book titles individual volumes of mine, which includes anthologies that
I edited, and that they're probably about close to a
dozen of those. It comes came to about two hundred
and ten titles something like that. That's a lot of
It's a lot of us. That's it's enough, you know,
I feel I've written four. Yeah, well I think that's enough. Yeah,
(08:30):
I think four is enough. Well, come to think of it,
if I had made that decision early and I just
saved myself a lot, a lot of work.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Yeah, But it's interesting these two characters, Bernie rodenbar who's
the kind of gentlemen burglar, and Matt Scudder, who's the
in many ways an archetype for a lot of detectives
who came after. Yeah, you know, the hardbitten, New York reformed, drunk,
bad past detective. Both of these eyes. I have have
(09:01):
a long history with you. When did you start writing
because like, you started writing these guys in your thirties, right.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I've thought you meant the nineteen thirties. Nineteen thirties. Did
you start writing them in the night? That would be sure.
I'm a detective shape, right. I started writing them in
within about a year of each other. The characters were conceived,
and I started writing about them in the the the
(09:36):
mid seventies.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
It's interesting because I was I was a very I
was a huge fan of Scudder right away, and Bernie
was a slower burn for me because Bernie felt like
it was a little more kind of almost PG Woodhouse
and it's kind of like light on his feet type
fun character. And because I'd come to you through Matt Scudder,
(09:59):
I was like the grimy the New York streets and
the yeah and the bad people and stuff. And then
Bernie was was kind of I was kind of looking
for that there and it wasn't there. And it wasn't
until I had the same thing with with Woodhouse though.
The first couple I read, I was like, what the
hell is this? And then once you get into it,
you go, this is actually great and actually in a
weird way, is brilliant, unbelievable right, and contains an odd
(10:26):
skewering of the British upper classes that I didn't spot
at first.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
I mean, but it's it's so wonderful.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, the kind of like the way he cuts up,
the kind of doubt Nabby set is fantastic.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah. Yeah. Also heah evidently had a real resentment against
older female relatives, Yes for sure. Yeah. Do you do
that in books?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Do you put people in books that you're angry at,
like if you run across somebody?
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Did you ever do that with Bernie or with No? No,
I don't think I ever have. If I have it's
it's uh slipped. My mind has so many things too.
But do you ever read the book? And I have
no recollection of write now. No, well that's not entirely true.
(11:18):
Early on, I did a lot of erotic paperbacks, you know,
under pen name. I did tons of those. That was
the way to earn money, right, it was like your
only fans page. No, it was you liked erotic. It
was what I did, and you know the it was
(11:39):
it was to make money. But they're all to make money. Yeah,
I guess that's your job, that's what you did. But
some of those, in uh, later years, I've because I'm
shameless and because Ego and Avarice are my two motivators,
their stoken horse, for sure. Yeah, absolutely, I've I've reprinted,
(12:06):
both electronically and in print printed form, all my early work, right,
and and I figure, why not. There are people who
like them, and that's that's fine with me. But doing that,
I've had to determine what books were mine. And there
(12:30):
was a stretch there where I engaged other people to
write books under my pen name. Really yes, yes, this
was back in the early to mid sixties. Okay, and
some of those, you know, I don't remember immediately if
(12:50):
I've written them or not. But it never takes more
than reading a page, you know, for me to know
what it's my worthy or no.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, I suppose if you if your output is it
like it's a fairly prolific output.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
You can't remember all that.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
I look at old episodes of Late Night, so was
if something comes up from my old Late night show
on the internet, I'm like, I have no recollection of that.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
None. I remember most of them, But there were stretches
late in the game, in say nineteen sixty four or so,
when I there was one time when my second daughter,
my daughter Jill, was born and I had to pay
(13:41):
the abstetrician. This was long enough ago so that people
did not routinely have insurance and so that you could
live without it. Yeah right, Yeah, So I had to
come up with one thousand dollars to pay the abstetrician. Now,
of course that would be the Copey right if you
(14:03):
had really excellent, excellent coverage. Yeah. So I called my
agent and I said, how can I earn a thousand
dollars in a hurry because I want to pay this
fellow's bill. And he said, well, I think Bill Hamling,
who was a publisher of mine on outfit called Nightstand Books.
(14:23):
He said, I'm sure he'd take an extra book for
me this month. So I found three days and wrote it.
You know what booking three days I did? Was any good?
