3 out of 5

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I feel so up and down about this book, which is… maybe the sign of it being a good, or even great book, but it’s also incredibly hard to judge for exactly those up and down reasons.

I’ll recount a bit of those varying opinions, hopefully without spoiling much. Overwhelmingly – at least initially – I felt like this was a bit of uncomfortable wish fulfillment for a (then) 75 year old writer. Block and a lot of the Hard Case Crime classic pulpsters did their time in erotica, and some of that can be fun; I’m admittedly not sure what modern erotica reads like, but ‘The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes’ kinda plays out like a dude imagining himself as a heterosexual anal sex whisperer – the ladies love him, and they all like it in the butt. Sound… compelling? I mean, maybe if you’re a dude with that same wish to be fulfilled, but otherwise the only thing really keeping the book alive when it’s in this mode – which it is for over half the book – is Block’s writing, and all the bits surrounding the sex stuff.

Retired NYPD cop Doak Miller is chilling in Florida as a PI, often doing odd jobs for the local cops alongside his freelance work. He has a steady string of flings on the side, which are detailed pretty extensively, and, content-wise, read like how it’s described above. I mean, it’s not necessarily overly gratuitous, and Doak’s female partners are written to have agency, but they’re also depicted very much from a typical (male) pulp perspective… although, arguably, that’s who’s POV we’re taking in the book. Quality-wise, the writing crackles, as per usual, and these sex scenes are vignettes between Doak’s day-to-day stuff as a PI, which kicks off the main plot: Doak is tasked by the sheriff to go undercover, posing as a hitman for Lisa – who wants her rich husband quite dead. She ultimately backs out of the plot, but Doak finds himself incredibly intrigued by this woman…

That’s a setup for a more predictable tale, of a femme fatale convincing someone to kill for her, but Block – very, very much to his credit – has a twist on that. And it’s a good one. It’s one that saves the book from its indulgences, and goes a lot darker than I was expecting, to a point of making me somewhat uncomfortable. (Which I like.) So that opens up another argument of the sex stuff being there as a purposeful juxtaposition to where the book goes, playing into some pretty rough questions one might ask themselves about Where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality? and so on. That may also suggest why this twist is ruined by the copy on the back cover, which I really don’t agree with doing, but maybe the editors were like, “people are going to think this is just a sex book unless we tell them otherwise…”

The darkness builds. And then I have another opinion formed by the last chapter, which is hard to talk about without ruining the effect of reading it, but is themed similar to the fantasy / reality question, and backed up by the book’s final line of dialogue: “That’s the movies. This is life.”

I’m stuck between these opinions: that the book’s opening could’ve achieved a similar effect without reading like a Hustler letter; but that that is relevant to making the darker sections of the book make sense; and whether or not where it ultimately goes is a cop out, or a final twist of the knife.

The fact that I’m sitting with this is… awesome. But I can’t tell how much of its effects are purposeful, and as for the rating, it’s not a Block book I’m eager to return to, even though I think I should at some point, to see if it stirs these same confusions and discomforts on a second or third read.