Block on . . .

Though I genuinely did enjoy nearly all the work that went into assembling, publishing, and promoting The Getaway Car (aside, perhaps from a few permissions wrangles), the aspect of the whole process that I'll always be happiest about is the sense that my work added some pleasure to the world. Let's be clear: nearly all the pleasure offered by The Getaway Car was the work of Donald Westlake. I wouldn't begin to argue otherwise. But I will gladly take credit for doing the work of turning his work--ephemeral and occasional as it was--into something that's easy to get, and that was easy to bring to the attention of his fans, many of whom had never known these many thousands of words of his writing existed. That will always make me happy.

Recently there's been another, wholly unexpected effect, one that I won't claim any actual credit for but am glad to have played a small part in generating: inspired, he says, by The Getaway Car, for which he wrote a foreword, Lawrence Block has just assembled and published a collection of his own nonfiction writing about his career and the work of other writers. Titled The Crime of Our Lives, it's just been published, and it's full of great stuff. Block has long been a garrulous commenter on his own books, supplying forewords and head notes and afterwords to collections and new editions, pieces that are always funny, but at the same time serious about the work of writing and the way that a moment in a writer's life and career becomes crystallized in a particular book or story. For this collection, however, we get, not so much Block the host, but Block the guest: it mostly consists of his introductions for and articles about his peers, mentors, friends, and colleagues in the writing world, from the expected (Chandler, Hammett, Spillane, and, of course, Westlake) to the more surprising (Poe, Joseph Conrad). Each one is pure Block: idiosyncratic, anecdotal, personal, and wholly engaged with the craft and job of writing.

If all goes well, I'll be interviewing Larry about the collection soon for the new crime site The Life Sentence, so I won't go into much more detail here, but I can't close without quoting a couple of the pieces. First, for their sheer goofy humor, here are the first lines of an introduction to a collection of Ed Gorman short stories:

Ed Gorman is a terrific writer, and you're going to have a wonderful time reading these stories.

Now what?

That's seventeen words. Pete Crowther, who asked me to write this introduction, has given me to understand that introductions to the volumes he publishes run in the neighborhood of a thousand words. That's not a bad neighborhood, you wouldn't be afraid to wander there after dark, but the seventeen words I've written leave me with nine hundred and eighty-seven words to write, and what am I going to write to take up the slack? I mean, I've already said everything I really have to say on the subject. Here are some stories. Read them, and leave me alone. What else is there to say?

Well, I'll think of something. I am, after all, a professional writer.

No surprise: he does.

Here he is offering a take on a question that Westlake, too, pondered: Why did Dashiell Hammett burn out so quickly?

I wonder if an answer might not lurk in the one scene in The Maltese Falcon not to be found in the Huston screenplay. In it, Spade recounts at length the seemingly pointless story of a man named Flitcraft, who left his home and family and disappeared after nearly being killed by a beam falling from a construction site. By the time Spade succeeded in finding him, the man had re-created essentially the same middle-class life in another cit with another family. Spade explains:

But that's the part I always liked. he adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

A beam fell and Dashiell Hammett taught himself to be a writer. Then no more beams fell, and he adjusted himself to that.

And, finally, here the opening of his obituary for his longtime friend Donald Westlake, written the day after Westlake's death, at the request of the Mystery Writers of America:

When the phone call came and brought the bad news, one of the first things that came to mind was John O'Hara's line: "George Gershwin died yesterday, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to."

Go get the book. You'll enjoy it.

{As for The Life Sentence: it's well worth checking out. I'm one of many members of its advisory board, though I deserve credit thus far for nothing but encouragement, so the recommendation is genuine: this week kicked off with an interview of the always interesting Laura Lippmann by site founder Lisa Levy, and much, much more is promised in the coming weeks.}

Virginia Woolf, meet John Dortmunder

As the snow blows and blows outside, making me glad to have stacks of unread books surrounding me, let's take one last dip into Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf before I leave it behind. In an undated, unpublished manuscript, Woolf described watching police cars chase a thief in the Tottenham Court Road, then reflected:

What does it feel like to be chasing a criminal? What does he say about it when he gets home and takes off his heavy boots and jacket? In all modern fiction there is not account of this that convinces one that the writer knows.

Well, if Westlake's Dortmunder is any guide, what he does when he gets home is goes to the fridge and gets a beer, Then, when May asks what went wrong, he says, "I don't want to talk about it, May." Then Andy Kelp tells her. At length.

One last (?) ride in The Getaway Car

It's been a while since I gathered reviews for The Getaway Car, and a big one has just appeared to cap off a long and very gratifying publicity run, so I hope you won't mind indulging me in a bit of linking and smiling. Like I told Gil Roth when he interviewed me for his Virtual Memories podcast recently, the nice thing about editing a book of someone else's work is that you can sing its praises wholeheartedly without feeling fully sheepish: it's their work, after all, not yours.

The biggest review thus far came from the Wall Street Journal, in which William Kristol went a bit farther than even I would be willing to go:

I hope I won’t shock anyone, but will merely expose myself to good-natured ridicule, if I profess myself inclined to the opinion that Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was the greatest modern American novelist.

The best thing about that review was that Kristol urged people not just to get The Getaway Car, but to go pick up the Parker books, too--and subsequent sales showed that a lot of folks took his advice.

Perhaps the review that meant the most to me came from the Washington Post, where Michael Dirda--a longtime IBRL favorite--was full of praise:

The Getaway Car may seem an odd title for a nonfiction miscellany, but it derives from a remark by Abby Adams Westlake. Her husband, she said, “no matter where he was headed, always drove like he was behind the wheel of the getaway car.” That suggests something of the rush and exhilaration with which most readers will turn these pages.

Having Michael Dirda say that the book was "expertly edited" really warmed my heart.

In the Daily Beast, longtime Westlake fan Malcolm Jones raved about the book and the oeuvre:

Is a posthumous collection of miscellaneous pieces (even one as smartly edited as this one) a good place to first encounter a writer known for his fiction? Normally I would say no, but in Westlake’s case, there really is no wrong way to approach his work. It is after all his sensibility—funny, fatalistic, humane but never sappy and always a little off kilter—that gives his writing its flavor, and you can find that sensibility in these pages as surely as you can in the novels. Because ultimately Westlake was not this kind of writer, or that kind, not a crime writer, or a satirist, or a comedian. He was just a writer, and as good as they come.

In the Guardian, meanwhile, my online friend P. D. Smith wrote a brief, but very appreciative review--the subhead says it all:

This wonderful collection, edited by Levi Stahl, includes entertaining autobiographical insights from the prolific American crime writer.

And then, to cap it all off, the New York Times Book Review on Sunday featured a brief review by Charles Finch (who earlier in the Chicago Tribune had named The Getaway Car one of the five best books to get a suspense fan this year). Finch wrote:

"This is a book for fans," Stahl insists in his introduction—the sole misstep of his whole enterprise, because in fact this is a book for everyone, anyone who likes mystery novels or good writing or wit and passion and intelligence, regardless of their source. . . . Stahl has assembled these pieces both lovingly and wisely. . . . A collection [that] one hopes will find him new readers.

Don't mind me. I'll just be over here blushing. I knew going into this project that I was going to enjoy the whole process, but the ride has been even more fun than I expected--thanks for going along on it with me.

Penelope Fitzgerald's notebooks

This week has found me happily reading Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, after the UK edition inexplicably mouldered on my shelves for almost a year. Maybe it's because, at more than four hundred pages, it at first seemed excessive, for the wholly silly reason that surely Fitzgerald, that master of leaving out, ought to have a slim life?

Halfway through, I'm so, so glad for the length--and for Twitter, which has allowed me to share line after line that Lee has dredged up from Fitzgerald's many working notebooks and diaries. In her novels and nonfiction, Fitzgerald was such a good writer of sentences, marrying elegance, concision, and meaning, and her presumably far less polished notebooks turn out to have their share. A quick selection:

The whole art of happiness consists in staying in one place.

