“When someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth,” says Bob Dylan. “When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” Dylan delivers this fine wisdom in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary—The Rolling Thunder Revue, A Bob Dylan Story. It’s a sort-of true look back at Dylan’s rollicking 1975 tour, when facts mattered less than truth, when Bob was more honest than ever, singing most nights in a painted white-face mask.
It’s a line that resonates—particularly for a certain kind of fiction writer who’s always had a pronounced distaste for the addiction / recovery memoir.
For readers interested in a more forthright accounting of addiction, recovery, and all the messiness in between, I’d suggest instead a trip to the crime fiction section. Here, you’ll often find men and women in the masks of their characters, delivering emotional truths tucked inside outlandish adventure. More truth and more fun. Step away from those Million Little Pieces; stop starring at that Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man; and please don’t listen to the party girl explaining How to Murder Your Life.
If you want to hear what it’s really like, take a seat next to the likes of Matt Scudder or Dave Robicheaux or Claire DeWitt. Listen to what they have to say. Try to keep up. It’s not all about their demons. There are cases to solve, wrongs to right. The picture is bigger than their private struggles. Addicts tend to do more navel-gazing than most, but at some point, it’s time to look up and engage with the world. Which is something that crime fiction might do better than any other form of storytelling. Engagement with the ugly world is everything, no matter how fucked up a character might be.
Any discussion of addiction and recovery in crime fiction must start with Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder.Any discussion of addiction and recovery in crime fiction must start with Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. The hard-drinking private eye was a trope well before Scudder appeared on the mean streets of New York, starting with The Sins of the Father in 1976. However, Block’s was the first to focus not just on the boozing, but on the struggles of alcoholism. The fifth (and for my money, the best) book in the series, Eight Million Ways to Die ends with Matt introducing himself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Block has released fourteen Scudder titles since then, and AA meetings are a recurring theme. The reader is constantly reminded of that central truth of addiction: it’s never in the past tense. It’s never beaten. No one is a former or recovered alcoholic. You are—forevermore—a recovering alcoholic. Scudder, like all addicts, is always just a moment of weakness away from falling off the wagon. Which is why he gets his butt to so many AA meetings. They’re his anchor to sober living.
The series opens at his favorite haunt, Armstrong’s—“a good sound saloon with dark wood walls and a stamped tin ceiling.” He’s drinking his usual—bourbon-spiked coffee. The caffeine keeps him alert; the whiskey helps keep the demons at bay. That is, until he realizes, after five novels and gallons of the amber, that his primary demon has become the whiskey itself. That’s how it goes with addicts. You start not just because drugs and alcohol feel good; you abuse the stuff because it helps soothe a troubled mind. It soothes until it takes over the mind itself. Addiction is sneaky that way.
When Scudder gets clean, he doesn’t abandon Armstrong’s and he sticks with the coffee, but he learns to lay off the hard stuff. He’s good about following most of the tenets of AA, but he’s also a creature of habit. Sober or not, his local pub is both his office and living room. He’ll stare down those bottles lined up behind the bar, he’ll head to a meeting—and then he’ll solve the case.
James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux did not need five books before he got sober. When the series opens, with 1987’s The Neon Rain, Dave is already in recovery. His best friend, partner, and archetypal trickster, Clete Purcel, is decidedly not. He’s an unapologetic alcoholic, and a violent one. In chapter one of The Neon Rain, he asks:
‘Dave, when does a guy know he’s got a drinking problem?’
‘When it starts to hurt him,’ replies Dave.
There might be more wisdom summarized in those six words than in any self-lacerating / self-congratulatory memoir. Across twenty-two books in the series (most recently this year’s excellent New Iberia Blues) there is much that hurts Dave and Clete. They reckon with humanity’s capacity for cruelty with biblical intensity. In lesser hands, the over-the-top violence could become farce. However, Burke also happens to be a world class stylist. Sentence-for-sentence, he might deliver the finest prose in all of crime fiction. No one—in any genre—writes weather like James Lee Burke. And few have written so honestly about a man’s struggles to stay clean.
My two, personal favorite addict-protagonists in crime fiction are both created by Irish crime writers—Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor and Benjamin Black’s (aka John Banville’s) Quirke. The latter is a cheerless pathologist from 1950s Dublin whose investigations tend to be interrupted by blackout benders and hospitalizations. This being Ireland in the fifties, AA isn’t really an option. Taking the cure means having another drink—as every drunk knows, the only true cure for a hangover. Quirke will venture stretches of sobriety—mostly for his resigned daughter, Phoebe—but he’s accepting of the fact that he’ll drink again, even if it likely kills him. This being John Banville’s alter-ego, the writing is also hard to top. Banville is a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, though his Benjamin Black novels are far more fun.
No one—in any genre—writes weather like James Lee Burke. And few have written so honestly about a man’s struggles to stay clean.As for Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor books—few would use the word fun to describe them. That is, unless you’re an armchair sadist who delights in seeing a character’s darkest night of the soul, on a relentless basis. Bruen’s novels might be best described as prose-poems. His voice is singular. It sounds like Galway itself. It also contains some of the most unblinking accounts of alcoholism and drug abuse in all of fiction. When I first read Bruen, I made the (always dangerous) assumption that the writer must be mess himself. Not true, I learned. The character may be a Jameson guzzling, coke snorting, Xanax popping disaster, but the author evidently likes his very un-Irish Budweiser and doesn’t touch anything harder.
When I published my first novel, Under Water, my character Duck Darley took his cues from all the protagonists mentioned above, and many more. I’ve been thrilled when readers have noted the similarities between Duck and another haunted contemporary: Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt. Gran’s latest, 2018’s The Infinite Blacktop, has been hailed as an “existential masterpiece.” Both DeWitt and Darley have been known to steal pills on a case, and both tend to reach first for the bottle in times of stress. Neither cares to contemplate a vice-free life.
Duck is a Vicodin-loving alcoholic with a denial-fueled disdain for AA. After two books of more or less constant drinking, my third, The Tower of Songs (released this month) opens with Duck on the wagon, trying out ‘the weed cure.’ Over the last few years, it’s a method of ‘recovery’ that I’ve witnessed first-hand. I have a growing number of friends who have sworn off the booze, and who now swear by pot as their only vice. As weed continues its inevitable path toward nationwide legalization, I believe that’s a trend that will continue. Regardless of your personal views on marijuana, it’s hard to argue with the evidence that it’s not only less dangerous than alcohol, cigarettes, or really any drug you can name, it also appears to be a form of addiction treatment itself.
It seems to work for Duck. I’ve discovered that he’s a better investigator when he’s ‘just’ stoned, as opposed to being wasted on whiskey. As for the author, I’ll still enjoy bending an elbow—until it starts to hurt.
