1967 was a banner year for the many-headed beast that was Donald Westlake in the first decade of his career. As Richard Stark, he published two more Parker novels at Gold Medal, and kicked off the short-lived Grofield series at Macmillan. As Tucker Coe, he continued the Mitch Tobin series of detective novels at Random House. As Curt Clark, he published the standalone science fiction novel, Anarchaos. He also had a children’s book come out under his own name, in collaboration with an illustrator. But when it comes to the six novels of his that were published that year, only one was actually credited to Donald E. Westlake.
That book was God Save the Mark, and it enjoys the distinction of being the only novel Westlake ever wrote that won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He won two more Edgars later on–one for the Dortmunder short story Too Many Crooks, and one for his screenplay adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters. But it’s his novels that defined him as a writer, and made all his achievements in other areas possible. And while I’d assume he was nominated multiple times for best novel–well, why assume? I can look it up.
Not one nomination for Stark. None for Coe. None for any of his pseudonyms, though pseudonymous novels sometimes won. The Mercenaries, his first crime novel, and the first book published under his name, got nominated for Best First Novel. Then he got nominated for The Busy Body, won for God Save the Mark, got nominated for The Hot Rock, and one last time for Kahawa.
Seriously? The Ax didn’t get a nod, but Kahawa did? Strange be the ways of Edgar.
Awards can be perplexing, all the more when the winners are chosen by artistic peers. You look at the list of Best Picture Oscars, and if you’re a film buff, you grit your teeth and mutter obscenities. Don’t even get me started on the acting awards.
Looking at the historic list of best novel nominees and winners on Wikipedia, I see a whole lot of names I don’t recognize, and a long list of books hardly anyone reads or even remembers today. As well as some acknowledged masters and undoubted classics. And a whole lot of espionage thrillers, which pretty dubiously count as mysteries in my book–get your own award, spymasters!
It took Ed McBain 46 years and 50 novels to get just a nomination for his enormously influential 87th Precinct series, which was all about detectives, though not the genius kind. Paperback originals don’t seem to have gotten nominated at all (so déclassé), and the violent sexy hardboiled stuff Westlake originally was known for was apparently not even considered unless it was written as a mystery of some kind, and published in hardcover. Sorry, Parker. No Edgars for you. Like you give a damn.
Just to add to the confusion, one of the books God Save The Mark beat out in 1968 (the award year) was Rosemary’s Baby. Yes, that Rosemary’s Baby. Which heavily outsold the winner (over four million copies), and was not written or marketed as a mystery novel. But Levin had already won the Edgar Best First Novel Award for A Kiss Before Dying, so he was in the club.
Repeat winners in the Best Novel category were rare, and none of them are favorites of mine–Dick Francis is the only three-time winner, and was nominated constantly (lots of horse lovers in the MWA?). Agatha Christie, by contrast, had to settle for being the first Grandmaster, having produced much of her best work before the Edgars got started, though eventually a more specialized award was named after her. English mystery writers did really well at Edgar time–Westlake was the first American to win for Best Novel in years, as well as the youngest up to that point.
Votes get split. The genre is vast and multifarious, and many of its practitioners limit their attentions to their own patch. Many times an author who should have already won for any number of superb earlier books gets the statue for a less impressive effort as a form of belated recognition. And authors who got a great reception when they first showed up, thus pulling votes their way, may later end up in the remainder bin of literary history–but they still get to keep the award. Their books stay on the winner’s list.
And all the many far more deserving books and authors we still read today remain off it. No Edgar for Patricia Highsmith, though she was nominated three times–I’d guess her writing was too good to ignore, but her notoriously abrasive personality cost her votes. George Pelecanos has never been nominated for his prose, though he got a shared win for his work on The Wire, along with an Emmy for a script he co-wrote. I hope his day may yet come. Life is not fair, and awards nominations are just erratic and often misleading tokens of professional esteem–not proof of enduring merit. The true winner is the one whose books stay in print.