Borges likes to keep complications, but reduce them to their most economical form.

I've come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret that I haven't spent my life on it.

One is only middle-aged once.

I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost.

To live in the country with dog cat an apple tree books a listener--not only good but the only good.

Even evil spirits keep in touch with themselves.

I could go on and on. The impression Lee gives is that Fitzgerald didn't maintain a single, long-term notebook, like Anthony Powell, or a system, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rather, she seems to have kept a working notebook for each book, and other notebooks throughout the years for other reasons. When teaching, for example, she had notebooks in which she worked and planned. (That's where the Borges quote comes from.) One of Lee's great achievements in the biography is to make clear how much groundwork Fitzgerald was laying in those notebooks for here eventual, late, arrival as a fiction writer. It ends up being tremendously exciting, watching Fitzgerald making notes for teaching that are at the same time notes for herself on how novels work, or sketching a character in her notebook and clearly beginning to develop some of the precision and judgment that would mark her fiction.

The reason this blog exists is that rocketlass suggested I start one so I would stop reading aloud at parties. (Which she was right to do. Good god.) But the true initial spur to whatever writing about books I've done in the past decade was Fitzgerald's posthumous collection of nonfiction, The Afterlife. Looking back, I have no idea why I picked it up: I knew her name, but I'd read nary a word of her novels. Yet I bought the book and was instantly won over by her perceptiveness and sensibility. Within weeks I had read all her novels and written my first book review, which, submitted cold to the Bloomsbury Review, would also be my first published review. I wrote then,

What comes across most clearly is her appreciation of hard work, craft, and dedication.

Yesterday, ten years later, in an interview about my collection of Donald Westlake's nonfiction, I talked about Westlake's dedication to craft, and boiled down the lessons I learned from close engagement with his writing to these:

Be clear. Be concise. Be concrete. And the work will not do itself.

Thus are laid out the continuities between these two favorite writers, the points of connection between two wildly disparate worlds and aesthetics. Taste is no respecter of genre; attentive reading discovers links between separate spheres.

And now to hope for an edition of Fitzgerald's notebooks--a book I would turn to again and again over the years. A boy can dream, right?

You don't want the guys on your string to be late. Early, though--we'll take early.

Look what arrived a week early--and just in time for me to show off a couple at a family reunion this weekend!



It's shipping out now to individual customers and to bookstores, and you should see it on the shelves (or, may we hope, the front table?) of your local bookstore by early-to-mid September. The official publication date will be September 29. I think it turned out beautifully: my colleagues at the University of Chicago Press turned my messy stack of xeroxes into a handsome book that should catch the eye of any Westlake fan, and I'm grateful for it.

In other Getaway Car news, September 1 issue of Booklist will bring us what's likely the last of the pre-publication reviews, and it's pleasantly of a piece with the rave in Kirkus and the starred review in Publishers Weekly. It, too, is starred, and it's full of praise for Westlake:

An absolute must-read for Westlake’s legion of fans, this wonderful collection showcases the late mystery writer’s nonfiction skills. . . . Westlake’s writing here is as compelling, as seemingly effortlessly entertaining, as it is in his fiction. A great collection and a reminder of just how talented an author Westlake was.

I couldn't ask for much better than that.

Finally, if you're not sick of hearing me yammer about the book yet, and you're in Chicago, New York, or Iowa City, you should come out and see me! Here's the calendar:

September 20
Chicago
7 PM at The Curiosity
E-mail me at WestlakeGetawayCar@gmail.com for more details and to RSVP.

September 29
New York
6:30 PM at The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street
For this event, I'll be joined by Abby Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Otto Penzler. As all three are great raconteurs, I'm planning to basically say hello, thank everyone for coming, and turn them loose to tell Donald Westlake stories all night.

October 4
Iowa City
As part of the Iowa City Book Festival, I'll be on a panel October 4with crime writer and genre historian Craig McDonald talking about Westlake and crime fiction in general. Come for James Ellroy (He's on the mainstage October 2), stay for us!

If you're planning to be at any of these, drop me a note--if we've not met, I'd like to be sure to introduce myself and say hi.

In an essay on Stephen Frears that's included in the book, Westlake says, "If you can't have fun, why do it?" Well, this project has been a blast from the very start, and I suspect the real fun part is just beginning.

Thanks to Random House's reissues, I (relatively) suddenly find myself with thirty John D. MacDonalds on my shelves

Random House started reissuing John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee mysteries a year and a half ago, and I've enjoyed having an excuse to revisit a series that was really important to me when I was in high school. Along with Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, the McGees were key to my transition from the coziness of Agatha Christie to a more hardboiled American school of crime.

The McGees hold up remarkably well. Having spent so much time with Donald Westlake's relative reticence over the past few years, MacDonald's use of McGee and Meyer as his dual-persona mouthpieces took some getting used to, but while the natural staling of politics means that MacDonald once in a while strikes a wrong note, overall his sociopolitical asides remain effective--and, most important, consistent with his tarnished knight-errant. Florida is, was (since at least Andrew Jackson, and probably the Spanish), and always will be an absolute destructive mess, it seems, as unfathomable to outsiders as it is confounding to natives.

One thing that remains particularly interesting is how MacDonald uses McGee to acknowledge the frustration and weariness of the series writer. Through the middle of the series--three or four books leading up to 1978's The Green Ripper--McGee is explicitly weary with himself, frustrated by the role he's cast himself in, doubting its truth and value both, but unsure about how he might either rejuvenate himself or break out of it. That, dramatized, is the problem of the series author--and one of the reasons that I remain astonished by (and incredibly respectful of) Westlake's twenty-four years of letting Parker lie fallow: mechanically putting a character through recognizable paces is a creative risk, one that can kill character and creator both. Yet rather than deny the problems he faced continuing to write stories about his meal ticket, and thereby letting his books curdle into cynicism, MacDonald took them out and looked at them, and let us see them, too.

For McGee, the answer is lasting love, which instantly reenergizes him--and its inevitable loss, which sets him dangerously aflame. For MacDonald, presumably, rejuvenation came from allowing McGee a possibility previously denied--the possibility of lasting change--and seeing where that led.

I've been skirting the one substantial flaw in MacDonald's books: sex. McGee is at his most dated when it comes to women--not because he is a midcentury sexist, but because the feminism he believes in and practices is, much as he scoffs at Hefner, fundamentally a Playboy feminism. It's a feminism of difference, one that allows self-determination regardless of gender but nonetheless falls back too often (for our contemporary tastes) on men being men, women being women, and freely given, heartfelt, passionate sex being the cure-all. Even McGee sees the occasional excess, lacerating himself here and there for his fuck-a-wounded-bird-to-health technique--but that doesn't stop him from maintaining the approach.

Worst of all, McDonald fails to heed my sole rule of writing: Always describe hangovers; never describe sex. Oh, does he describe sex. It's well-meaning, inexplicit, but nonetheless cringe-inducing, like when you hear someone say "make love" in seriousness. A passage from The Brass Cupcake will suffice as evidence:

I rose with her on the wave crest of a thing long denied, only vaguely conscious of reaching between us and thumbing open the buttons of the jeans, then sliding my hand around her and peeling the jeans down over the twin concavities of alive plum-tautness, dimly conscious of the thud as the moccasin fell at the end of the couch, of her breath that was like the beating of a wing against my throat, of the infuriating intricacies of robe belt, of the twin alivenesses hard under the blue T shirt, of the whole urgent mounting need of her, as vivid as a scream.

"Twin concavities of alive plum-tautness"? Jesus. (And that moccasin--in 1950, that's surely borderline Bohemian?)

