Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Coppelman. Thanks for listening. This is an emotional podcast for me. I'm sitting here with my old friend Larry Block. Lawrence Block. You probably know him as one of great writers who's still writing books. He's been writing books for, he's been writing for longer than 60 years. Something like that. And books coming out,

for about almost that long. Oh, yeah. And certainly short stories were coming out before then. Right. Larry's been on the podcast before. He and I have been friends for close to 30 years. Something like that. We certainly met 30 years ago. You see. And long before that, I was I was reading his work. And Larry, you know, it's funny because I mean, you know, in our in our lives,

you know, you play a really important role to me and you know how much I care about you personally. And what's great for me is how much I care about you as an artist. I at 14 started reading your books. And I, you know, got to write a forward for a collection of stories about this character, Matt Scutter. And you have just completed and are about to release the latest book.

Involving Matt Scutter. Indeed. Called the autobiography of Matt Scutter. The autobiography of Matthew Scutter. Yes. The autobiography of Matthew Scutter. And I've read the book. It is different than every other book about Scutter. It has some enormous similarities to the other books about Scutter. But it is not a crime thriller. No, not at all. It's not an awful really.

Well, okay. Talk about that. Why is it not a novel? Well, I suppose it is, but in a kind of a meta way, which is a word I rarely use because I don't begin to understand what it means. But it's it's the autobiography of a fictional character.

And I found out incidentally, I wrote it and not aware of it's ever having been done before. And I found out a couple of months after I finished the book. I'm glad I didn't know it before.

That Simone had written a memoir of Magray is most is recurring detective. And I read that. And I found it very comforting to discover that while I have enormous respect and admiration for Simone, this particular book was quite dull. It just didn't much work.

Well, this book is not dull. And I don't think you look, I if you are a Matt Scutter fanatic, I've in just in case people are tuning in who didn't hear our earlier conversation on here. I've read each of the Matt Scutter books three times and some of them I've read five times. So I'm really up target audience for this book.

Absolutely. And I have to say I was I think the second reader of third reader of it. So that that's good. I guess your your wife and your one of your daughters read it first, which is fair. I accept that. I accept being third to them.

But it's but I think you don't have to as funny you say there've only been a couple of these books, but I mean many books purport to be memoirs of fictional characters.

The difference is this is the memoir autobiography of a fictional character we've met in many books before. Yes. And I do think if you go and read those books, it might make this experience.

It'll make it different and might make it richer in certain ways, but I don't think it's required.

You don't. I was wondering about that because it seemed to me when I was trying to think how to promote the book or do anything towards it.

I thought that really anyone who's a real fan of the Scutter series will want to read it. Yes.

But I couldn't think of any reason why anyone who was not would would even want to pick it up. So baffles me.

Well, perhaps they would because you're one of the great living American writers and are acknowledged as such. And so there's a fair already Scutter fans they probably either disagree with an assessment or just don't share it.

Yeah, or maybe they don't know like that's the thing and maybe this being not because there are I say this there are people who just don't want to read genre fiction.

There are people who don't think they like genre fiction. And even though I would make the argument that after the third book, these aren't genre fiction.

I think the first three are at the literary edge of genre fiction. But I think once we're into the fourth book, you're doing something entirely different.

And you're nodding. So I guess in your re-evaluation, you you you accept that's not a crazy statement.

Well, I'll go with it.

You'll go with it.

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