Westlake had scored the biggest hit of his career with The Fugitive Pigeon, and had done well with his two subsequent comic novels for Random House. He was building a rep, and had many prominent supporters. For him to win so young meant that he was increasingly being recognized as a rising talent by his colleagues. The back of my Signet reprint of this book includes lavish praise from Rex Stout and John Dickson Carr–when these guys liked you, you were in like Flynn at the MWA.
Among the ten ‘Nephew’ books, I’d put God Save the Mark at the top of the bottom five, or on a good day, the bottom of the top five–and well below The Spy in the Ointment, published the previous year, though as I pointed out, Westlake was on well-trodden ground with that one, since comic spy novels and films revolving around mistaken identity were almost old hat by the Mid-60’s. Comic mysteries were still very nearly Westlake’s personal domain at this point–he had done more than anyone to revive that form. That no doubt helped him with the Edgar vote. Everyone loves to laugh.
I certainly love to laugh, but among the six novels Westlake published under various names in 1967, I’d rank this one fifth–just above The Damsel, which I don’t consider a very good book. This is partly because I think Westlake didn’t really get his comic act together until the 1970’s–he’s still in the journeyman phase here, though learning more with each comedy he writes. But it’s mainly because he was doing such accomplished original work in a more serious vein–just not under his own name anymore.
I can hear what you’re thinking–“Okay, so why are you ‘fredfitch’, and why is your posting avatar the cover of (according to you) the fifth best novel Westlake published in just that one year?” What an excellent question! That I am not going to answer right now. But for the record, I do like this book quite a lot, and I think it deserved the Edgar–certainly more than Rosemary’s Baby. Just not as much as a slew of other books Westlake wrote, most of which had no chance of ever winning an Edgar, so why blame God Save the Mark? It was standing in for all the others, past and future. That’s how I see it. And now I think I’d better start the review part of the review.
The hero of our story is Fred Fitch, a freelance researcher, who digs up information for writers, scholars, producers, and such, at the local libraries in New York City. He makes a decent enough living this way, and dwells quite comfortably in an apartment that takes up the entire third floor of a Manhattan townhouse on 19th Street that he fears is going to get torn down to make room for progress in the near future. One thing about all the Nephews thus far–they have very decent living accommodations when first we meet them, and they aren’t looking for any kind of personal or professional change in their lives–in fact, they’re all rather averse to change.
Fred is 31 but looks and acts much older. He has a bit of a potbelly that he tries to walk off by not taking the bus in good weather. He wears round spectacles, which he thinks is hopelessly square, so obviously not a Beatles fan. He’s had little to do with women since high school (he did manage to lose his virginity there, somehow), and doesn’t seem to have any male friends, other than a detective on the Bunco Squad named Jack Reilly, who views Fred with a mixture of amusement and despair. And that’s because Fred’s a mark. A rube. A patsy. A sap. A dupe. A chump. The prize sucker of all time. King of the Conned. Prince of Pigeons. God save him.
It all began, he tells us, when he went off to his first day of kindergarten, and returned without his pants–some classmate had talked him into giving them up. He has no idea how it happened, and this inherent cluelessness has not much improved in the ensuing quarter century, though he has become something of an expert on the con game–
From that day forward, my life has been an endless series of belated discoveries. Con men take one look at me, streamline their pitches, and soon go off gaily to steak dinners while poor Fred Fitch sits at home and once again dines on gnawed fingernail. I have enough worthless receipts and bad checks to paper my living room. I own miles of tickets to nonexistent raffles and ball games and dances and clambakes and shivarees, my closet is full of little machines that stopped working as soon as the seller went away, and I’m apparently on just about every sucker mailing list in the Western Hemisphere.
I really don’t know why this should be true. I am not the typical mark, or victim, not according to Reilly, or to all the books I’ve read on the subject. I am not greedy, nor uneducated, nor particularly stupid, nor an immigrant unfamiliar with the language and customs I am only–but it is enough–gullible. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could lie to another human being to his face. It has happened to me hundreds of times already, but for some reason I remain unconvinced. When I am alone I am strong and cynical and unendingly suspicious, but as soon as the glib stranger appears in front of me and starts his spiel my mind disappears in a haze of belief. The belief is all-encompassing; I may be the only person in New York in the twentieth century with a money machine.