That passage aside, The Brass Cupcake is a fine crime novel, and, as MacDonald's first, surely gave his editor a sense that here was a rare talent ready to cut loose. Bad sex aside, I'm grateful to Random House for reissuing it and a slew of other MacDonald standalones. Those are the books that a young Westlake read as he was starting out, and about which he wrote:

Gold Medal originals, with their yellow spines, were my education in popular fiction. At first I devoured them all indiscriminately, but gradually I began to go past the yellow spine to the brand name, to differentiate Vin Packer from Harry Whittington, Edward S. Aarons from Peter Rabe, and to accept some new titles more eagerly than others. There were the writers to skip, there were the old reliables, there were the few really good writers with surprises and felicities somewhere within every book, and there was John D. MacDonald. Almost from the beginning, he was in a class by himself, and I think the secret was that he never wrote a scene, not a scene of any kind, as though he were writing for the pulps. There was never overstatement, never sleaze, no wallowing in the mire. He accepted my, the reader's, intelligence as a given, and not many did that.

My complaints about the sex scenes aside, I can't disagree.

Westlake and Manchette

My friend who manages 57th Street Books (my home bookstore) pushed Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman (1981) into my hands this week, and I'm glad he did: it's a short, taut, bleak thriller about a hit man forced to postpone retirement, and it reads very much like a French cousin to Donald Westlake's work as Richard Stark. The passage that most directly called Stark to mind was this one, wherein Terrier, the hit man, gets the drop on a man who's been following him:

"They said you were an okay guy, that you might knock me around a little, but I only had to say I was a gofer and give you the name of the Rossi brothers and you would let me go! You're going to let me go now, aren't you?"

"Sure."

Terrier drew back a little on his seat and stopped pressing the barrel of the HK4 against the throat of the young man. The latter tearfully rubbed his neck.

"Oh! Thank you, thank you!"

"Take this message to Cox," said Terrier as he put a slug into his heart.

Reading that, Parker fans will no doubt find themselves thinking of a scene from Butcher's Moon. As Parker strides through the middle of a gang war he's fomented, he confronts a low-level gangster who pleads for mercy:

"I'm only the messenger!"

"Now you're the message," Parker told him, and shot him.

As Timothy Peltason points out in his excellent essay on the Parker books in the current issue of the Yale Review, Parker isn't generally one for snappy lines. Talking is generally a waste of time, and never more so than when you're about to shoot somebody. But at that moment in Butcher's Moon, he (or his creator) can't resist--and, slightly out of character though it may be, it has become one of Parker's signature moments. It's fun to see it echoed--most likely unknowingly--by Manchette.

Three Westlake tidbits

We are now less than two months away from the moment when Donald Westlake's The Getaway Car arrives and starts shipping out to stores! Can you feel the excitement building?

I'm being silly, but the nice thing is that the excitement actually is building, at least in a small way. The starred review in Publishers Weekly was followed last week by a rave in the newest issue of Kirkus:

University of Chicago Press promotions director Stahl thinks this collection of Westlake’s nonfiction will please his fans; it’s likely these sharp, disarmingly funny pieces will also create new ones. . . . Westlake kept a list of possible book titles [which is included in the book], the last of which was Read Me. It would have been just the right one for this bright, witty book.

Can't ask for much better, can you? On top of that, both Ed Gorman and Bill Crider had nice things to say on their blogs, which you can find at the embedded links. And now I wait, as patiently, I hope, as I've counseled authors I've worked with to do.

I've got two more Westlake tidbits to share with you tonight as I attempt to ease back into reliable blogging now that my summer of travel is finally finished. The first came to me from that Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian Dave Lull: a quote from the Dortmunder novel Jimmy the Kid is used as an opening example in a delightful piece at the Dabbler on Pavement Panto. What, you ask, is Pavement Panto? I'll let Brit, the author of the post, explain:

Pavement Panto refers to those contrived actions one performs to mask, disguise or somehow ‘cover for’ any public behaviour about which one feels awkward or obscurely embarrassed, often for an entirely imagined audience.

Brilliant, no? Is there anyone who isn't guilty of a bit Pavement Panto once in a while? And Westlake, as the example from Jimmy the Kid shows, had a great eye for it:

Well, he couldn’t keep walking north forever. At the next corner he stopped, looked indecisive, then patted himself all over, pantomiming a search for some small but necessary object. In a large elaborate movement, he snapped his fingers, suggesting the sudden realization that the small but necessary object had been left behind; at home, perhaps. He then turned around and walked the other way.

Last thing for today comes from my ongoing trek through all of Westlake's work. I'm down to four or five, and over the weekend I read Philip (1967), a book that's always intrigued me simply because in lists of Westlake's work, it occupies its own category: Juvenile. And that's actually what it is: a children's book, with illustrations by Arnold Doblin. It's a gentle story (perhaps unexpectedly so, given its author) about a boy in a Manhattan apartment who gets a new dump truck and is looking for some dirt to play with. While grime may be plentiful in Manhattan, dirt, however, is relatively hard to come by. Hijinks--of a muted, kid-friendly sort--therefore ensue. It's a charming book, one that I could easily imagine kids and parents enjoying.

The best moment for a Westlake fan, however, is the following paragraph. Read it and see if you don't hear Westlake's voice coming through clear as ever:

But something was wrong. And Philip knew what it was.

Dirt.

The main point about a dump truck, it's supposed to carry dirt. You put it down on the ground, and the scoop picks up big mouthfuls of dirt and fills up the truck, and then you push the button and the truck drives across the yard to where you want to move the dirt, and then you push the other button and the back of the truck lifts up and all the dirt slides out. That's what a dump truck does.

It's all there: a preference for order and function and suitable work, in the midst of a slightly exasperated realization that what the world is in reality is one big mess of mismatches and problems. Westlake to a T.

Highsmith takes aim at one of the evils of life

Donald Westlake and Gillian Flynn led me back to Patricia Highsmith this week. Westlake, unsurprisingly, did so through The Getaway Car. Sadly, there wasn't much in Westlake's files on Highsmith, which is too bad, since I would have loved to read an extended analysis of her everyday sociopaths in light of Parker's more focused pathology. But Westlake did discuss Highsmith at least once, in the context of the work he did on a film version of Ripley Under Ground, and I was able to include that. If you want a thumbnail version of it while you wait for the book itself to arrive in September, you can head over to Nick Jones's Existential Ennui, where he's recently posted about it.

Gillian Flynn, meanwhile, last week led a Wall Street Journal book club on the Highsmith novel that most influenced her, Deep Water (1957). And hoo, boy, now that I've read it I can see why: it's about a marriage made toxic by infidelity and acquiescence . . . and just a touch of sociopathy. As in the Ripley novels--or, to draw the circle more tightly, Burke Devore in Westlake's The Ax--the husband Highsmith creates is plausible and ordinary, yet capable of monstrous acts. It's that everydayness that frightens, and draws us in; only slowly do we realize that the disconnect between his mind and his emotions, his behavior and his analysis of that behavior, is fundamental, and deadly.

It's Friday night and I'm behind-hand a bit after a day spent dealing with dull yet time-consuming new (108-year-old) house problems, so I'll just hit a couple of more sociological points then leave you with a passage that amused me. First, the sociology: Highsmith's couple is ensconced in the upper middle class of 1950s suburban Connecticut, the land of Cheever and Updike (and, at one remove, John O'Hara). And, murder aside, there are aspects of that life that--no matter how much Cheever and Updike we read--remain jaw-dropping to an upper middle class twenty-first-century urbanite. To wit:

1 Oh, lord, how they drink. Don't get me wrong--I'm mid-martini right now myself--but that will be the evening's martini. For the 1950s suburban set, that would be mere pre-gaming. Actual social drunkenness, for me (and most of my cohort) is an occasional error, regretted; if Highsmith and her peers are to be believed, in that set it was common, bordering on constant. Combine that with a relative lack of entertainment options and a narrow range of acquaintance, and no wonder there was all that sleeping around . . .

