Donald Westlake was a terrific writer, and if you pay any attention to crime fiction his name glimmers like platinum because, alongside of Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block, he was one of the Great Living Old Pros. Maybe some of you have read Carl Hiassen's comic crime novels, and enjoyed them. They're fun, but look, take my word for it, _Donald E. Westlake_ is the master, and if you don't read him you are depriving yourself.
Westlake wrote more than a hundred books, none of them bad, and some were juist brimming with tight, complex plotting, complex characters, and some of the nimblest writing since P.G. Wodehouse. I used to say that the Dortmunder novels were sort of crime fiction's P.G. Wodehouse, but this shortchanges Westlake-- who also came up with some of the grimmest novels around.
His finest novel may have been _The Ax_. The main character's a middle-aged paper mill manager who's been downsized out of a job. He hasn't been able to tell his wife. He leaves home in the morning, scans the want ads, occasionally getting interviews that go nowhere. He's been living on savings that are quickly running out. Westlake makes the man's desperation as deep and vivid as a paper cut. So when he outlines the scheme to get his career back, you're shocked at its evident brilliance, and even more appalled that he'll go through with it.
Or, if you don't want to hunt down _The Ax_, rent _The Stepfather_, which is one of those low-budget thrillers that stands out as a real gem of the form. (Ignore the sequels.) Westlake wrote this as a favor to producer Brian Garfield, and the nature of the deal was that they couldn't change the script without Westlake's consent. And luckily enough, they hired an unknown actor named Terry O'Quinn to play the lead, and he was _perfect_. (It reminds me of another thriller worth checking out: _The Silent Partner_, with Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer.)
How about something lighter? Track down _Kahawa_, an amazing crime story where the thieves go after a multi-ton trainload of Ugandan coffee. It's been years since I read this one (and maybe I oughta get a hardcover), but the characters include mercenaries, diplomats, villagers, assorted black-marketeers, and Idi Amin Dada.
Or for a REAL comic romp, check out 1977's _Dancing Aztecs_, which is one of the greatest comic novels ever written, Westlake's his version of those epic comedies like _It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World_. Ready for the set-up? Here it is. A stolen gold statue has been smuggled into New York with sixteen plaster copies. Due to a mix-up, the statues have been given to the members of a citywide activist organization. So the crooks have to track them all down to find the real statue. BUT, while the crooks hunt all over Manhattan and its environs to find and break the plaster statues, a marriage among the activists breaks up, one of the crooks falls in love with one of the statue-owners, more and more people become aware of the gold statue and horn in on the chase, and a funeral director has to stage-manage a parade in Harlem full of the worst celebrity lookalikes he can hire. And two thirds into the novel, when we're down to the last statue, Westlake makes us SCREAM when he casually informs us that it's a fake, too. "Someone has made a mistake."
But let's get to the two names that Westlake's known for, Parker and Dortmunder, who would be those masks of Tragedy and Comedy, except that Dortmunder could be _both_ of them and Parker really can't be either of them, so maybe they're not the masks of Comedy and Tragedy after all. (Yes, I cribbed that gag from Westlake.)
Parker is an expert thief. He's not a dinner-jacket sophisticate, like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie. Parker is as ruthless and bone-dry as a bison skull in the desert. He evaluates a robbery, makes his decisions, lines up a crew (or ir recruited), and goes at it. But, life being as it is, complications ensue. Maybe part of his crew's just unreliable. Maybe the mark has his own agenda. But Parker manages to survive these treacheries, and once in a while, he comes out ahead. In the movies, Parker's turned up as Mel Gibson in _Payback_, Robert Duvall in _The Outfit_, Peter Coyote in _Slayground_, and even Jim Brown in _The Split_, but Lee Marvin was absolutely perfect in _Point Blank_. So think Lee Marvin.
The funny thing is, the Parker novels were marketed as a numbered-series set of paperbacks, but they're actually very experimental. In most of the Parker novels, Westlake will bring us up to some excruciatingly suspenseful point... and on th next page, he'll double back a day or two earlier with another character's backstory. Quentin Tarantino, a Westlake fan, did the same thing in most of his movies (and yeah, _Reservoir Dogs_ feels like a Parker novel). Westlake spun one of the secondary characters into a short series of novels on his own, where actor-thief Alan Grofield took center stage... and there's a Grofield book and a Parker novel that begin with the exact same chapter.
