Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block  is dry. He writes about addiction and alcoholism, about divorce and brutality. His protagonist, Matt Scudder the private-eye, roams the pubs when he is not visiting AA groups. The plot crawls along maily by conversions between Scudder and other people of interest, and the crime-busting and logic-reasoning happens almost exclusively in the detective's secret mind, exposing to the readers only at the last possible moment. 

Except in a few lapses of style, Block would reveal his soft spots for humanity. Like in this description of a female owner of an antique shop which happens to be downstairs of the crime scene.

She was a dumpling, her hair an unconvincing red, her cheeks heavily rouged. Her billowy print dress flowing. Her smile was guarded, and something about her stance suggested she was keeping close to whatever device she could use to summon help.
I said I had a few questions about what had happened upstairs.
She said, "You a cop?" and her face relaxed for a moment, then tightened. "You're not a cop," she said, with such certainty she had me convinced.

The owner turned out to be a woman with enough savvy and life's wisdom to see through Scudder's unwillingness to talk to a difficult questionee -- the victims' daughter actually, and she detected the detective's mind with the shrewdness of any mother-of-four-grown-boys. The unexpected human touch surprises the reader like a single deliberately (accidentally?) colored character in an otherwise black-and-white comic strip.