2 Pants. Oh, midcentury men's pants. Highsmith's murderous husband finds himself eating better and drinking less, and he becomes

pleasantly conscious of the fact that his front was absolutely straight now, that there was no bulge at all below his braided belt.

The braided belt we'll abhor, then leave. It's the "below" that I want to deal with. Look at this picture of Bogart (and, I think, IBRL favorite Sydney Greenstreet in the wheelchair?) if you need a reminder.



Good god, men at midcentury wore their pants too high. Even Bogart can't carry off that look.

And now, to carry you into the weekend, I'll share the one moment in the novel when Highsmith allows a character to acknowledge the presence of evil in the world:

The likelihood of typographical errors in spite of rigorous proofreading was going to be the subject of an essay that he would write one day, Vic thought. There was something demoniacal and insuperable about typographical errors, as if they were part of the natural evil that permeated man's existence, as if they had a life of their own and were determined to manifest themselves no matter what, as surely as weeds in the best-tended gardens.

In the current paperback edition of Deep Water, published by Norton, the next typographical error doesn't appear for more than ten pages.

Westlake, and the risks of being (or working with) an author

I hope you enjoyed the long wander through Daniel Deronda that saw me through the process of packing and moving house for the first time in fourteen years. Many thanks to Maggie Bandur for joining me, and to the folks who left comments--Mark Marowitz's defense of Grandcourt, in particular, is worth your time if you've not seen it.

Now that the move is complete (more or less--the tiny bit of construction we're having done reminds me that construction, like certain novels, is never exactly done), I'm planning to dive back into more reliable blogging. And I can't help but begin with a bit of horn-tooting: the collection of Donald Westlake's nonfiction that I edited, The Getaway Car, just received its first official notice, a starred advance review from Publishers Weekly. And, oh, it's a good one: when you get your copy of the book in September, you'll see this on the back cover:

A must-have for all Westlake fans.

{I should also point out that this week's issue of Publishers Weekly marks another step in my and Ed Park's secret plan to take over the book world: one of the other nonfiction reviews is of a book of essays from the Believer that he coedited, Read Harder. When you stop at your local bookstore in September to get the Westlake, you can also grab Ed's! Book world domination awaits!}

And now, having played author for a bit, I feel obligated to turn the microphone over to James Laughlin, founding publisher of New Directions, and a letter that he wrote to William Saroyan of October 11, 1937 that's included in his sort-of memoir, The Way It Wasn't:

I'm sorry but I can't let you have proofs on the stories. By sad experience I have had to make that the rule. If I let every contributor have proofs it would cost me $150 in corrections. You don't know what authors are like because you are one. First, authors don't know that corrections cost $3.50 an hour, secondly they don't realize that when they change one word in linotype it knocks out a whole page of slugs and that costs two or three hours' time to fix.

Thirdly, authors just have to take one look at a page of proofs to go entirely crazy and decide they are Jesus instead of Napoleon and rewrite the damn thing.

I'm sorry, I just can't afford it. You authors will have to realize that we small publishers can print you but can't humor you . . .

College keeps me working like a shithouse eel. No time for letters.

And that's all that need be said on that front, no? I'll try to keep it in mind as I'm endlessly badgering the colleague who is stuck being my publicist . . .

The real Donald E. Westlake peeks through in Killing Time

In the brief introduction to the collection of Donald E. Westlake's nonfiction I'm editing, The Getaway Car, one of the reasons I gave for being interested in Westlake's nonfiction is that he gives us so little of his own self and opinions--explicitly, that is--in his actual writing. Oh, we certainly can glean a few things: he appreciated hard and careful work and craftsmanship, believed firmly in the power of entropy and error to derail plans, and thought we all were closer to the dark side than we like to think. But compared to, say, the digressive sermons offered up by John D. MacDonald, or the obvious protagonist-as-stand-in-for-author of writers like Robert Parker or even Raymond Chandler, Westlake the man is invisible on the page. Part of the fun of the nonfiction, therefore, is collecting and sharing the instances where he did explicitly offer opinions on his own work and that of others, when he straight-up gave us his point of view.

While I've been working on the book, I've also been slowly making my way through the last thirty or so of Westlake's novels that I've not read, and that led me not too long ago to his second book, Killing Time (1961). It's a good little corrupt town novel, with nods to Red Harvest but none of that book's whiffs of nihilistic brimstone. In this book, everyone's corrupt, and, frankly, while that's certainly not good, it's not necessarily all bad, either: rather, it's quite simply the way it is.

Late in the book, the protagonist, Smith--a private eye quietly kept on retainer by the corrupt powers that be in the city, another in what would become a long line of Westlake heroes who are nothing like heroes--goes on a rant when he meets a do-gooder from an upstate civic organization that, by arriving and making noises about cleaning up the town, has infected the town with a murderous case of nerves. On learning that Smith has files on crimes in the town dating back years, the do-gooder tries to shame him, only to be told by Smith that turning those records in simply isn't his job.

I'm going to quote at far greater length than usual, because the passage needs to be reproduced in full for Westlake's point--and mine--to be made. His point will be clear; mine is simply that this passage reads to me like as close a statement of opinion from Westlake as we would ever get. Not an endorsement of crime, but an endorsement of the acceptance of reality, and the pointlessness of naive idealism. See what you think:

"Not your job?" He sounded honestly shocked. "Surely, Mr. Smith, it is every citizen's job--"

"No," I said. For all his individual personality and appearance, completely unlike Masetti, he wound ups spouting the same tired civics-class garbage. "My job," I told him, "was to be a confidential investigator. If the facts I learn wind up in court, I'm not useful."

He shook his head slowly back and forth, the lips once more pursed. "I don't know, Mr. Smith," he said, "I have no idea what sort of arrangement Mr. Masetti had in mind, or what offers he made you, if any, but I'm afraid I'll have to know quite a bit more about the situation here in Winston before agreeing to do business with you. If you are trying now to gain immunity for yourself by making some sort of deal with the Citi--"

"Immunity? What the hell kind of immunity?"

"Now, really, Mr. Smith," he said ponderously. "After all, you have just stated to me that you have in your possession a record of governmental crimes in this community covering the last fifteen years, and that you have, until this very moment, never once attempted to reveal this information to the proper authorities. Quite the reverse. You have gone so far as to admit to me that you have actively concealed the evidence of these crimes."

"Never!" This interview wasn't going at all as I'd expected, and I was beginning to lose my temper. "I have never," I told him angrily, "concealed the evidence of any crime. The evidence has always been there, and is there now. And any proper authority who's interested can go find it exactly the way I did, by looking for it. It isn't my job to do the proper authority's work for it."

"Your job, as you describe it, Mr. Smith," he said pompously, "is a dishonest one."

"As a matter of fact," I went on, talking over him, "what lousy proper authority anyway? The District Attorney? He's one of the biggest crooks in the state. The Mayor? The Chief of Police?"

"that isn't the point," he said.

"Why the hell isn't it? I live in Winston, in the real world. I have to make my living in Winston, in the real world, and that means I have to make my peace with the people who run Winston, and who run the real world. I tried that, and it's always worked pretty well. Now you people have come in and rattled this town out of its wits, and that arrangement doesn't work any more. I'm adapting myself to the new conditions, that's all. I'm no more honest, or dishonest, in the vague abstract total way you use those terms, than anybody else alive in the world. I have a job, and honest and proper job, licensed by the state of New York and the city of Winston, and I do that job as well as I can. And a part of that job is its confidential nature. My job is confidential in exactly the same way that a lawyer's job or a doctor's job or a psychiatrist's job or even a priest's job is confidential. Is a lawyer supposed to report every crime he hears described in his office? Is a priest supposed to report every crime he hears described in the confessional?"