Dortmunder, on the other hand, got his start as Parker. Westlake began a Parker novel with the idea that Parker'd have to steal the same gem over and over, but it kept coming out funny. So Westlake came up with a different band of thieves. There's John Dortmunder, the expert planner with the world's worst luck. His crew usually includes eager-to-please buddy Andy Kelp, driver Stan Murch, mountain of fear Tiny Bulcher, and a handful other equally strange small-time crooks. The best Dortmunder film was _The Hot Rock_, and even though people felt Robert Redford was too glamorous to play the hangdog Dortmunder, I thought he was fine (and George Segal was perfect as Kelp). But Westlake once said that Harry Dean Stanton would have been a perfect Dortmunder.
If you've read a P.G. Wodehouse novel, like _The Code of the Woosters_, you may remember how the plot kept getting more complicated, and how Bertie and Jeeves would find themselves in greater and greater trouble. That's how Dortmunder's jobs go. In _Why Me_, Dortmunder's pulling a simple jewelry-store robbery, and almost by accident he acquires a national-symbol-grade ruby called the Byzantine Fire. So the cops are after him, the FBI's after him, several terrorist groups are after him, and since they're getting rousted by the cops the city's _criminals_ are after him. Or in the short story "Too Many Crooks," which could be the funniest crime story ever written, Dortmunder and Kelp drill into a bank vault and find themselves held hostage by _another_ team of bank robbers. The plots wind up tighter and tighter, and with every twist you're laughing because you can't _believe_ Westlake would _do_ that to his hero.
Recurring gags, motifs, characters and situations abound, and a series just doesn't work as comfort food without things that _always_ happen or places we _always_ visit. The meetings at the O.J. Bar and Grill are always accompanied by notes on the decor, the "our own brand" bourbon, the signs on the bathrooms, and the hilariously inane arguments of the regulars in the bar. Andy Kelp's an enthusiast for nearly anything, especially electronic gadgetry, and when he steals cars it's always a doctor's Cadillac. Tiny Bulcher, "a monster brought to life by Claymation," terrifies everyone by sitting still. Stan Murch always has a new driving route through Manhattan. Fence Arnie Albright dwells on how detestable he is to his fellow man, but he make sup for it by giving better dollar than that other guy, Stoon.
There's lots of play in the Dortmunder books too. In _Jimmy the Kid_, Kelp reads a novel that describes a kidnapping in perfect, plausible detail, so he convinces Dortmunder into following its blueprint. The book Kelp finds is _Child Heist_ by one Richard Stark, about a thief named Parker. In _Drowned Hopes_, the Caddie that Kelp's stolen gets reposessed by Ken Levine... a character from Joe Gores's novels. And the same scene turns up, written from Levine's viewpoint, in Gores's novel _32 Cadillacs_.
The villian of _Drowned Hopes_ is an evil, grizzled, mean-spirited psychopath named "Tom Jimson," which is a great name in itself (as in jimson weed). But it's even more perfect when you recall that Westlake nearly won an Oscar for writing the script for _The Grifters_, from a novel by Jim Thompson. (Fun fact: director Stephen Frears asked Westlake to write the script under the Richard Stark pen name.).
There's just too much of Westlake to cover here. He created the Father Dowling mysteries. He did a nice "Starship Hopeful" series of funny science fiction storis for _Playboy_. He did a biography of Elizabeth Taylor under a pseudonym. He did a couple of mystery weekends with the likes of Gahan Wilson and Stephen King and Peter Straub. He did a good science fiction novel, _Anarchaos_, under the name Curt Clark. He did several series of novels under other pseudonyms, including some 1950s porn novels co-written with Lawerence Block to pay the bills. He did a book about the 1967 rebellion in Anguilla, a tiny Caribbean island whose people revolted _against_ independence and _for_ staying a colony of Great Britain... and Britain sent an invasion force to _put down the rebellion_. This was, other than the Liz Taylor job, Donald Westlake's only _non-fiction_ book.
This April, Westlake's last novel-- one last Dortmunder, titled _Get Real_-- will be published.
So, have I given you any incentive to read this wonderful, absolutely wonderful writer?
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