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Were you taking any stimulants?
Speaker 2 (14:42):
It was the sixties. No, I did occasionally, but not then.
It was a little later there that I started using
dexamil occasionally when I wrote. But this time I wasn't
using any stimulants, and I just I just went to
(15:04):
the office and typed for about eight hours the first day,
and about eight hours the second day, in about five
or six hours the third day, and then the book
was done. That's amazing. By twenty minutes after the book
was done, I'd forgotten the names of all the characters.
I mean, they didn't they didn't occupy space in my
(15:28):
head for very much time. There was no way to
remember that. It's do you remember the name of the book,
because I'd like to read it. I don't know which
one that was, Oh, because I.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Feel like that would be a fascinating kind of almost
like automatic writing, you know, the old spiritualist automatic writing
thing that I mean, be kind of a.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Real in them were written at not at that speed,
but frequently in a week. I find that fascinating because
they're especially the detective books in particular, are very complicated.
The police were not detected right right. Hello, this is
(16:05):
Craig Ferguson.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And I want to let you know I have a
brand new stand up comedy special out now on YouTube.
It's called I'm So Happy, and I would be so
happy if you checked it out. To watch the special,
just go to my YouTube channel at the Craig Ferguson
Show and is this right there? Just click it and
play it and it's free.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
I can't look.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I'm not going to come around your house and show
you how to do it. If you can't do it,
then you can't have it. But if you can figure
it out, it's yours. You have a very emotive style,
though even even Bernie first, I it was a mistaken
identity for me with Bernie Roden bar at first because
(16:48):
I thought there was no depth to that, and there's
an extreme amount of depth in Bernie, and I feel
like that You're very emotive as a writer. There's big sweeps,
big human emotions in there. I remember in particular, Actually,
what was the small town? The one you wrote after
nine to eleven? Is an extremely almost like you were
(17:10):
heartbroken when you wrote that book or something, or you
were terrified.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
That kind of was. Yeah, that was That was a
time that imprinted itself rather deeply on one's consciousness. Were
you in New York, Georgiana eleven? Did you see it
all happened? Yes? Actually we were in the line of sight, yeah,
because you're downtown. Yeah, yeah, on the high floor we saw.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
And that book. Did that book happen in the aftermath
of nine to eleven? Was it like in the space
of weeks, months, days.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
It was a curious thing because it was a book
that I had started before that, right, and I'd written
a chunk of it, introducing several of the couple of
the characters. I probably wrote about it and twenty pages
of it before, and then after nine to eleven, I thought, well,
(18:05):
I can throw this away because the world had changed
in some fundamental ways, and certainly the city had changed.
And a little time passed, and sometime I think it
was in the spring of two thousand and two, so
(18:34):
maybe six months after after I thought about it, and
I thought, because what my object there was to write,
for the first time for me, a big, multiple viewpoint
now bill set in New York, with as much of
(18:56):
New York as I could fit in it. I thought, gee,
I could still do this. I would probably want to
rewrite almost everything in the beginning portion, but there's there
(19:19):
are scenes there that work, and there are characters who
I find interesting. And I thought, I don't want to
write a book in which nine to eleven happens. I
want to write an aftermath book. And and did and
(19:42):
it it was no to what extent the book succeeds
or fails?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
I don't know. I rarely know with my own stuff.
But what would that? What's the metric you use for that?
How do you know if a book succeeds or failed?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So once you write it, it's done. It is what
it is, and there's no kind of judgment on it.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
There isn't really no I you know, I want them
to do well. Sure, you want to do a real
justice and may be well received. That's incidentally brings to
mind a very interesting effective the retirement of not doing
(20:33):
this anymore. Okay, And it's not just that I'm not
writing anymore. But that I'm detached from the whole career
in a way I wouldn't have anticipated. Is that product
of aging? Do you think everything in my existence is
(20:55):
so one way or another product of aging? But also
it's no, it's part of it is that my life
as a writer feels like a closed chapter. Right. And
(21:15):
I'm very grateful that I got to spend those years
doing that, like sixty five years, right, yeah, And I'm
very grateful that I got to write all those books,
the good, the bad, and the indifferent. But but I'm
detached from them in an odd way. I don't too
(21:38):
much care now what anybody thinks to them. I know
they won't outlast my lifetime by any substantial margin. Nobody's due, really,
and I don't know. And that's fine. The thing, the
(22:02):
thing is, that's that's fine. It kind of I kind
of feeled with with a book.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I remember because the first time when I the first
book I wrote, I remember you were very very.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Kindly read an early draft of.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
It and and you let it was interesting because it's
a it's the only novel I've written so far, and
it's an unusual book. And you said, it's an unusual book,
and you sent me a copy of a book that
you had written years and years ago, which is also
a very.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Unusual book called The Long Walk, The Random Walk. Random Walk.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
That's right, and random Walk is such a weird, out
of time, out of style book for you.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I know what was going on with that?