"That is not the same thing, Mr. Smith!" And from the shocked, wide-eyed way in which he said that, I knew I had blasphemed.

"And just why the hell isn't it the same thing? I shouted. I was on my feet now, without knowing how or when I'd stood up, and I kept shaking my fist as I shouted at him. "I've been responsible for crimes solved, reparations made, injustices corrected, without the people involved getting a lot of bad publicity, and without anybody getting a useless jail sentence, and I've--"

"Useless?" That one brought Danile to his feet, too. Blasphemy against the penal system was apparently even worse than blasphemy against the church.

"Yes, you're goddam right, useless! Look, you take a kid--" I had to stop and shake my head and take a deep breath and start all over again, so the words would come out slow enough to be pronounced. "You take a kid, " I said. "He burgles a grocery store. The law gets him, and the court gives him six months in a reformatory, and he comes out a worse kid than when he went in. And ten years and four penitentiaries later, he winds up in one of those modern clinks with the pastel-pink bars and more psychiatrists than prisoners, and they spend five years trying to undo the damage that was done by that reformatory."

"That's an oversimplification!" he shouted.

"How else are we going to talk, if we don't simplify, you fat-headed fact-filled do-gooder?"

"I didn't come here--"

"To be insulted, I know. All right, now, listen, you take that same kid, only instead of the law getting him, I get him. And nobody knows about his crime but me and the grocer and his parents. He gets the scare of his life, when he sees how easily he was caught, and he gets the word on what would have happened if the cops had found him instead of me, and the grocer gets his money back, and the kid never pulls that kind of stunt again."

He shook his head rapidly, saying, "And you accuse me of idealism, when you expect--"

"Expect, hell! That's what happened! That is exactly what happened with a kid who broke into Joey Casales's grocery store. The hell with your theories, I'm telling you what works, and I'm trying to tell you what the goddam system is in this world, and how I fit into that system. And if I don't fit into that system, I'm through."

"If Satan himself--" he started, but I cut him off. "You're goddam one hundred per cent right! I snapped. "If Satan himself were Mayor of Winston, and all the lesser devils had all the offices in City Hall, they would be the ones running my world. And if I expected to live in that world, I would have to make my peace with them."

Killing Time is a short book, under 200 pages, and this rant takes up four of them. It feels like a set piece that perhaps Westlake didn't even intend when he set out on it, but that he couldn't help but let run once it caught fire. And it works: it raises and amplifies the underlying themes of the book (and of this genre of book), and it doesn't deform either the character or the story.

(Still trying to decide about two of those adverbs, though: "ponderously" I think is perfect, but "angrily" seems unnecessary.)

Westlake on Hammett and The Thin Man

The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany began with a single essay, "The Hardboiled Dicks," which Westlake originally delivered as a talk at the Smithsonian on May 13, 1982. It's an extended look at Westlake's chosen genre--interestingly, at a branch of it that he barely bothered with a writer, the detective novel--and it reveals Westlake to be a careful, attentive reader and a thoughtful critic of his fellow writers. Even now that it's been surrounded by another 65,000 or so words of Westlake's writing in what will eventually become the book, it remains a standout, full of history, analysis, and opinion, all backed up by extensive quotations from the writers in question.

Over the weekend, while I was making my final edits to the manuscript before turning it in, I found myself particularly drawn to Westlake's thoughts on Hammett. No writer was a more obvious influence on Westlake's style in the early years, which makes his acute analysis of Hammett's relationship to his material, as seen by reading between the lines of The Thin Man (1934), particularly interesting.

Westlake's essay traces the movement of hardboiled fiction from its roots in some sort of actual experience through its increasing stylization and eventual shift into ritual and pastiche. (Had Tarantino been making films in 1982, Westlake could have used him as an oblique example.) Hammett he locates at that point on the arc when experience (which Hammett had with the Pinkertons) was beginning to give way--and his argument is that Hammett knew it and didn't want any part of it. The Thin Man, he claims, is Hammett's exhausted riposte:. After quoting a scene where a low-level hood gets beat up for no explicable reason, Westlake writes,

This sequence doesn't come out of anything, and it doesn't lead to anything. Its only reason for existing at all is to show that Nick doesn't know what's going on any more, he's become a visitor to the scene he used to live in. And when I say Nick, I mean Hammett.

Hammett was a major writer, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that the texture in his writing comes so very much from himself. Writing inside an action genre, where subtleties of character and milieu are not primary considerations, he nevertheless was, word by word and sentence by sentence, subtle and many-layered, both allusive and elusive, delicate and aloof among all the smashing fists and crashing guns. He put himself in his writing, and that makes The Thin Man a very strange read, in that singular way that The Tempest is strange; inside the story, the writer can be seen, preparing his departure.

As Hammett's own experience of hardboiled characters faded into the past, Westlake argues, he was unwilling to take the next step, into the baroque and ritualistic and stagily imitative--that would be left to Chandler. (Whom Westlake never thought much of.) In the Library of America edition of Hammett's novels, there's a quote from an interview tucked away in the notes that backs up Westlake:

I stopped writing because I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Westlake sees the result--which he elsewhere included among his ten favorite books in the genre--as an unusual thing for the genre: not a disappointed, or cynical, or world-weary book, but a sad one:

You notice also the passing reference to literature that will or will not last. The Thin Man is a very sad book, made even sadder by how bravely and smilingly the narrator hides his sadness. Hammett is not leaving the hardboiled detective story. The genre is leaving him.

My interest piqued, I re-read the novel for the first time in a dozen years. And whereas the first time I read it, I saw it as a slightly cockeyed comedy, a slightly less fizzy kin to the William Powell-Myrna Loy version, this time I couldn't help but see what Westlake saw: it's a novel about confusion, where everyone expects Nick Charles, returned to New York and (reluctantly) to detecting after seven years away, to step right in and be the detective he was, to know things the way he used to know them . . . while all around him is oddity and incomprehensible behavior and incompetence and uncertainty. Friends aren't friends, while enemies aren't even worthy of the name; the closest Nick comes to camaraderie (Nora aside) is when a gangster he once sent up the river insists on reminiscing a bit--at least those memories are honest.

This is what good criticism does: it makes it hard to read a book the same way you read it before you encountered the critic's take on it. I would have read The Thin Man again eventually, but would I have seen in it the sense of dislocation and loss that Westlake showed me? The book ends with the expected closure, but it's closure rooted largely in conjecture, which Nora finds frustrating. She wants to know for sure, and she wants to know what will happen to the people left behind by the murders. Nick replies:

"Nothing new. They'll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn't round out anybody's life except the murdered's and sometimes the murderer.

"That may be," Nora said, "but it's all pretty unsatisfactory."

The first time I read the book, I took that as one final joke, an expression of Nora's ever-amused, ever curious arm's-length relationship to Nick's work, and to crime itself. Now I read it as Westlake did: as a hand waved in irritated farewell. How can I not?

If you like Westlake, you're going to like this book, folks. I'm really proud of it, and I'm champing at the bit. A year. That's all we've got to wait now!

Pity Him Afterwards

In my slow attempt to read all of Donald E. Westlake's novels (and thus catch up to Ethan Iverson), I recently made it to Pity Him Afterwards (1964). Westlake's fifth novel, it's interesting but still feels very much like journeyman work--oddly, it's not as well-conceived or executed as his excellent first novel, The Mercenaries (available now from Hard Case Crime under Westlake's preferred title, The Cutie.) Nonetheless, for a novel that starts as unpromisingly as this one ("The madman clung to the side of the hill"), it's far from uninteresting: a crazed killer, escaped from an asylum, attempts to hide within the newly assembled cast of a summer stock theater, and the mix of actors, local officials, and the remote setting all offer pleasures.

