The Last Temptation of Manhood: Sexual Transformations in Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder Series

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadierme d'etudes americaines Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 81-98 The Last Temptation of Manhood: Sexual Transformations in Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder Series Leland S. Person 81 At the end of Lawrence Block's A Ticket to the Boneyard (1990), the eighth of thirteen hard-boiled detective novels featuring Matt Scudder, the vengeful Scudder executes the serial murderer, James Leo Motley, by placing a gun in the unconscious man's hand and then in his mouth-and then pulling the trigger. "I stayed there at his side, down on one knee, the gun in his mouth, his finger on the trigger, my finger on his," Scudder recalls. "Eventually his breathing changed slightly and he started to stir. My finger moved, and so did his, and that was that" (294). Motley and Scudder have a long history with each other-from before the beginning of the series, in fact-and this is not the first time Scudder has framed Motley with one of his own guns. Nor is there much question either time that Motley deserves what he gets. In A Ticket to the Boneyard, for example, this blow job from hell ends a string of ten brutal murders-and the vicious rape and torture of Scudder's prostitute girlfriend, Elaine Mardell, who lies near death in a hospital even as Scudder blows away her attacker. Twelve years before, while still a New York City police detective, Scudder had faked an assault on himself in order 82 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' etudes amerzcames to send Motley to prison for brutalizing Elaine. At that time, Motley vowed to kill Scudder and all of his women, and it is those serial killings that Scudder interrupts by staging Motley's suicide. I will return to the ending of A Ticket to the Boneyard because Scudder's murder of Motley climaxes the conflict over male sexual identity that the novel enacts, but let me first establish a context. In this thirteen-novel series, Scudder is a New York City ex-cop, ex-husband, ex-father, unlicensed, recovering alcoholic detective, whom David Geherin calls the "gloomiest and most guilt-ridden" of all the hard-boiled private eyes (1985, 190). Scudder's "King Kong-sized clinical case of guilt," in Robert Baker and Michael Nietzel's words (1985), stems from accidentally killing a seven-year-old girl during a robbery-the reason he quit the police force and his marriage, the reason he lives in a seedy hotel room and, through the first six novels in the series, tries to drink himself to death. When he enters Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), Scudder begins to reconstruct his life,and at least in the gendered and sexual terms that concern me here, that process of reconstruction reaches a critical moment in A Ticket to the Boneyard. 1 With some theoretical help from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985), Kaja Silverman (1992), Guy Hocquenghem ([1978] 1993), and Klaus Theweleit (1989), I want to examine the novel and the Scudder series for their representation of male sexuality and sexual identity-for their use of the detective as a site of deviant desires and subversive sexualities, but also for the way a normative heterosexuality is destabilized, pluralized, and then rehabilitated. Lawrence Block is certainly one of the sexually frankest of the hard-boiled detective novelists, and no other writer that I can think of so immerses his detective and his detective's subjectivity in such a variety of sexual and sexually charged experiences. 2 What interests me especially about A Ticket to the Boneyard, however, is the doubling of detective and killer-the interplay of desire and denial as Block uses Motley to act out extravagant sadomasochistic fantasies that implicate Scudder himself. The result is not so much Scudder's "outing" as the deconstruction of his (or any) securely defined male identity, or sexuality. That is, by forcing Scudder into an increasingly intimate identification with Motley and thus into various subject positions and relations with variously gendered objects, Block creates a "marginal male Leland S. PersonI 83 subjectivity," in Kaja Silverman's terms-making male...