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.

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.

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.)

"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.