Westlake knew summer stock from his first wife, an actress who spent at least a couple of summers at upstate theaters like this one. The speech the theater's manager gives a hungover new arrival seems likely to have be lifted from reality:

I want to get you interested in this theater, and I want to get you interested in this season. I want total commitment from you, Mel, for the next eleven weeks. We have an impossibly tough schedule here, a new play every week. You'll have a major role in only four or five of them, but you'll be working in all of them. You'll be a stagehand, or you'll run the flies, or you'll work props. You'll help build sets, and you'll help strike them. You'll work a seven-day week, and you'll work a fourteen-hour day most of the time. You can't do that and last the season if you don't give a damn about what's happening here.

Mel Daniels, the actor to whom this speech is addressed, feels like a prefiguration of Grofield--a Grofield whose straight life is his only life, and who hasn't yet figured out just how good he is with women. On his way to the theater, he enters a diner:

The little man in the white coat came over and asked him what he wanted. He asked for coffee, and then changed his mind and asked for iced coffee. The little man said, "No iced coffee. Iced tea."

He was going to go into a Hemingway routine from that--repeat everything the little man said, and ask when the Swede came in for dinner--but he didn't have the energy. And the little man wouldn't get it, he'd figure Mel for a smart aleck. So he said, "All right, iced tea."

Westlake's other characters include an actress with ambition to direct, a vigorously rude director ("shaped like a bag of lard, soft and sagging, with a petulant jowly face and pudgy hands"), and a self-doubting police chief who spends his winters as a college professor. It's a promising cast, and--the problems with crazed killers aside--an effective plot structure, as Westlake contrives to prevent the reader from knowing which actor is actually the madman for most of the book. But ultimately the book is less than the sum of its parts: after all this set-up, Westlake rushes to the end too quickly, and since we're less interested in the madman's fate than in the characters he's threatening, it's unsatisfying.

Westlake explained in a couple of interviews that Pity Him Afterwards was the quickest writing he'd ever done: start to finish, it took him something like fifteen days. And while it doesn't feel in any way slapdash--did Westlake ever write anything that did?--it does feel like a book the more mature Westlake would likely have continued poking away at until it opened up into something bigger and better.

I'll close with a couple of notes that tie in to particular interests of this blog. First, an explanation of the title. It comes from Samuel Johnson, via Boswell:

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

And, finally, one more indication that Westlake at this point in his career was just getting his feet under him: the book includes the first of what would be many uses of Sydney Greenstreet as a point of comparison (Huzzah!) . . . but he's not quite there yet:

He was a stocky man who looked to be about thirty, five foot, ten inches tall, with a heavy face that could become Shakespeare's Falstaff or Hammett's Casper Gutman with equal aptitude.

Within just a few years, Westlake would cut to the chase, moving beyond Hammett's character straight to the actor who played him, and the universe of similes would never be the same!

The Fugitive Pigeon

The Fugitive Pigeon (1965) was Donald E. Westlake's first comic novel. In an interview for Armchair Detective in 1988, Westlake explained that the novel "wanted to be funny," and in the introduction to his story collection Levine,Westlake described the turn to comedy:

In the early spring of 1964 I started a mystery novel, intended to be published under my own name by Random House, about a young man who runs a bar in Brooklyn which is owned by the Mafia. They use it as a tax loss and to launder money, they occasionally use it as a package drop, and the young man has the job of running it because his uncle is connected with the Mob. At the beginning of the story, two mob hitmen enter the bar as the young man is about to close for the night, try to kill him, and miss.

This was intended to be an ordinary innocent-on-the-run story, in which the innocent can't go to the police because of his uncle's mob connection. The schnook-on-the-run story, as in The 39 Steps or Alfred Hitchcock's movie Saboteur (in which Robert Cummings played the schnook, and not to be confused with Hitchcock's Sabotage, in which Sylvia Sidney played the schnook), has certain comic elements built into it, but it needn't be a comic story, nor did I initially see my mob-nephew tale as a comic story.

But something went wrong. The conventions of the form prostrated themselves before me. Something manic glowed in the air, like St Elmo's Fire. Instead of the comic's best friend--Shazam!--I became the comic!

What's strange, reading The Fugitive Pigeon now, is that it's not so much comic as gentle--the conventions are noir are there, but without the edge. Oh, there are some jokes in it, but not a lot--and compared to the jokes, nonsense, and absurd intricacies of plot that Westlake would cook up in his later books, it's just not that funny.

What the book does do is introduce a type Westlake would go on to use to greater effect in novels like God Save the Mark: the naif. Westlake's narrator is like a mirror image of the classic noir hero who, lured by sex or money, winds up in over his head and find a previously unknown resourcefulness, even ruthlessness. Westlake's naifs, on the other hand, usually discover that what they want is to get to shore as quickly as possible, please.

There is one moment of great comic description in The Fugitive Pigeon, however, in which we can see the germs of Westlake's later comic style. It's the first appearance of a mobster named Gross:

Up till then I'd assumed that "Gross" was the man's name, but it was his description. He looked like something that had finally come up out of its cave because it had eaten the last of the phosphorescent little fish in the cold pool at the bottom of the cavern. He looked like something that better keep moving because if it stood still someone would drag it out back and bury it. He looked like a big white sponge with various diseases at work on the inside. he looked like something that couldn't get you if you held a crucifix up in front of you. He looked like the big fat soft white something you might find under a tomato plant leaf on a rainy day with a chill in the air.

That's a writer who's having fun, and stretching some wings he didn't know he had.

The work of the man who is committed to chronicling instances of Sydney Greenstreet similes and depictions of hangovers in literature is never done!

While on vacation last week in Michigan, I read, among other books, a pair of Donald Westlake novels that I'd not previously gotten to, The Fugitive Pigeon (1965) and Dancing Aztecs (1976). And they happened to offer new instances of two of the aspects of all of literature that I have decided are important enough for me to track: comparisons to Sydney Greenstreet and descriptions of hangovers!



Westlake is the master--perhaps even the originator--of the Sydney Greenstreet comparison. That said, he cannot be relied on to spell Greenstreet's first name correctly. (Perhaps he should have added it to the sign he hung above his desk that read "Weird Villain," the two words he had the hardest time spelling.) So please understand that the misspelling in the second example is Westlake's rather than mine.

Here we go. From The Fugitive Pigeon:

I looked back, and at first I couldn't see the Packard, but then I caught an evil glint of chrome in the darkness back there. That car was the mechanical Sydney Greenstreet.

Let's be honest: that's a fairly weak example. The Packard was big and menacing, but so is George Raft, and Lee Marvin, &tc., &tc. But as I think that's the first Greenstreet comparison of Westlake's long career, I'm willing to cut him some slack.

And from Dancing Aztecs:

Krassmeier sat on the leather sofa to one side, sneering contemptuously at everybody like some road-show Sidney Greenstreet.

I like that one because it gets away from the obvious point of comparison, Greenstreet's girth, focusing instead on his general air of cynical, been-round-the-block superiority.

Let us close the evening with a reminder of what some folks out there will wake up with tomorrow, the hangover, as described by Westlake in Dancing Aztecs:

There are three kinds of hangovers. There are hangovers that are green and wet and slimy, full of queasiness and trembling and the conviction that one has somehow been disemboweled in one's sleep and a recently dead muskrat has been placed where one's stomach used to be. Then there are hangovers that are gray and stony and cold, in which the granite of one's skull has been cracked like the wall of the temple, and the rock of one's brain has been reduced to rubble within, painful rubble. And finally there are hangovers that are red and jagged and jolting, lightning bolts shooting in one ear and out the other, more lightning in the elbows and knees, buzzers and electric chairs and whoopee cushions in the stomach, flash bulbs in the eyes and battery acid in the mouth. Those are the three kinds of hangovers, and Pedro had all three of them.

