Have you had moments, while reading a really good book, when the suspense is so intense, so unbearable, that you lose a little control of your eyes? When they won’t stay on the line you’re reading but flit to the next paragraph, to the bottom of the page, to the next page, against your will, so that you have to force yourself, with serious willpower, to go back to the sentence you were reading in order to do it properly and follow events in their proper sequence?

Well, that just happened to me while reading “All the Flowers Are Dying” (William Morrow, 288 pages, $24.95), the new Matthew Scudder novel by Lawrence Block.

If you like mysteries and are a New Yorker, as most readers of this column are, you already know Mr. Block. He’s prolific, having written more books than he’ll admit to (under several pseudonyms, including Chip Harrison and Paul Kavanagh, as well as his own name), and they’re mostly very good. Some are a lot better than that, and this is one of them.

Mr. Block has written just about every kind of mystery imaginable, from funny spy novels (about Evan Tanner, who never sleeps) and light, humorous adventures of a burglar (Bernie Rhodenbarr, whose day job is running a bookshop) to intricately plotted crime stories about a hit man (Keller, who appears to be amoral but isn’t, exactly) and stand-alone thrillers like the best-selling “Small Town,” about a post-September 11 New York.

To me, however, the best books, the real literature, are those about Matt Scudder. There are 16 of them, stretching back to 1976. The first three, paperback originals, were fine, but nothing distinguished them from a number of other private-eye books of the time. He let the character go for awhile, then brought him back with “A Stab in the Dark,” followed by “Eight Million Ways To Die,” which was my favorite until several years later, when the beautiful and poignant “When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes” was published. Now that I’ve read “All the Flowers Are Dying,” though, I’d have to say it’s a tie.

Scudder is an alcoholic. He drank while he was a member of the New York Police Department, and his drinking caused the death of a 6-year-old girl. He quit and went to hang out at Jimmy Armstrong’s, a saloon on Ninth Avenue, and later, when Jimmy lost his lease, on Tenth Avenue and 57th Street. Not long after Jimmy died, it became Jake’s, and it’s still there.

While Scudder – having quit the job and, soon after, his role of husband and father – filled his days and nights with drink and regrets, people came to him for help. He was an ex-cop, they figured, so he might be able to fix things for them. He couldn’t help himself, but he did help others, and eventually he became a private detective.

He married a girl, Elaine, who had been a prostitute, and he loved her and she loved him. By the time of “Eight Million Ways to Die,” Scudder had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and he’s been sober ever since. It wasn’t always easy, but he’s got it as much under control as an alcoholic can have it. One day at a time.

After drinking years away at Armstrong’s, he’d put “the plug in the jug,” as old-timers say, and spent a lot of hours in church basements and storefronts, where he “looked for something to put in the empty places alcohol used to fill.”

In this superb series, Scudder has aged in real time, just as the author has. Oh, yeah, and as we all have, come to think of it. He’s in his 60s now, and the reflexes have slowed a little, which makes it all the more difficult when an unusually brutal killer appears to have targeted him.

It’s hard to convey a novel’s literary strength in a brief review. It is for me, anyway. You can’t always just a pull a line or two out of context to illustrate an author’s style, especially if it has subtlety, and Mr. Block’s does. It can move from a gently sad episode to a crisp wisecrack to a truly terrifying look inside a psychopath’s mind without ever breaking stride.

In the opening scene, Scudder meets an old friend, a cop who has decided to retire. He’d been ready a few years before, he said, “and then the towers came down,” a watershed moment for everyone who lived in New York, but maybe more so for police.

“That was no time to retire,” the cop said to Scudder, “although guys did, and how could you blame ’em? They lost their heart for the job. Me, I’d already lost my heart for it. Shoveling s– against the tide, all we ever do. Right then, though, I managed to convince myself I was needed.”

Later, Scudder and Elaine go to listen to music at a blues club where they run into an old friend; she tells him he looks well. “He shook is head sadly. ‘The first time anybody said that to me,’ he said, ‘is the day I first realized I was getting older. You ever hear anybody tell a kid in his twenties he’s looking well?'” Elaine tells him that she takes it back.

She’s a good-looking girl with a sense of humor, and once you meet her, you’d like to spend more time with her. Matt is smart and decent, and you wouldn’t go wrong spending some days and evenings with him, either. There are 16 books in the series – 16 opportunities to spend time with him. If you’re smart, you’ll go out and get a few of them. They’re addictive, but it’s okay. Enjoy them. You’ll find you can’t stop until you’ve read them all. One book at a time.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.