Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008
Jan. 2nd, 2009 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIn 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,
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.
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.