Whatever your tipple, may you wake tomorrow with none of the three.

"So I just had him deal with those cops, you know?"

One of the pleasures of working on my forthcoming collection of Donald Westlake's nonfiction, The Getaway Car, has been reading a lot of interviews across many years. Westlake was something of a performer in interviews--he had a number of essentially stock answers and anecdotes that he broke out at appropriate times, but 1) they're good ones, and 2) there's enough variation in questions and focus among the interviews that you're able to pick up something new from pretty much all of them.

The best I've found yet, and one that I'm planning to include, is an interview by William DeAndrea for Armchair Detective's Fall 1988 issue. It's a long interview, touching on pretty much every question any Westlake fan would want to ask, and it also offers new details from or angles on familiar stories. Like this one, about the origins of Parker:

WESTLAKE: Of course, the first book wasn't going to be part of a series. Nothing happened the way I anticipated it was going to happen with that book. I was doing one a year in hardcover from Random House, and I thought, okay, time to have another name, and I'd been reading all these Gold Medal books--which is where Peter Rabe came from--so I wrote this novel to be a Gold Medal paperback original novel. Certainly not a series. In fact, Parker got caught at the end. The editor at Gold Medal turned it down, and I was confused. Then it was sent to Pocket Books. There was an editor at Pocket Books named Bucklyn Moon. Buck Moon.

DEANDREA: Great name.

WESTLAKE: Yeah. He was an interesting guy. He was a white guy whose three great interests were mystery[en-dash]private eye-[en-dash]crime novels, poetry, and black writing. He edited anthologies of black poets, for instance; he was the American champion of Chester Himes--Gravedidgger Jones, Coffin Ed Johnson. These things all came together in him. At that time, I was represented by Scott Meredith, God help me. Buck called Scott, and then he called me, and said, "Is there any way for you to let Parker get away at the end of the book, and give me three a year?" I said, "I think so."

DEANDREA: "And you're gonna pay me for them, and everything?"

WESTLAKE: In 1961, the two companies that paid the top were Gold Medal and Pocket Books, and Gold Medal was a little better, because they paid on copies printed. Which is rather a wonderful thing. When I eventually did get published by them, when they would do another printing, they'd just send you a check for the number of books they'd printed.

DEANDREA: They work that way in Germany.

WESTLAKE: Well, Otto used to work that way with Mysterious Press. Until he became a serious publisher. (Laughter) But, at that time, a $3,000 advance was very good. So in '61, being told that for my second name I would do three books a year, which would be no problem, that would be $9,000 already. On the first of January, I know I'm going to make at least $9,000 this year--that's terrific. And I'd really had to distort the book to have the guy caught in the end anyway, so I just had him deal with those cops, you know? Parker unchained.

In order:

1. I knew of Bucklyn (elsewhere spelled Bucklin) Moon from this story, but I had never heard about his interest in African American literature.

2. Gold Medal paid on copies printed? Holy hell, that's amazing. Should I, a publishing professional, have already known that that's how a mass market paperback publisher once worked? Because I certainly didn't. Wow. 3. I have read many accounts from Westlake of rewriting the ending of The Hunter, but this is the only one I've come across where he explains that it was hard to have Parker get caught, convincingly, in the first place--and what fun is in that line "So I just had him deal with those cops, you know?" We know. Oh, do we know.

Trust me, folks: this book is going to be a lot of fun.

The fate of Samuel Holt

In between bouts of research for my forthcoming Donald Westlake nonfiction collection last weekend, I also read one of the forty or so Westlake novels I'd not yet gotten to, Sacred Monster (1989). It's far from his best: a story of a self-involved movie star whose only mode of existence is playing a part, but no Westlake book I've encountered yet is worthless, and this one has its moments.

The bit that amused me most, however, comes in an aside, when the star is recounting his life story and tells of a new house he and his wife moved into, which had until recently been owned by

a television star named Holt who'd committed suicide when his series was canceled.

That, Westlake fans will quickly realize, is surely Samuel Holt, star of a Magnum, PI-style crime show--and author of four books about his inadvertent real-life adventures solving crimes . . . which were written by Westlake in the early 1980s and published under Holt's name as a Richard Bachman-esque test of the market. In the foreword to the Felony and Mayhem editions of the books, Westlake explains that he'd gotten his publisher to agree not to put his name on the books, and he was ready to see whether he could sell just on the strength of his writing--but then

The first book was published, and in the window of my local bookstore was a sign saying Samuel Holt was me. The publisher had told his sales staff the "secret," and encouraged them to pass the news on to the bookstores.

Coming at this from the other end--working in a publisher's marketing department--I have to admit that it would be very hard to grit my teeth and not share the secret.

Despite what we learn in Sacred Monster, however, I'm not at all convinced that Holt actually killed himself. He just didn't seem like that kind of guy: he's not exactly happy-go-lucky, but he's resourceful and determined, and while his show was clearly important to him you don't get the sense from the books that it's a matter of life and death. All these years later, we'll likely never know, but I suspect foul play. Does that loose-lipped publisher have an alibi?

Brothers Keepers

Donald E. Westlake wrote more than 100 novels. It's a daunting number, but fortunately there are plenty of places where a reader just coming to his work can begin. Like comedy? Try the first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock, or the standalone Somebody Owes Me Money, with its brilliant opening line:

I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn't so eloquent.

Want something more hard-boiled? Try 361, which Westlake himself described as an exercise in writing with absolutely no hint of emotion, or the first Parker novel, The Hunter.

One place not to start is with Brothers Keepers (1975). Yet as I was reading it recently, I kept thinking that it serves almost perfectly as a demonstration of the qualities that make a Westlake novel entertaining. It's about a monastery in Manhattan whose residents realize that they're about to be booted so that the property owner can build a soulless office tower. Westlake described the writing process to Ethan Iverson like this:

I have to tell you a teeny thing about the genesis of Brothers Keepers. It all began with a title; The Felonious Monks. They would commit some sort of robbery to save the monastery. So I started it and introduced them and realized I liked them too much to lead them into a life of crime. So, to begin with, there went the title. "Okay," I said, "let's see what a caper novel looks like without the caper." Turned out to be a love story; who knew.

Surprisingly, it works--and what makes it work is the simple fact that shines through even the hardest-boiled of Westlake's novels: this is a man who enjoyed writing. He enjoyed setting difficulties and seeing how he could get out of them. He enjoyed pointless asides, and dumb jokes, and goofy displays of knowledge. All those come into Brothers Keepers at some point, and they're delightful.

The light touch of the opening gives a good sense of Westlake's off-kilter sense of humor:

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession."

"Yes, yes. Go on."

Why does he always sound so impatient? Rush rush rush; that's not the proper attitude. "Well," I said, "let's see." I tried not to be rattled. "I had an impure thought," I said, "on Thursday evening, during a shaving commercial on television."

"A shaving commercial?" Now he sounded exasperated; it was bad enough, apparently, that I bored him, without bewildering him as well.

"It's a commercial," I said, "in which a blonde lady with a Swedish accent applies shaving cream to the face of a young man with a rather prognathous jaw."

"Prognathous?" More bewildered than exasperated this time; I'd caught his attention for fair.

"That means, uh, prominent. A large jaw, that sort of sticks out."

"Does that have anything to do with the sin?"

"No, no. I just thought, uh, I thought you wanted to know, uh . . . "

"This impure thought," he said, chopping off my unfinished sentence. "Did it concern the woman or the man?"

"The woman, of course! What do you think?" I was shocked; you don't expect to hear that sort of thing in confession.

"All right," he said. "Anything else?" His name is Father Banzolini, and he comes here twice a week to hear our confessions. We give him a nice dinner before and a nightcap after, but he's surly all the time, a very surly priest. I imagine he finds us dull, and would rather be hearing confessions over in the theater district or down in Greenwich VIllage. After all, how far can a lamb stray in a monastery?