Speaker 1 (22:51):
I mean, it's a very it's almost like magical realism
or something going on in there.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
It was something, it was. It was a very strange experience. Yeah,
Lynna and I had gone on our first really adventurous trip.
We went uh on a trip that was under the
auspices of the Institute for the Advancement or something of
(23:15):
no Weddics Sciences, whatever the hell it was it was.
It was it was an outfit founded by Edgar Mitchell
when he came back from the moon. What isdics science?
I don't know, Okay, I forget. It's fine. Somebody in
the internet, right, I at one point could have supplied
(23:37):
a definition of the word. But it's it's remarkable enough
that I can recall the word any idea. What nouetics
science is? Yeah, all right, okay.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
So disciplinary study that brings scientific tools and techniques together
to basically solve the subjective inner knowing study of nature
of reality.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
There we are, there we go, there we are. Anyway,
they had this trip to Africa, right, that's where you go,
with just about just about eight or ten of us
on the whole trip, and we started. We spent a
lot of time in Togo, and one thing we did
(24:19):
in Togo was we met with a fellow named Akoite,
who was I think he had a German father and
Togule's mother, and he'd grown up there. He'd gone to
school some in Germany and at the Sorbonne he qualified
(24:43):
as a doctor. He decided that that wasn't really where
he was, and he became this spiritual healer and conductor
of Voodo type ceremonies in Lomay in Togo. And we
(25:05):
met him and he was a powerful personality and he
did this whole thing with Afterward, one of the things
I'd sort of hoped for was that a new direction
in my writing would come out of this. Okay, so
it ended, and then we went to other places in Africa.
(25:26):
We went to Cote d'avoir and we went to Mali.
We had a good time, and we came home and
I had booked a session a space at a writer's colony,
the first time I'd ever done that, or retreat where
you can go for two weeks or a month or
whatever whatever it is, and what do you do. You like,
(25:49):
you hang with other writers, or you hang with other
writers to whatever extent you want. But what it mostly
is is that they supply a room for you to
work in, a room for you to and three meals
a day, and you go there to work. So I've
met some people I've become very fond of at Reuter's colonies,
(26:12):
but that was never the point. The point always is
to go there to work. And I had the spacebook,
and I thought, I have to go there. It's my
first time at a colony. What the hell am I
going to write? And I thought, well, there was a
Burglar book I sort of had in mind. Had you
(26:34):
started the Bernie series. Oh yeah, the Bernie series had
gone on for a while. This would have been seventy seven. Okay, no,
pardon me, this would have been eighty seven. Okay, yeah.
And I so I thought it would be nice if
(26:55):
there was something else that I could write that I
had more firmly mind. And I was sitting one day,
we were living in Florida at the time, and I
suddenly had this vision of people walking through the mountains.
(27:17):
Of course whatever, and bits and pieces started coming to
me over the next several days, and I thought, well,
you know, I don't have a book here, because this
(27:37):
is a complicated book, but maybe I've got enough of
a beginning so that i can spend my time at
the colony roughing it out, you know, making some sort
of outline. And it was about two weeks from that
time that I drove up to the car. He was
(28:00):
in Virginia, and I'd been thinking about the book throughout,
and it wasn't so exactly that I'd been thinking about
it as things were coming to me. And I got
(28:22):
to the colony, I was assigned my room, I was
assigned my office, and I went to sleep. I got
up the next day, I went to my office and
I wrote twenty pages of a novel. And I did
that every day for the next twenty three days. I'll
(28:46):
do it twenty pages a day. It's a low. Every
day I woke up knowing what would happen in the
book that day, still not necessarily the day after that,
and and when I was done that was under walk
(29:06):
I've never had an experience at all like that before
or since.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
It's an interesting thing. And it's funny because you the
way you describe it. The novel that I'm talking about
that you were there, it was called Between the Bridge
and the River that I wrote, it's a very similar experience.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I would wake up in the morning not knowing what
was going to happen, but interested to find out. Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
And so I would have these characters and there was
disparate plot lines, and I was like, I wonder, what's
going to happen today, and I would write it down
to find out.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, And it was an.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Odd excuse me, an oddensation of not having planned out
the book.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, at the end of it.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Because anything I've written since then has been autobiographical or anecdotal,
with the exception of a short story I wrote for
you for that Edward Hopper collection and the so I
know what happens because I was there when it happened,
you know, and elaborate the story, or if I tell
a little bit of this and that about it doesn't
(30:03):
really you know. It's it's me doing what I want
to do as I embellish a story which I know
has already happened, but I didn't have that experience with
that book. It was it was a very odd thing.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
And I talked to.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Stephen King about that experience and he said that he
when he was writing The Shining he was also getting
sober at the same time.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, And it was very interesting because you go back
and read that book with him just flippantly saying at
the time, I was getting sober at that time, having
gone through getting sober myself, and I know you were
sober doing that that that it's like it takes on
a completely different perspective.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Even looking at the movie, which I don't think he likes,
but the it's all very different. If you look at
the lens through.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
The Monster of of Alcoholism, it's like, oh my god. Yeah, yeah,
it's fascinating. But he said about that that he felt
there was all this stuffie waiting to get through and
he just had to kind of get it through for
that book. I thought it was a fascinating way to
look at it. I wonder how often that happens to people,
(31:17):
even like if you write two hundred and ten books,
wherever it is, and it's happened to you, once that way.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
I frequently don't know where I most of the time
don't know when I started a book exactly where it's
going to go when it evowws. But this was as
close as I ever came to having, oh, what you
might call a channeled book. Right. It's not as though
I felt this felt like I was taking celestial dictation.
(31:45):
It was very clear to me that I was making
the choices and everything else. It was somehow categorically different
from other writing experiences I've had. It gave me like you're.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Talking about the Nouetic Science trip to Africa, and clearly
there was there was some kind of you were, uh,
you know, I'm gonna say it sounds dismissive, but but
but you were, you know, in some kind of spiritual
search at that point in your life. Yeah, is that,
you know if I was. But it worked certainly worked
(32:25):
out that way. I was the process.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Of that translate state. Where there were there stimulants, where
the drugs were. There were there was alcoholic a verbal
thing to take, but it didn't feel that it was
a drug experience. And there were lots of people's around
in there and dancing and things like that. It's hard
(32:53):
for me to remember of that clearly. But in ways
it was transformational. Lynn had had not a delusion, but
a sense for years that just out of the corner,
(33:16):
in the corner of her eyes, there would be a
huge snake.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Okay, and she knew, like in her life, she was
thinking that all the time.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Frequently what happened, she knew it wasn't there, right, you know.
She was never like directional or anything, but she just
had the sense of a presence, you know. And so
she mentioned that to a Quoite, and he said, you know,
(33:54):
he gave her something. He said, take this and participate
in the ceremony, and you will possess the snake, the serpent,
the power whatever. So she did, and and she never
(34:15):
had the sense that there was a snake again. Yeah,
and she did feel a kind of empowerment after that
she realized that she hadn't before. So I'm I'm willing
to believe that he did things, you know, I keep
an up in mind about it. I wrote a story,
(34:35):
the hell did I call it? I wrote a story
in which there's a character like based on a Quoite.
I hardly ever pattern characters after specific people, but here
I felt comfortable doing it. I called him a twilee
(34:56):
I think in that and again it's set in Loma
in Togo, and it's sort of a a piece of
spy fiction somewhat, but it's in a big collection enough Rope.
I'll send you an ephile of the story.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, I must have read, because the given enough Rope,
I've I've read that collection.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Yeah, but but in context it might be yeah, yeah,
I'll send that.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
You know, one of that springs to mind as well.
And I think this might this might be a story
that's in that collection, The Merciful Angel of Death.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
The Yeah, that was a scudder story, right.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
And it was in the It was a scudder short
story though, right, And it was the kind of fascinating
look at a period. And that's why I think your
your idea that that the canon of your work will
not outlast you by much is perhaps not as accurate
(36:04):
as you think it is from my perspective, because there
is a huge sweep of time. You know, those sixty
five years that you documented some very you know, profound
moments in the history of that time, the Age Crisis
nine to eleven, the changing of this city, that goes
(36:25):
through the life of Matt Scudder, the detective who's is
crushed by a mistake he makes, and you know, and
like it's you know, taken.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
In the context in New York, and I'm amazed.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
I haven't read the autobiography of Scudder because I've thought
I'd read everything, so that is a trait.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
But I will send, I will send you. Do e
books work for you? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Yeah, I actually read a kindle, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
I will. I will send all those. Do you self
publish this stuff? Now? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I think more and more I talk to authors like, yeah,
why would I bother with?
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Yeah, you know, the big publishing industry now, I think
may do a good job with commercially important books. But
on a level that I that I don't play it
anywhere or doing it. And I just found it so
(37:25):
much simpler and more straightforward and everything to publish the
books myself. And that way, you know, they don't you
don't make much money that way, But you don't make
much money anyway, no, I know. It's kind of a
it's kind of a.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Thing though, that it has rewards, because listen, I think
I made as much on that novel as i'd make
for a Wednesday night in a casino in Ohio.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But it's but I don't remember the Wednesday Night casino.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
I remember the journey on the novel. It's a difference.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
So no, And it's hard sometimes, especially when I think
when you're young and you want to make your bones
and maybe I'm just being for myself, but it's hard
to appreciate it, or it was for me, hard to
appreciate the value of something that had no real intrinsic
financial value.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
And I remember you said, you and I.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Had had lunch once and I was talking about money,
and you said that because I was getting hosed down
with it at the time. I remember it was during
the end of late night and all that kind of stuff.
And you said, the danger of having a lot of
money coming at you is you start thinking that it's
the only thing that mars. Yeah, And it was for
(38:47):
a little while I thought about it, and.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
It's kind of stuck with me. Do you ever do
you ever think I I.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Could have should have would have made more money, or
should have been more.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
But the thing is, I've often had the thought, yeah, yeah,
because you know, I I look at my career and
there were there never were any big dramatic financial successes,
not even when the scudder sies like the Mascutter movie.
(39:25):
I made a decent living, but never, you know, never
there were no I think one book inched its way
onto the Times best seller list, but that's that's that's all,
you know. And lots of people whom I've known and
been friendly with, you know, have have made big money,
(39:48):
right ah, they keep it in proportion. Most have made nothing.
But and I've thought about that, and one thing that
struck me was that if I'd had big early success,
(40:09):
I'm sure I wouldn't have kept writing for sixty five years. Yeah. Yeah.
And also it's hard to know how much you tell
yourself because you want to hear it. But I'm I'm
(40:30):
kind of I'm happy with the way things turned out.
I think I reached just about the level of success
that was best for me.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, I understand that. I think because I, especially
people like us who you know, have have taken the
kind of the alcoholic bronkle for a while, that I've
seen people who succeed so much after they get so
(41:02):
bored that they don't do so well with it. And
there may be I mean, there's been decisions I've made
when I thought, I don't I don't care enough about this,
and I feel like it might be dangerous and every
and there have been times when I have been achieved,
and it's usually some financial or or some kind of
kudos that makes me forget something I heard in a
(41:26):
meeting in Glasgow when a woman said, an old lady
said to me.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
That she's probably amazing as I am now. But like
you said, but she.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Said, I son, if you forget what you are, if
you get what If you forget what you.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Are, it will not matter who you are, because you
won't be there. Like it's okay. And I think that
the idea of the success that's appropriate for what you
can handle is a nice one.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah, it's a it's a way of maintaining some kind
of gratitudinal equilibrium, which is a phrase that I picked
up in my nice one.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, in my where did I get that? In the
science thing? What do we call that science thing? Nodic science?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
It's my noetic science phrase, gratitude and the equilibrium.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
But what about now? You said to me when we.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Were hanging around outside, you said, do you feel like
you're happier now than you've ever been?
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Is that you think that's right. I think I'm having
a better time these days than I can recall, and
I'm enjoying the life I'm leading in retirement. As I
think I mentioned before, I've become an absolute gym rat.
I'm at my local gym. What do you do? You
(42:53):
left weights and walk around? I do. I do weights
work and I generally put in about a half hour
on the trap. Wow, and you know I'm I'm in
and out in about an hour and a half. Is
that something you get into after the old the heart thing? Oh? No,
(43:13):
I got into you know. I don't have many regrets,
but one thing I can find myself regretting is that
I didn't get into working with ways when I was
a teenager because I was a terrible athlete. I was
(43:35):
hopeless of sports and all of that. But lifting weights
that I could have done, and I think I could
have enjoyed it and stayed with it and things like that.