Substitute spam emails for the face-to-face approach con men of that era were more often forced to employ, and I think we can all feel Fred’s pain. But with online con artistry, at least we can read online reviews–assuming they weren’t written by the purveyors of what’s being reviewed. And we do assume that, don’t we? We are all Fred Fitch, though hopefully not to the same extent Fred Fitch is Fred Fitch. Of all Westlake’s protagonists, he may be the most quintessential Everyman. He’s not brave, brilliant, handsome, sexy, charismatic, or even all that interesting, aside from his mythic credulity. A curious choice of heroes.
And as the story begins, after having been conned twice in one day, Fred gets a phone call from a shyster lawyer named Goodkind, telling him his Uncle Matt–a man he never heard of before in his life, let alone met–has left him half a million dollars, which after the hefty inheritance tax, will come to three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars–two and a half million in today’s money. So for the second (and I believe final) time in the Nephew Books, we’re dealing with an actual nephew.
Though Fred immediately and understandably suspects a con, his instincts have misled him yet again. The inheritance is legit–his family confirms that Uncle Matt was the black sheep of the family, and it seems like he decided to leave his money to Fred because all his other relations had been rude to him. Word spreads quickly among Fred’s family and acquaintances out west about how badly they’d misjudged Uncle Matt, and of Fred’s good fortune, of course. Fred, you might want to listen to a little advice from Bessie Smith right about now.
Case in point–Fred’s downstairs neighbor Mr. Wilkins, a retired Air Force veteran, suddenly shows up at his door with a massive book manuscript. The book is an alternate history of Caesar’s military campaign in Gaul, only now Caesar has WWI biplanes, which he can use to drop rocks and spears on the hapless Gauls. Because of course guns and explosives haven’t been invented yet. I mean, it’s the 1st century BC, don’t be ridiculous. Mr. Wilkins thinks Jack Lemmon will be perfect for the movie adaptation, and there’s this publisher who will happily print and promote the book–just a matter of ready capital, you see………
Fred is wavering–maybe this is a good idea, and anyway it would make Mr. Wilkins happy–then Mr. Wilkins and his book get kicked down the stairs by Fred’s second inheritance. And by far the better one–we actually met her and the other female love interest in the previous chapter–all of a sudden, Fred is awash in women. But only one worth talking about, as I see it–Gertie Divine, The Body Secular. A former stripper, who was his uncle’s companion–probably not a euphemism in this case, since Uncle Matt was old and slowly dying of cancer.
She shows up on his doorstep, looking, as he tells us, like she’s been running through a few choruses of Lili Marlene, and she just bulls her way into his life without so much as a by your leave–though she has a handwritten note purporting to be from his uncle, ‘bequeathing’ her to him. Fred is irritated and fairly intimidated by her at first, but the more he hangs around her, the more he likes her–she’s everything he’s not; brassy, blonde, bold, and beautiful, in a delightfully cheap and common way. She’s as much of a hard case as he is a pushover. Yang to his Yin.
Here’s one of my favorite Gertie moments–after their first meeting, Fred is walking her to the subway, and it suddenly occurs to him he can afford to call her a cab–
She instantly overreacted. Putting her hand to her heart–a not easy thing for Gertie to do–she pretended to be on the verge of a faint, and cried, “Oh, the spendthrift! He throws it around like it was pianos!”
I knew how to handle Gertie now, so I said, “Of course, if you’d feel more at home on the subway—”
Her answer was to put two fingers in her mouth and give a whistle that shattered windows as far away as the UN Building. A cab yanked itself out of traffic and stopped, panting, at our feet.