"Um," I said, trying to think. I'd had all my sins organized in my mind before coming here, but as usual Father Banzolini's asperity had thrown me off course. I'd once thought I might jot down all my sins in advance and simply read them from the paper in the confessional, but somehow that lacked the proper tone for contrition and so on. Also, what if the paper were to fall into the wrong hands?

He goes on to confess stealing an orange Flair pen from one of the other brothers, for which he's given "two Our Fathers and oh, Seven Hail Marys."

Westlake's plots are airtight--even this crime novel without a crime features a complicated plot--and efficient in their workings. But while he never wastes any time, he also doesn't hesitate to use time, to take advantage of what's offered in a scene to have a little fun, even silly, mostly pointless fun. The best example of that in Brothers Keepers, a scene that had me giggling to myself on the L, is when Dwarfmann, the guy who's going to build the office tower, unexpectedly draws a Bible verse and begins combat:

"My days," he said, "are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. Let's get back down to business."

I'm sure Brother Oliver was as taken aback as I was. The imagery, in Dwarfmann's rattly style of speech, seemed wildly inappropriate. Then Brother Oliver said, in distinct astonishment, "Was that from Job?"

"Chapter seven, verse six," Dwarfmann snapped. "Come, come, if you have something to say to me, say it. Our time is a very shadow that passeth away."

"I don't know the Apocrypha," Brother Oliver said.

Dwarfmann gave him a thin smile. "You know it well enough to recognize it. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter two, verse five."

"Then I can only cite One Thessalonians," Brother Oliver said. "Chapter five, verse fourteen. Be patient toward all men."

"Let us run with patience," Dwarfmann or somebody said, "the race that is set before us."

"I don't believe," Brother Oliver told him, "that was quite the implication of that verse in its original context."

The duel continues for nearly two pages, and after Dwarfmann leaves, the monks are still a bit stunned:

Shaking my head, I said, "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

Brother Oliver gave me a puzzled look. "Is that New Testament? I don't recognize that."

"Uhh, no," I said. "It's Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice." I cleared my throat. "Sorry," I said.

As much as any writer I can think of, Westlake demonstrated that he understood that we aren't coming to these books to improve ourselves, or learn life lessons (though, to be fair, you can learn a hell of a lot of life lessons from the Parker novels), but to have fun. And if he's getting the most possible fun out of the writing, we're likely going to feel the same way in the reading.

An announcement and a call for help--Or, When the man sat down at the typewriter . . .

{Donald E. Westlake loses to Brian Garfield at the storied Mysterious Bookshop floating poetry game sometime in the early 1970s. Photographer unknown. For more about that game, see my interview with Garfield on the University of Chicago Press blog.}

Donald E. Westlake opened most of his Parker novels with a sentence that began with the word "when." You can read them all at  the Miskatonic University Press site, but the best of them definitely comes from Firebreak: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."

In other words, the man didn't mess around. You can't mess around if you're going to make your living with your words for more than half a century. You can't mess around if you're going to write more than 100 books, and end up with dozens of them firmly ensconced in the canon of crime fiction. Like Parker, Westlake was a pro--a working writer who simply went about the work of writing, day after day.

For a lot of writers, that means taking up any job that comes along: book reviews, features, essays, forewords--any old thing that will help an editor fill a hole and bring in a check. Westlake, however, always kept his focus relentlessly on his fiction, so when he did turn to nonfiction, you can be confident he was taking on a subject he cared about.

Which leads me to today's bit of good news: I've just signed a contract with the University of Chicago Press (my employer when I'm wearing my publicist's hat) to edit a volume of Donald Westlake's nonfiction--a celebratory miscellany, sort of like the wonderful Charles Portis volume that was published last year.

The plans are still at a very early stage, but what we're envisioning is a volume that would bring together the best of Westlake's nonfiction, including reviews, essays on favorite writers, magazine pieces, occasional writings, and more. In addition, it would likely include a couple of the most interesting interviews he sat for over the years; a piece or two by prominent fans, friends, and critics about Westlake and his work; and possibly even letters and e-mails. The goal is to give Westlake's large and ever-growing fanbase insight into how his inquisitive, inventive, alert mind worked over questions of genre, form, talent, and more--helping us to see the man behind the books we've all loved for so many years.

I'm already making great use of a small cadre of Parker-fan advisers who have helped me through the years as Chicago has republished that series, but I also could use help from the fan community at large: if you know of any Westlake nonfiction pieces that you even suspect I may not have heard of--anything that's all obscure, or old, or forgotten--I'd love it if you'd drop me a note or leave a comment below. I'll be doing some digging in libraries and archives, so I hope I'll be able to find plenty of good material in addition to what I already have, but I also am well aware that the crime fiction community is incredibly knowledgeable, and I would be grateful for any tips or thoughts folks are willing to share.

I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this from me in the months to come--and I hope you're as excited as I am!

From the desk of Donald E. Westlake. Or maybe Richard Stark? Or Samuel Holt? Or Tucker Coe? Or . . . ?

We'll keep the writers' letters theme rolling along today--though today's entry is our first look at the future of collections of writers' letters: it's from an e-mail. It comes to us courtesy of Ethan Iverson, jazz pianist and expert on the writing of Donald Westlake, an e-mail that Westlake sent to Iverson sometime around 2005:

I’ve always loved Point Blank sort of the way the Neanderthal mother loved that first hairless mutant: did that come from me? And I never get over being astonished at how far that original toss has sailed. In addition to the lowly origins you mentioned, there's also the fact that it was supposed to be a one-off, that I had Parker arrested by the cops at the end of The Hunter, which is part of why I didn't bother to give him a first name. A Pocket Books editor named Bucklin Moon (honest: discovered Chester Himes) asked me if I could somehow arrange Parker's escape and bring him back. It's all careful planning, all careful planning.

There's more of their e-mail exchanges at Iverson's blog, where he offers an indispensable annotated guide to nearly all of Westlake's books.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know why I picked Westlake for today: tonight is the nationwide premiere of Parker, an adaptation of the novel Flashfire that stars Jason Statham as Parker, the first time that Parker's name has actually been used for the character onscreen. I'm not seventeen, so I'm not seeing the movie tonight, but I'm looking forward to seeing it soon, and I've definitely been enjoying the flurry of attention that it's brought to the series as a whole.

In addition to Michael Weinreb's excellent essay on Westlake for Grantland (The Outfit "doesn't so much begin as get straight to the goddamned point."), there's Nick Pinkerton's look at Parker's checkered cinematic history for the Village Voice (File under Things I Did Not Know: "Jim Jarmusch . . . can be seen reading a Stark novel on an airplane in 1994's pseudo-documentary Tigrero."), and A. O. Scott's appreciative review of the film in the New York Times.

As Parker's main publisher, my colleagues and I have been doing our part, too. I wrote a post for the Press blog about the books and movie, including five tips for keeping yourself from being robbed by Parker. (And let's be clear: if you'd told fourteen-year-old me that I would get paid to write about crime novels, and later that day get to trade e-mails with Lawrence Block, I would have been pretty damn impressed with future me.) But the big news we got to share this week was that we'd launched a new Parker website that features infographics of Parker's take from each heist (and the bodies he left behind), Parker's rules to live (heist) by, and, biggest and best, a complete, sortable guide to all 498 characters to cross Parker's path in the twenty-four novels. I've been kicking around the idea of doing a Parker character guide since we first started publishing the books, and with the help of my incredibly hard-working colleagues--as attentive to detail as Parker himself--we've made it happen.

So pick up your copy of The Hunter and settle in for the weekend, folks. Oh, but don't forget to lock your doors first. You never know who might be casing the place.