It is. I got into it finally when I was
about forty and and have you know there have been
(43:56):
times when we didn't live in a gym, or I
didn't go that frequently, but I've I've been a member
where I am now for about almost twenty five years.
I joined this gym shortly after nine to eleven, and
I'd been going to another one in the neighborhood before that,
(44:18):
but it closed and and I really enjoy it. You know, I.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Started lifting weights. I hadn't done it for years. I
really love the sensation of having done it.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yes, you know that, Yes, it body feels good. It does.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
It's kind of it has a kind of parcascet vibe,
you know what I mean. It's like you get to
the other end and you go, sure, I feel kind
of everything's okay, yep, yep.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
You don't get high so much.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
It's kind of like, oh, okay, I can handle it.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Absolutely. Also, the feeling of.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
Serenity that comes after physical exhaustion, it's pretty good, true. Yeah,
And I still I find myself even now I've been sober.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
You've been sober longer than me. I've been sober thirty
three years. I don't know. You've been sober like one
hundred or something, forty seven years, right, so the bard
forty forty eight years a long time. It's a long
time for anything.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Yeah, really, But you know the thing is about it
is that even now.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
After all this time.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
I don't know about you, like if I have to
go and get any kind of medical procedure done, which
kind of as one gets older, you know, it kind
of like clicks up when they they have that that
moment when they're going to put you under. But there's
I can see the drip in my arm and the
anistasis says, Okay, you're going to feel a little dizzy
(45:51):
or woozy, or you'll feel this. I want you to
count backwards. That moment when that drop goes into the
IV live.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
For the fucking.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
I live for that fucking moment when they say, oh,
you're going to need a scope or a thing. I'm like, okay,
is the propofile involved because I'm there, and and that
when they drop that thing, because I can't have it.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
You know, I can't have it unless you know.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
But but when they dropped that, I remember, I even
said to the guy. The last time I had have
done it was a couple of years ago. I said
to the anistatist. He said, okay, you're gonna I'm just
gonna drop the sanamony. You count backwards and actually the
dropman and I said, can I stay here? Just before
I just before I left. It's funny, I still feel
the call of it, you still feel It's not the call, No,
(46:39):
Booze doesn't call to me, not in that kind of
a way.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I don't. But but the idea of some kind of.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Relief sometimes calls to me, some sort of altered state. Yeah,
a little bit like maybe maybe it's time for me
to go to Togo and and transit up.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Oh he's gone, jeez.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
So let me ask you now then, because we're about
out of time. But I but just before we go,
I want to ask you, what is given the fight?
You wrote books for sixty our story, you wrote everything
for sixty five years, and now you don't write at all.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
What do you do? Well, as I said, I go,
of course, go to the gym. You go to the gym,
I read, I listen to music. I hang out with
my wife, who's a lovely woman. So that makes sense.
That's uh, that's a delight. Patient I would imagine as well.
(47:41):
Patient she would have to she fucking would a saint,
she is kind of yeah. Uh. And we travel. We
travel quite a bit, not as it enterest as in
(48:02):
the past, because no Africa trips more or what mostly
mostly cruises, but we spent I think two weeks in
Tasmania on a cruise around Tasmania earlier this year. That's
(48:24):
a long flight, yes, And I decided, even though it
was a perfectly comfortable flight, we had a decent enough time.
And I hate flying. I hate airports. I hate the whole. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I love it and hate it. And this
one was I don't know, sixteen hours, however long it was.
(48:46):
I thought, I don't think I have to do that again. Yeah, yeah,
especially if you get this somewhere. I am.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
I've never been to Tasmania, but I can imagine you
could probably get a similar effect geographically by not leaving
the continental United statef am.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
I right, uh, probably. We did. Like Saber, it's a
very livapool city and we enjoyed we enjoyed the GA
Cruz and everything.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
But it's too far away, not for the Tasmanians, let's
be fair. From their point of view, it's right there,
it is, it's right there. They're fine, Larry's great to
catch up with you.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
P Uh, have more power to you. They keep going
to the.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Gym and I'll speaks excellent. It's so good to see
it's lovely to see