Now that’s a broad. And my primary complaint about this book is that she’s only with Fred in a handful of chapters–he spends a lot more time with the other female lead, a rather forgettable girl (probably why I keep forgetting her name) who is involved with Jack Reilly, and since this book is written in the first person, that means we see too little of the divine Gertie by far. I can understand the reasons for this–Fred has to develop a spine, and that means he has to be left to his own devices for a while, but a life-altering relationship like this merited a bit more space, and to short-shrift such a great character is a crime worse than any perpetrated on Fred in the book.
(Sidebar: I bet if they had actually made the planned film adaptation in the late 60’s–with Bill Cosby as Fred–Gertie would have been much more prominently featured. And probably wouldn’t have been a blonde. Cosby, still playing a tennis pro/secret agent on TV at that point, might have been a bit hard to buy as the out-of-shape nebbish in the book. Personally, I think Westlake name-checking Jack Lemmon was something of a wistful hint to Hollywood, though Lemmon was a bit old by then. My ideal Fred and Gertie of all time would probably be Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis in their 30’s, but it’s all quite quite moot by now. Back to the synopsis.)
It probably says something about how I feel about the plot of this book that I don’t feel like relating it in much detail–the story, as I see it, is just a convenient excuse for a lot of great gags, and a look at the world of the huckster from the POV of the mark. Basically, Fred learns that his uncle was murdered, and that he may be next. What follows is a lot of running and hiding and talking to various people to try and figure out what’s happening, and how he can make it stop happening.
Along the way, we see repeated instances of his famed gullibility, but we also see that it’s mainly just a result of him being too obliging a soul–under the pressures of his current situation, fearing for his life, we see him toughen up, become more aware. A dreadful girl he had a crush on in high school shows up on his doorstep, brandishing a letter he wrote to her from camp, saying it represents a legally binding proposal of marriage. He marries her or she’ll sue. He calls Goodkind, and asks him if she’s got a case–and holds up the phone for her to hear while Goodkind laughs himself sick, and says Fred should try to make her sue–the countersuit would be worth a fortune. She runs out the door and down the stairs in a rage, swearing vengeance. Fred feels incredibly good about this. The worm has started to turn.
The more obvious short cons won’t work on him anymore–a guy comes up to him in Grand Central Station, doing the old Lost Bag Full of Money routine (aka The Pigeon Drop), and he tells the guy to get lost, after kicking him in the shin. He knew about this swindle, and most of the others, but the old Fred would have fallen for it. The new Fred, in fear of his life, is becoming more wary.
The problem wasn’t who Fred was–his identity is fine–he’s just a nice decent ordinary guy. But even a nice guy has to learn how to say no sometimes. Or everybody and his cousin walks all over you, I mean him.
But unlike many other Westlake protagonists, he will never get the knack of physical violence. His reaction to being shot at or menaced in any way is to run like hell, which is probably the most valuable survival skill there is, and hardly to be disdained. Westlake was getting better and better at crafting scenarios where the hero would be forced to find innovative ways to traverse the urban jungle–find escape routes where none seem to be present, make his way through courtyards, alleyways, adult bookstores, across rooftops, down convenient ladders–Fred even makes use of one-way streets to try and foil this black limo that keeps tailing him.
This improvised use of the convoluted vertically oriented Manhattan cityscape often seems to prefigure what would be known as ‘parkeur’ in later decades–which I assume is not a reference to Parker, who did some of the same thing in his books, but never for comic effect. As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, this is basic slapstick, right out of the movies, and particularly silent comedy. Westlake isn’t inventing it, or even improving on it–he’s just figuring out how to describe it in prose form, without getting bogged down in detail.
He was always well aware of the fact that filmmakers could show this kind of thing much more easily than he could describe it–but the descriptions can be remarkably effective in their own unique way, playing as they do with our shared knowledge of how something like this would be done in the movies, and somehow making it seem new again, with a sort of wry understatement. It’s still in its formative stages here, but you can see once more where he learned how to write those paralyzingly funny scenes in the Dortmunder books. The most important thing is attention to detail–describing how it actually feels to do what the movies only show us. You’re not just watching it; you’re hearing it, smelling it, feeling it, living it. Here, