HIGH ADVENTURE by Donald E. Westlake

Pilot Kirby Galway is having a bad week. He has two different customers (for the Pre-Columbian artifacts he smuggles) show up at his home in Belize at the same time. That wouldn't be so bad except that each customer thinks he is the exclusive customer. They also think those artifacts are real. If that's not enough to give Kirby a headache, along comes a fiercely honest, Junoesque archaeologist named Valerie Green. Valerie ("despoliation!" is her watchword)  is positive there is an undiscovered Mayan temple right -- there. Yes, there. Right where Kirby and his band of merry Mayan pranksters have created a fake temple on his land. Government official Innocent St. Michael -- a sorely misnamed individual -- knows very well there is no temple on Kirby's land because Innocent sold him that land. Suckered him on the deal, in fact, because the land is worthless. But Innocent was never one to let a fast dollar or a beautiful woman get by him so he's very curious as to all the shuckin' and jivin' going on out Kirby's way. Vernon, Innocent's right hand man, is hell bent on bringing down the Belizean government, and that may involve kidnapping and murder if he can withstand the ulcer-inducing stress of simply imagining those events. And in between making fake antiquities, keeping his customers satisfied, drumming up new customers, staving off both the government and the rabid archaeologist as well as reporters and Guatemalan terrorists disguised as -- wait for it -- Ghurkas, Kirby still has to complete his usual rounds of smuggling marijuana into the US.

Now having said all that, do I really need to tell you what a delightful confection this book is? There is no weight to the book at all, despite Westlake's wryly humorous reflections on government corruption, academic corruption, and the general ineptitude of the human race. The story is a charming bonbon, aiming solely to amuse the reader, and it succeeds admirably, though the book does not quite rise to the levels of hilarity achieved in the author's Dortmunder series.

Westlake rounds out all of his characters, finding as much humor in their assets as in their liabilities, and he sets up scenes worthy of the finest screwball comedies in which to mentally torture his characters with their misinterpretations of situations and identities. There is one particularly funny scene in a hotel restaurant in which Kirby's various customers and the archaeologist are all trying to have dinner, trying not to be recognized, and everyone in confusion (and no small amount of fear) as to identities and motives. That the scene plays out with very little in the way of dialogue is testament to Westlake's skills of characterization and the third-person point of view.

Besides being a master of the plot twist -- Westlake's mind was positively labyrinthine -- the author also wrote fine prose, full of imagery, often beautiful yet lacking any pretention. For readers familiar only with his Parker novels and their lean style of prose, this book is a real change of pace. Fans of Westlake's Dortmunder series will find much to enjoy here, but will still miss the crazy gang in that series.

RECOMMENDED

On Tuesday, Feb. 21, Hard Case Crime will release THE COMEDY IS FINISHED, probably the last we will see of Westlake's previously unpublished works.

REVIEW: CHRISTMAS AT THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP edited by Otto Penzler

The first story in this delightful collection of Christmas mysteries just might be the best gift I'll receive this holiday season. Give Till It Hurts is one of the comical John Dortmunder stories by the much-missed Donald E. Westlake. Dortmunder, for those not familiar with the character, is a thief. He's a good thief, which is to say that he's good at his job, not that he is a good man. But things seem to happen to Dortmunder; things no thief, however proficient, can plan for.

With the cops hard on his heels, Dortmunder passes himself off as a guest in a Christmas poker game, sitting in for the missing "Don," who can be no other than Westlake himself, of course. This poker game takes place after hours at The Mysterious Bookshop, with participants including the likes of "Larry" (Lawrence Block?), Justin (Scott?), and the proprietor of the bookstore himself, Otto Penzler. I found myself chuckling because Dortmunder was still so very -- Dortmunder; I found my eyes welling up because I hate the idea of a world without the possibility of more of Westlake's wicked sense of humor. This is the very essence of a Christmas gift: something unexpected that brings joy and also touches the heart.

As a result, I find myself deeply grateful to Otto Penzler for sharing these stories with the rest of the world. You see, Penzler personally commissioned each of these 17 stories, one a year since 1993, from writers whose names alone inform the reader of the quality within this book: Westlake and Block, of course, but also Ed McBain, George Baxt, S.J. Rozan, Edward D. Hoch, Charles Ardai, Mary Higgins Clark, Rupert Holmes, Anne Perry, Jonathan Santlofer, Michael Malone, Andrew Klavan, Jeremiah Healy, Ron Goulart, Lisa Atkinson, and Thomas H. Cook.

