The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

As a fan of author Lawrence Block’s more mainstream mystery writing… having read over forty of his books… (Mathew Scudder… Bernie Rhodenbarr… Keller’s Greatest Hits… Evan Tanner… Chip Harrison … and a couple of stand-alone novels)… this is the first of his more risqué books (regardless of the name he wrote them under) that I have read. Before getting into the story itself… as part of due diligence in respect to potential readers… this is a small short book. Though the pages number to 234… I found it a little distasteful… that the first page of written dialogue didn’t come till page 13! In addition to two pages of writing credits (counted as pages)… there were three separate pages with the title of the book. If that’s the way you meet a contractual page count minimum… it seems odious at best.Doak Miller is a retired NYPD cop who has moved to Florida… and to augment his police pension… he has hooked up with local law enforcement to do odd jobs. One such job is to pose as a hit- man… to try and entrap a beautiful-sexy-blue-eyed woman who wants to murder her rich older husband. Doak… though “wired up” for their rendezvous to secure the contract hit… Doak slips her a script he prepared for her to surprisingly read… to go on tape… to convince the locals… that she changed her mind. And thus the hot… sordid… love affair… and murder plot… begins.Doak… though never described as a hot sexy leading man type… has sex thrown at him from every angle… without even the slightest suave maneuvers… and just as surprisingly… or hard to believe… “they” all like to talk about other sex acts… real… or imagined. There’s Barb the married real estate agent… who likes showing property through the front and back door… and loves telling… and listening to stories… real… or imagined… there’s Mrs. Ellison… the married pregnant mother… who is probably… the most ridiculous rendezvous in the book… and of course there’s “old-blue-eyes”… who does it all… tells it all… listens… to it all… and of course wants her rich husband “offed”!Through it all… Doak… drinks… plans… performs acts… while the… unholy trio… seem to wait in line… for action… and stories. Doak shares his murderous background… and his penchant… for “choking” in the clutch… as he tries to assuage… his microscopic moral fiber… with old noir movies.

It is impossible to read this book without thinking of some of Block’s early titles from the 1960’s. The title is clearly reminiscent of The Girl with the Long Green Heart (1965). The plot is an update on the same classic noir theme that Block examined in the first novel that bore his own name, Grifter’s Game (1961).That theme is: Boy meets Girl. Boy decides to kill Girl’s husband to get the money.This is as hard noir as you can get. The characters in Grifter’s Game were lovable losers who you wanted to root for, but they made choices that took them down destructive paths from which they could not recover. However, the characters in Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes are all unrepentant parasites from the get-go. Everyone is using someone, cheating on someone, or playing an angle to make a cheap score.One thing I loved about the novel is that the protagonist often watches classic noir movies on TCM. During the course of the book, he reflects on films like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, among others, and he compares his life to theirs and ruminates on how his fate will play out.A lot of reviewers have complained about both the high number of sex scenes and their graphic nature. This too is a throwback to early Block who wrote pseudonymous sex novels for nearly 20 years. I will say that a book like this needs a certain amount of luridness, but in this case the sex scenes quickly become counterproductive. The protagonist was having such hot, steamy sex with so many women, I kept wondering why he was taking so many risks for one particular woman who frankly seemed interchangeable with the others.Block provided a resolution that managed to be surprising because it went against much of the foreshadowing that had come before. This was almost exactly the same technique and ending he used once before in Cinderella Sims (1961), and it was the best ending possible. The final line was classic.

I loved this book especially the ending (read it and find out what I mean). A lovely bit of sleaze with a fatal infatuation for the blue eyed girl of the title by the main character, a retired cop now a private detective. The sex scenes are on the right side of nasty and the plot to kill the husband standing in the way of the deadly couple is believable. There are continuing references to famous films like 'Double Indemnity' and 'The Postman always rings twice' because the detective is always watching them late at night while he ponders his own deadly plan to get the woman he craves and her husbands money.

Lawrence Block has been writing gritty, fast-paced crime novels for over 50 years. Having previously read some of his early stories, I was interested to read 'The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes', as it was written just a few years ago. The main character is Doak Miller, a recently retired policeman who has moved from New York City to Florida. While doing some freelance undercover work for the local sheriff he meets Lisa, a beautiful woman who is married to a wealthy businessman who is much older than her. Doak and Lisa soon begin a steamy relationship and they start to wonder whether it would be possible to get rid of Lisa's husband but keep his money.'The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes' has all the hallmarks of the other books by Block I have read, with one notable difference. Although there are some sex scenes in Block's earlier stories, they are described in a relatively subdued way. However, there is a great deal of explicit sex in this story - which I should have perhaps anticipated from the book's cover design. I found these parts of the story too crude to be enjoyable, hence the four-star rating, and I suspect that other readers may also find that it 's too explicit for them .Notwithstanding that misgiving, this is an exciting book with a smart ending.

Lawrence Block has been writing since God was in his heaven and Kennedy in the White House.That he’s had an esteemed career goes without saying. He’s written slight pulpy books (After the First Death), Bigger City-wide Blockbusters (the counterintuitively named Small Town, movie scripts (Wong Kar Wai’s Blueberry Nights), and reams of commentary on, instruction for and inspirational words to writers (his Telling Lies For Fun and Profit has been a constant in my life for many years).And he’s been incredibly flexible. In his Seventies, Block, seeing the changes in the publishing landscape, and recognising that the relationship between publishers, authors and readers was being redefined, began to self publish, to digitally publish, and to actively use his website, eNewsletters, EBay and direct sales to get his books – at prices which allowed him to make some coin on the transactions – into the hands of people who wanted to have them.Considering he’s just three years off his 80th birthday, this might seem an odd development for an elder statesman, who might be expected to have grown used to sitting on his laurels while the publishers and their marketing department sold the books.But Lawrence Block – like the late Jackie Collins – comes from a different place. A place which is funky and dimly lit, and very often looked down on by publishing and critics, dismissed as lesser, cheaper, dirtier. A place where Give ‘em what they want, and Get paid first are not dirty words.Because – before he’s a writer, Lawrence Block is a Pulpiste. He writes books that are fun, but functional. He tells stories that are sometimes shocking, often a little unlikely, occasionally incredible, and always – always – engaging. And he makes characters that, at times in my life, I have loved as much as – if not more than – my own family. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Block story that didn’t make me feel something. Even when (and there are one or two – especially amongst the earlier shorts) they’re, all told, hokum, there’ll still be something – a character, a plot line or device, hell, even just his narrative voice that you just can’t help falling in love with.And so to The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes, his first “New” story in a while (we’ll get to those quote marks in a minute). It’s not Tolstoy, but it’s close to being (if I can mix my narrative fiction and my playwrighting metaphors) a hot sweaty Floridian Ibsen. With anal.The “New” bit is because, of course, as a Noir, it’s not a new story at all: Morally uncertain man meets dazzlingly beautiful woman with a wealthy, older husband who simply will not die. He falls for her big time, and decides that the husband has to go. Telling more of the plot would, I think, ruin it for you, but suffice it to say that many of the tropes you’d expect are here, except that, as they are being delivered by a master, they’re fresh, self aware and, at times, self-referential; the amount of Noir movies on TCM is a particularly fun touch that as good as cries out I am a Post-Modern Noir Novel. Except, of course, it’s Post-nothing, and not even particularly modern. It takes place today, but could just as easily be happening at any time from the 30s to the 90s.Lisa, the Girl in question is a real twist for me. She’s supposed – in Noirs – to be a bad girl. A charmer and deceiver of men. Someone who bewitches our hero Doake, and, having used him to dispose of her husband, leaves him to pick the pieces up. Most of this book is spent waiting to see if this will happen, or if – just this once – she’ll turn out to be a good woman…Likewise Doake Miller, who begins as a bit of a chump – all drearily failed marriage, House by the creek and no aspirations of any note beyond bedding the next chick – is drawn in such a way that, as the book progresses, your sense of him moves through mild disomfort to a point where you realise you might just have spent two hundred pages rooting for a monster.Because what is “New,’ what does feel fresh is the way in which Block tells the story, until you realise that what you’ve been reading was never really about the execution of a murder, and whether or not they would get away with it, but about the girl and the chump, whether anything pure can survive in a world of corruption, and the question of whether you can ever really know people…There’s sex here, as the publishers have excitedly trumpeted, some readers have casually observed, and some shocked fans have discovered too late to avert their gaze. And it’s erotic, but it totally passes the pornography test: It’s not prurient, and – despite the kinkiness on display (from maiesiophilia to asphyxiation) - it serves an artistic purpose. It shows Doake as a character that’s apart, on the edge, and battling, it seems, at times, to pull away from the darkness.Does he succeed? Or does the darkness engulf him? I’m not sure I can answer that one. Why don’t you read it and tell me if you think he does.

Very few times have I bought a book that I could not finish reading. Frankly unpleasant to read, incredibly boring, I would gladly have put it in the bin, but I have the Kindle version. I have deleted it instead

THE GOOD NEWS is that this book is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that you may want to start highlighting text right from the get-go. I was tempted to, right there, in the opening chapter. Page fourteen, lines fourteen through to seventeen. Go and have a look.Nice, eh?What stopped me (and this is the bad news, in case you were wondering...) was the fact that my copy is the latest gorgeous release from HARD CASE CRIME and I didn’t want to deface its inherent and obvious beauty with my own personal graffiti. So I purchased the kindle version to get down and dirty with this baby.And so onto the story. The reader meets Doak Miller - former NYPD Detective, now working as a private eye in Florida. He is on good terms with the local law enforcement. Very good terms. You *could* say they were friends. With benefits, even.But all of this backfires when Doak is asked to set up the wife of a local businessman. It turns out she is THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES the book’s title refers to and the harder he looks at her, the more he falls for her. And before anyone can shout out, ’SPOT THE GRIFT,’ the pair of lovebirds are planning a life of easy living based on minor details such as murder, corruption and conspiracy to do OTHER BAD STUFF.TGWTDBE zings. It’s electrifying. It’s sassy, it’s dirty, it’s mean. It’s fun. It’s in your face police drama, with good guys hunting the bad guys. And the bad guys trying to outsmart the good guys. And each of the bad guys trying to outsmart the other bad guys. In other words, its a Grifter’s Paradise (note the Capital Letters there). It’s HARD CASE CRIME having the TIME OF ITS LIFE with the MASTER OF THE CRIME NOVEL.But most importantly, it’s Lawrence Block.The Man With The Golden Pen.