A Diet of Treacle - Lawrence Block

The signs of what is to come are all there in Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle, although it ought to already be obvious from the suitably lurid cover on the Hard Case Crime paperback with the tagline 'She Went Looking For Thrills - AND FOUND MURDER'. To be fair, you don't even need to look beyond the author's name to know what to expect, but Block's 1961 crime thriller has plenty of lowlife pulp and seediness in the opening chapters to alert you to the nature of the trouble ahead.

It's the counter-culture alternative living, hip drug taking community of Greenwich Village that houses characters like Joe Milani and his friend Shank. Right from the start Block describes them as being blissfully high in the middle of the day in a bar, neither of them with anything better to do but ponder their next move, or rather their next bout of inactivity. This day, Joe decides his confidence is running high enough to pick up a square chick who has come into the bar, but his attitude to the pick-up only seems to emphasise Joe's outsider status and lack of willingness to be anything else.

Shank meanwhile, known as such for the long stiletto knife he carries around with him (which we can tell from the cover is going to be used in a murder), similarly lives from day to day, buying a little pot and selling some on as his only means of income. It's low-level drug dealing, but he has to be careful, and can't risk even getting searched and found in possession of the latest three ounces of pot he has picked up. When his regular dealer is busted however, Shank finds that he is forced to distribute heavier drugs including heroin just to get his own stash. It's certainly more profitable, but it also pushes the friends into more dangerous territory.

Being Block, there's no squeamishness or moralising about the lifestyle adopted by Joe and Shank in A Diet of Treacle. The author deals in a realistic and even-handed manner with the nature of soft drugs, their essential harmlessness and widespread use. He also fills us in however on the troubled background of both Joe and Shank that has led them to drop out of society and into this lifestyle, and it's there that you can sense where problems might come down the line. Joe even considers that he would be lucky to be square, as being hip doesn't leave a whole lot of options.

So Joe is surprised when the square chick, Anita Carbone, turns up again seeking him out while he is in the midst of such contemplation. She's from uptown New York, but from Harlem, so just not some rich kid looking for thrills. She is however looking to escape from the predictable life of marriage, children and a mortgage that has been mapped out for her, wanting to explore options other than the one society dictates as being aspirational for a young woman.

Rather than treating the subject as a cheap lurid crime thriller (not that there is anything wrong with that, and if you hang around there are plenty of crime and sexual situations to be found in A Diet of Treacle), Block takes the time to explore the life-traps for young people looking for alternative ways of living. "In rejecting the values of a society they couldn't cope with, they had made the drastic mistake of setting up their own society - every bit as illogical as the one they had rebelled against." Without glamourising or moralising about it, Block unforgivingly follows the inevitable progress of where this path leads.

Reading notes: A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block is published by Titan in the Hard Case Crime series. I bought the paperback edition in the now sadly gone Chapters in Dublin.