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Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die

Obwohl Scudder am Ende die Kurve kriegt und es gerade so schafft, der einen letzten Versuchung zu widerstehen, erscheint mir dieser Band als einer der bittersten und hoffnungslosesten Teile der Serie. Und nach wie vor einer der besten, wenn nicht der Beste.
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After the meeting I walked for awhile in Central Park. The sun was out for a change and it was the first good day all week. I took a good long walk and watched the kids and the runners and the cyclists and the roller skaters and tried to reconcile all that wholesome innocent energy with the dark face of the city that showed itself every morning in the newspaper.
The two worlds overlap. Some of these riders would be robbed of their bicycles. Some of these strolling lovers would return home to burglarized apartments. Some of these laughing kids would pull holdups, and shoot or stab, and some would be held up or shot or stabbed, and a person could give himself a headache trying to make sense out of it.
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He was visibly drunk now, but only if you knew where to look. The eyes had a glaze on them, and there was a matching glaze on his whole manner. He was holding up his end of a typical alcoholic conversation, wherein two drunks take polite turns talking aloud to their own selves.
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'Those are cowry shells. Primitive societies all over the world use the cowry shell as a medium of exchange, it's the Swiss franc of the tribal world. You see how it's shaped?'
I went and had a look.
'Like the female genitalia,' she said. 'So men automatically use it to buy and sell.'
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(Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die, 1981)