Penzler's requirements were that each work must be a mystery/ crime/suspense story, that it be set during the Christmas season, and that at least some of the action must take place in The Mysterious Bookshop. These stories were then produced as pamphlets, 1,000 copies, and given to customers of the bookstore as a Christmas present. I am mighty sorry that I have not been a customer right along, but Penzler clearly has a forgiving nature since he now makes these stories available to anyone with the price of admission.

Westlake's story is followed by Schemes and Variations by George Baxt, wherein his snarky detective, one Pharaoh Love (I kid you not), is on the trail of a killer who has already done in three book dealers in the search for a rare Dashiell Hammett manuscript. Indeed, missing, stolen, or rare manuscripts play a role in several of these stories, as does Otto Penzler himself, but the reader is pulled along by the sheer charm and ingenuity of the writers. The name-dropping alone is staggering, and evoked a very real, very unChristian envy in me for those who have the privilege of dropping in at Penzler's store whenever they choose.

Generally designed to be lighthearted mysteries, there is yet a darker gem of a story by Ed McBain (who comes in for some good-natured joshing by some of the other writers for his vast collection of pen names). His I Saw Mommy Killing Santa Claus reveals the sinister side of the jolly holiday season. Lawrence Block chips in with As Dark As Christmas Gets, a clever homage to Nero Wolfe, while Jeremiah Healy introduces The Holiday Fairy, wherein one might note a slight resemblance to a famous Agatha Christie story but to which Healy has added a certain poignancy and imbued with far greater affection than any of the Dame's characters were wont to possess. And Mary Higgins Clark closes out the collection with What's in a Name?, an Algeresque tale for perennially rejected writers.

As a holiday gift for mystery lovers, I highly recommend this collection. But you know, people will say, 'Oh, I got her a book last year. She has lots of books, she must get so tired of receiving them,' and then they'll go out and buy you some overpriced bath salts or too-small house slippers or an Air Supply cd, and you won't get this (or any other) book. You'd better just buy it for yourself.

MEMORY by Donald E. Westlake

Forty years before Memento made moviegoers aware of the problematic condition of short-term memory loss, Donald E. Westlake wrote an amazing novel called Memory in which he explored the links between memory and identity, and what happens when those links are broken.

Written in 1960 and being published for the first time this April by Hard Case Crime, Memory is almost certain to have literary stylists bemoaning what further profundities Westlake might have written had he not spent so much of his time on more commercial fare. This book may even leave a few of his Parker and Dortmunder fans wishing the author had forever stuck to the kind of books they most enjoy. Me, I fall in the middle. I would love to have seen what Westlake could do if freed from the pressures of sales and marketing and the need to make a living, because there is no doubt about the brilliant talent on display in this book. On the other hand, I would never surrender one minute of the immense pleasure I continue to derive from his more commercial endeavors in exchange for anything he might have written.

Memory is the story of Paul Cole, an actor, whose memory is damaged when he is badly beaten by a man whose wife Paul has been sharing. Hospitalized and unable to continue with the touring company who employed him, Paul finds himself in a strange town without funds or friends or a memory capable of helping him locate either. His few clues to his home and work are the contents of his wallet. When he takes a job as an unskilled laborer in order to earn money for a bus ticket to New York City -- and the address on his driver's license -- Paul encounters indifference, cruelty, suspicion, fraud, and above all, a lonely isolation. There is a kind of Pac-Man inside Paul's brain, eating up the dots of his memory faster than he can produce them. Every time he discovers a dot has been eaten, the fear and panic nearly consume him as he fights to find his reality again, a reality that is ever changing, ever disposable, ever obsolete. He is man who cannot counter accusations because he cannot remember his actions, does not know his own character.

Equally sad and horrified, the reader watches helplessly as Paul fumbles at living, sometimes remembering a  face or name only to have that remembrance disappear into the ether within hours, his world spiraling down and down into a self-contained singularity that can never be more than the here and now, for whatever here and now are worth without any theres and thens to lend structure and context to his life.

Westlake nails the harsh indifference of social systems -- including or even especially those social service systems that have little or no use for people who cannot help themselves but depend almost entirely on those services. With no money, no place to stay, no job skills that he is aware of, Paul is one of the walking wounded, looking as healthy and normal as everyone else but damaged in ways no one, not even he, can fathom. It all begs a re-working of the old 'if a tree fell in a forest' question: If a man can no longer remember his life or identity, is he dead? And if he is, what is he supposed to do with the body that's still walking around? What is a man in our culture, when his identity, his entire being can be reduced to a driver's license, a couple of union cards, and a Social Security Number? Without those identifiers, can he even be human? Can his existence be tolerated?

A story without graphic violence, sex, or profanity, Memory yet isn't light reading and is never less than compelling.  There is a tinge of irony in the fact that this unforgettable story is being published posthumously, right when those Siamese twins, the memory and identity of Donald E. Westlake, are beginning a slow fade into history.

Here is an excerpt from Memory, in which Paul Cole, alone in a cheap hotel room in a town whose name he can't remember, has just written down as many memories as he can, in the belief that they will eventually trigger other memories.

He spent a long while sitting on the bed, occasionally writing something else down on the paper, and when he was finished he had a list seven lines long, and on all of the lines at least two names with an arrow between.

When he looked at his wrist, after putting the pen and pad away, he had a sudden feeling of dread, because his watch was gone. It was a dread for more than the loss of the watch; he could lose everything, be reduced to nothingness, and he was helpless.

But then the memory of Artie Bellman came back, and he remembered that Bellman had the watch, and he felt so relieved he had to sit down on the bed again for a while. He sat there with his head bowed and his hands dangling between his knees, and after a while he shook his head. Speaking aloud, he said, "What a sad war. What a slow sad war."

MEMORY
Donald E. Westlake
April 2010
Hard Case Crime
ISBN: 0-8439-6375-1
Cover art by Glen Orbik

Other reviews:
Ed Gorman 
Publishers Weekly

REVIEW: DROWNED HOPES by Donald E. Westlake

Look at that face. Just look at him. A wise, kindly old gent, wouldn't you say? A beloved granddad's face, a grandpa who takes you fishing and buys you your first pocketknife and teaches you to whittle. A grandpa who never loses patience while you search for the correct wrench to help him fix the kitchen plumbing. A grandpa who seems no older than you as the pair of you sneak into the kitchen to steal cookies cooling on the rack.

Well, maybe that man in the photo is all of those things, I don't know, but that's not what I think of when I look at his picture. I think of a cold criminal named Parker who was killing a man in his garage when the phone rang. I think of an ex-airman named Ray who was a passenger in the car his father was driving when someone shot and killed his father. I think of dopey Fred Fitch, who never met a scam he didn't fall for. And I think of John Dortmunder & company, the most entertaining bunch of thieves and nogoodniks in print.

The man in the picture is, of course, Donald E. Westlake. If you haven't read any of his books, allow me to expound on the quality and quantity of his work. First off, he's won three Edgars in three different categories (the only other person to do that is Joe Gores): Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Motion Screenplay, and he's been named a Grand Master by the MWA. More than a dozen films have been based on his books: The Hot Rock, Point Blank, What's the Worst That Could Happen, A Slight Case of Murder, and more. More? Hey, one of his books, Jimmy the Kid, was made into films in three countries: Italy, Germany, and the USA. Westlake has also written numerous original screenplays (e.g., The Stepfather) and his screenplay for The Grifters, based on the classic crime novel by Jim Thompson, won him that Edgar. Under one name or another (more than eight, I think, but who can keep track?) Westlake has authored more than 100 novels, and is still going strong.

That's good news for his fans. I count myself among them, but I'm really a neophyte. It's only been two or three years since I first read one of his books. I'm perhaps a quarter of the way through his oeuvre, and let me just say that in those 25 or so books Westlake has never once disappointed me. He is equally adept at creating comic crime capers or taut, edgy, brutal crime fic, a la the Parker books, written under his Richard Stark pseudonym.

I consider comic crime fiction extremely difficult to write. As proof, I offer you the paucity of authors who do it well. How many authors can you name beyond Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake? I will admit there are some budding comic crime writers out there whose work I enjoy and admire: Troy Cook, Declan Burke, et al, and I expect more good things from them, but for consistency, longevity, originality and laugh-out-loudity nobody tops Westlake.

All of which brings me to my latest encounter with Westlake's John Dortmunder creation: Drowned Hopes (1989). This is not the latest book in the series, in fact I seem to be reading this series in no particular order at all. Doesn't matter, each Dortmunder tale is a comic gem that stands on its own.

