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The Merciful Angel of Death
(2012)(The fifth book in the Matthew Scudder Stories series)
A Story by Lawrence Block
1994 Shamus Award for Best PI Short Story
"I love the Matthew Scudder series, and I love short stories."
--Otto Penzler, Los Angeles Times, Ten Most Wanted Books of 2011
Lawrence Block’s 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). And it’s Matt Scudder who’s been largely responsible for Block’s lifetime achievement awards: Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), The Eye (Private Eye Writers of America), and the Cartier Diamond Dagger (UK Crime Writers Association).
But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, as Lawrence Block recalls:
“I began writing about Matthew Scudder in the mid-1970s. The first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, appeared in 1975, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff—the 17th and most recent—was published in 2011. Over the years Scudder has also been featured in 11 short works of fiction. The Merciful Angel of Death is the fifth of these; it first appeared in 1993 in The New Mystery, Jerome Charyn’s anthology of stories by members of the International Association of Crime Writers.
“The story was written during the depth of the AIDS epidemic, and reflects its time. As longtime residents of New York’s Greenwich Village, we could only watch as so many of our friends sickened and died. But sometimes death refused to come, and that could be even more heartbreaking. Hence this story…”
The Merciful Angel of Death is included in The Night and the Music, my collection of all 11 Matthew Scudder short stories, available for Kindle or in handsome trade paperback form.
Genre: Mystery
--Otto Penzler, Los Angeles Times, Ten Most Wanted Books of 2011
Lawrence Block’s 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). And it’s Matt Scudder who’s been largely responsible for Block’s lifetime achievement awards: Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), The Eye (Private Eye Writers of America), and the Cartier Diamond Dagger (UK Crime Writers Association).
But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, as Lawrence Block recalls:
“I began writing about Matthew Scudder in the mid-1970s. The first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, appeared in 1975, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff—the 17th and most recent—was published in 2011. Over the years Scudder has also been featured in 11 short works of fiction. The Merciful Angel of Death is the fifth of these; it first appeared in 1993 in The New Mystery, Jerome Charyn’s anthology of stories by members of the International Association of Crime Writers.
“The story was written during the depth of the AIDS epidemic, and reflects its time. As longtime residents of New York’s Greenwich Village, we could only watch as so many of our friends sickened and died. But sometimes death refused to come, and that could be even more heartbreaking. Hence this story…”
The Merciful Angel of Death is included in The Night and the Music, my collection of all 11 Matthew Scudder short stories, available for Kindle or in handsome trade paperback form.
Genre: Mystery
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