Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008

[calimac]

In 1969 I saw the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was my introduction to Robert Redford, whom I liked enough to want to see more of. This explains why I went to see an obscure 1972 crime-caper comedy film called The Hot Rock, starring Redford and also, like Butch, with a screenplay by William Goldman. (Which in turn explains why soon after that I grabbed a new novel of Goldman's called The Princess Bride, but that's another story.)

The Hot Rock was a terrifically funny film, but it wasn't half as funny as something my mother brought home soon afterwards: the novel it was based on, by someone named Donald E. Westlake. The film had ended at a logical-enough moment in the plot, but the novel had a whole additional chapter with a whole additional level of payoff. And besides that, it was full of marvelous added detail and the kind of breath-taking comedy arising from characters who chronically misunderstand each other.

I started looking for more novels by this Westlake person, and for once, repeated exposures did not disappoint. Some of his other novels, all of them crime-capers of one sort or another, were even funnier than The Hot Rock. His absolute masterpiece of slapstick was a book I found in remaindered hardcover at Fantasy Etc. in San Francisco in the late 70s, and read most of while standing in line waiting for a concert at Great American Music Hall. The title was Dancing Aztecs, and unlike most Westlake books where the humor lay in the plot and dialogue, this one was equally notable for the ornate, expository-spinning prose. I could quote from it all day, but the single best moment comes in the character sketch of a self-appointed tough guy, which includes the beautifully self-canceling line,

He's so mean he can't look in a mirror, for fear he'll annoy himself.

Part of Dancing Aztecs's claim to masterpiece status was its huge scale and complexity - the intricately interweaving sub-plots were part of the charm. I found the same scale and complexity in an even bigger novel, Kahawa: the heist was just as clever as in his other stories, but this time the tone was entirely serious. I was wrapped up in this one for days, and I just re-read it again last week.

Gradually the hard-nosed, even bloody-minded side of Westlake's writing that he'd shunted off to pseudonyms began creeping back into the novels under his own name. Sometimes it worked - Drowned Hopes is a serious novel involving John Dortmunder, the comically inept crook introduced in The Hot Rock, but it's also a parody of the infinitely dark-minded crime novelist Jim Thompson - but sometimes not. I got disconcerted by several Westlake novels in which mild-mannered viewpoint protagonists suddenly develop unexpected capacities for ruthlessness out of nowhere. And even the comic plots in his lighter books started to get a bit tired. But the older books were as funny as ever, and I've kept reading intermittently.

I met Westlake once. I attended a Bouchercon because he was GoH that year, and I ran into him at a reception. I could hardly burble at him about how much I liked his work, and he'd surely heard it all before. So instead I remarked, "Nice tie," and it was: it was a nice tie.

Some of my more serious mystery-reading friends don't like Westlake, but he's not really a mystery writer. (Some of them don't like Dorothy L. Sayers either, and she also is not really a mystery writer.) But there is no fiction writer outside the sf/fantasy field [which he did dip into on occasion, but his major work lies outside it] with whom I share a devotion with so many other friends than Donald E. Westlake. Now his oeuvre is complete, or will be when his latest novel appears in April, and we would be gluttons to ask for more.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

So I'm a glutton. I wish he'd lived another 20 years.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I have really not read enough Westlake (very little in fact -- just never got around to it). But I did once read The Spy in the Ointment, and found it so much fun, that I did acquire a copy.

It's tempting to run out and buy some books (or rather, run to my Amazon account), even though right now, I should spend the money.

But he definitely had his own tune to dance to.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You want advice on which books to go for, I have it.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Umm... Is there a fan named Donald Eastlake?

K.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There is. To my latest knowledge he is alive and well, somewhere around Boston.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I read The Hot Rock many years ago, like in high school, and I remember nearly falling off the chair laughing a few pages in. I would like the Parker books as well and will try to read some Westlake/Stark this year.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

Anne Laurie got me started with Westlake by giving me a copy of "Dancing Aztecs" all those decades ago.

Interesting to read your comments on "Drowned Hopes," which I have been meaning to read for years. I always expected it to be a complete farce.

Also interesting that you hardly mention the violent, amoral books under the pen name "Richard Stark". I've read more of the "Stark" books than anything else by Westlake; I've collected them for decades, back to when this involved scouring used bookstores. The character Parker seems to appeal to my sense of doom. :) Of course, being a total slug about reading in the last few years, I still have about five Stark books left from the first series, and about five left from the 2000s revival.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As the paragraph mentioning Drowned Hopes suggests, I don't much care for the violent side of Westlake's work. (I omit "immoral" because I know one person who dislikes his comic novels for their immorality.) Experience with the ones of that kind under his own name mean I've never read any of his Richard Stark work. (Ironically, I had a childhood friend whose name really was Richard Stark.)

Drowned Hopes does have some amusing aspects, but it is mostly serious. An entirely serious and dire Westlake novel that's often mischaracterized as comic - perhaps because it has a farcical premise - is Two Much. The film of it has a very different tone.

[khatru1339.livejournal.com]

It was good to read your love of Dancing Aztecs, which I also love; I've read it several times and found it to be laugh-out-loud funny every time. (Once in a dentist's waiting room, and another patient came over to write the title down: "Anything that can make you laugh at the dentist's had to be really funny.") The first time I read it, I was in bed late at night and nearing the halfway point, and seriously considering staying up all night to finish it. Then Westlake announced it was nighttime, all the characters were asleep, and the reader should go to sleep, too. Damn. I reluctantly followed orders.

Dancing Aztecs should be one of the most famous novels around, one that everybody reads. Instead it's had pitifully few editions and is generally pretty expensive to find. (Hmm, I just checked ABE, and while they have copies over $100, they also have some affordable ones, if anyone's looking for a copy.)

I never managed to collect all of Westlake's books, but I have close to a hundred of them, some of which I still haven't read. My library is only organized up the the Rs so far, though, and all the Westlakes are in unsorted boxes; I've so far resisted the urge to just start digging through them.

I've read all the ones under the Tucker Coe pseudonym, but none under the Samuel Holt one. I've read a lot of the Richard Stark ones, which are great; you might like them more than you expect. (The Hot Rock started out as a Parker/Stark novel, but it kept turning funny on him.) And, alas, I gave away my copy of Comfort Station by "J. Morgan Cunningham" before I knew it was by Westlake. I can't afford a copy now. (Well, let's not say "can't," but it's hard to justify paying $150 up for a little joke paperback from the 1970s.)