SYNOPSIS: John Dortmunder arrives home after a futile night of thieving to find that a former cellmate and completely insane killer named Tom Jimson (and can you spot the similarity to Jim Thompson and his psychopathic characters?) has taken root in his living room. Tom wants John to figure out a way to get to the $700,000 Tom stole in an armed car robbery more than twenty years earlier. Problem: the money is in a coffin buried behind a library in a town that is now under 50 feet of water. Yes, while Tom was in prison a state reservoir was created that swamped the entire town. John doesn't think he can do this job, doesn't want to do this job even for half the money, he wants nothing to do with this madman, but if he doesn't somehow find the coffin and get the money to the surface Tom will dynamite the dam and hundreds of people will be killed in the resulting flood. And even if by some miracle John manages to salvage the money, he has to worry about Tom. Tom's partners all have a way of dying violently. Now if you put this same plot in the hands of, oh, say, Marcus Sakey, you would get a pretty good thriller, a nail-biter. In Westlake's hands, this story becomes a series of hilarious mishaps, misconstructions and misdeeds that build on themselves. A plan that starts with just Tom and John grows, little by little, to include all of Dortmunder's gang of regulars as well as a computer nerd, a dive instructor, an illegitimate librarian, her foul-mouthed mother, and possibly the unluckiest bridegroom who ever lived.

PACING: Drowned Hopes builds to its denouement in a more deliberate fashion than some of the other books in this series. In my opinion, that slightly slower pace is necessary due to the construction of the book. The story is sectioned into four separate attempts by Dortmunder to retrieve the lost loot. Each section is its own tale with its own story arc and each builds on the previous section. Instead of a single story arc, the sections stair step up and up to reach Westlake's last grand joke on Dortmunder.

CHARACTERIZATION: In the Dortmunder books, character is as much a physical attribute as it is about personality. To look at these people is to instantly know their nature.

When a lawman looked at Dortmunder and Tom Jimson, particularly together, he said to himself, "Probable Cause is their middle name."

And then there's Wally Knurr, computer geek a la 1989:

"...a round soft creature as milky white as vanilla yogurt...eagerly melting eyes, like blue-yolked soft-boiled eggs...perhaps elsewhere in the solar system he would find short, fat, moist creatures like himself..."

It is as much the interactions of the characters as it is the individual characterizations that make for reading enjoyment. For example, modern technology is anathema to Dortmunder, while the personal computer is Wally's raison d'etre. Wally lives in the gaming world, planet Zog to be exact, and although Dortmunder would like to verbally slay him for his otherworldly notions of how to retrieve the money (laser-burn off all the water? giant magnet on a spaceship?), he found "it wasn't easy to be hard-edged or sardonic when gazing down into that round guileless face."

SETTING: Westlake does not create the kind of breathable, walkable, everywhere-at-once ambiance that a Crais or a Connelly provides. Where those authors develop whole landscapes that are reflected within their characters, Westlake creates smaller, detailed exteriors that fight with his characters. Dortmunder becomes convinced the reservoir is trying to kill him but the inducements to keep him going back into the reservoir and his various escapes from the water make for some of the funniest moments in the book.

PLOT: The core idea of criminals going to great lengths to obtain property not their own is hardly new, but there's nothing cliched about Westlake's take on that idea. Of the books I've read in this series, Drowned Hopes may be the most tightly focused and the one in which he takes Dortmunder completely out of his comfort zone. When the basics of the story are fleshed out by events such as the hilarious bit-by-bit breakdown of the bridegroom or the sudden emergence of Tom's old -- and I mean old -- nemesis, the story takes (water) wings.

PROSE: Westlake provides a strong narrative flow in which digressions are always brought into play later. With so many characters and plot points, the third person, subjective POV was a wise choice. Here is an excerpt taken from chapter two, shortly after John and his companion, May, find that Tom Jimson, ruthless killer, has entered their lives:

Tom turned away, going back into the living room, walking rigid, like a man who's been broken and then put back together a little wrong, using too much Krazy Glue. Behind his stiff back, May waggled eyebrows and shoulders and fingers at Dortmunder, asking, Who is this person, why is he in my house, what's going on, when will it end? and Dortmunder shrugged ears and elbows and the corners of his mouth, answering, I don't know what's going on, I don't know if this is some kind of trouble or not, we'll just have to wait and see. Then they followed Tom into the living room.

Tom sat on the better easy chair, the one that hadn't sagged all the way to the floor, while Dortmunder and May took the sofa, sitting facing Tom with the look of a couple who've just been asked to think seriously about life insurance.

Other than advances in communication technology (Internet and cellphones specifically), this book has held up very well over the years. I recommend Westlake's Dortmunder books to everyone who likes a laugh, and I look forward to a new Dortmunder adventure next year, Get Real, when John and his friends agree to do a reality show heist. The mind boggles.