A novel that took 22 years to reach the screen
A Walk Among the Tombstones began as the tenth novel in Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder series, published in 1992. Scudder is an unlicensed private investigator and recovering alcoholic, an ex-NYPD cop working out of a Hell's Kitchen hotel, attending AA meetings between cases. The novel is a procedural about a drug trafficker who hires Scudder to find the men who kidnapped and murdered his wife. It is methodical, cold, and deeply rooted in New York City geography.
Block wrote seventeen Scudder novels between 1976 and 2011, and several were optioned over the decades without ever reaching production. The 1986 film Eight Million Ways to Die, directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jeff Bridges, adapted an earlier entry in the series but took such liberal creative liberties that it bears little resemblance to Block's fiction. It was not until 2014 that writer-director Scott Frank (Out of Sight, The Queen's Gambit) delivered a faithful adaptation of the tenth novel, with Liam Neeson as Scudder, and that is the only screen version of this specific story.
The Scudder novels have never become a franchise on screen despite the quality of the source material. The 2014 film performed modestly at the box office, and no sequel was produced. Block's series remains, for now, primarily a literary achievement, with the films serving as occasional visits to a character who lives most fully on the page.
Every version of A Walk Among the Tombstones
The source novel, its screen adaptation, and the wider Matt Scudder series
A Walk Among the Tombstones across time
- 1976Lawrence Block introduces Matt Scudder in The Sins of the Fathers
- 1983Eight Million Ways to Die published, the fifth Scudder novel
- 1986Hal Ashby's film adapts Eight Million Ways to Die, relocating it to Los Angeles 8 Million Ways to Die
- 1992Block publishes A Walk Among the Tombstones, the tenth Scudder novel A Walk Among the Tombstones
- 2011Block publishes A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the seventeenth and final Scudder novel
- 2014Scott Frank's film adaptation opens, Liam Neeson as Scudder A Walk Among the Tombstones
If you love the procedural bleakness: unlicensed investigators and moral fog
Private detectives operating outside the law, in cities that don't reward good intentions
If you love the New York City setting: crime in the five boroughs
Stories where the city is as much a character as anyone in them
If you love the Liam Neeson mode: cold, capable, grief-carrying men
Films where a particular kind of controlled male competence carries the whole weight
The definitive version is the novel
Block's 1992 novel is the version that earns everything the 2014 film reaches for. Scudder on the page is a genuinely complex figure: his sobriety is a daily discipline, not a backstory detail, and his method of investigation is slow, persistent, and unglamorous. The novel trusts that procedural patience to build real dread. Scott Frank's film is good, but it compresses and simplifies. Read the book first.
The underrated one: Scott Frank's film deserves more credit than it got
The 2014 film arrived during peak Neeson-action-thriller fatigue and got unfairly filed next to Taken sequels it has nothing in common with. Frank directs it as a slow, patient piece of crime fiction, not an action movie. Neeson plays Scudder's restrained competence without showboating. The film has real atmosphere and takes the material seriously. It came and went too quickly.
The one to skip: Eight Million Ways to Die (1986)
Hal Ashby's 1986 film uses an earlier Scudder novel as a starting point and then relocates the story to Los Angeles, strips out the alcoholism's moral weight, and turns Scudder into a standard 1980s action protagonist. Jeff Bridges is not poorly cast, but the film went through a troubled production and extensive reshoots, and it shows. It is a Los Angeles crime movie wearing Block's name, not an adaptation of his sensibility.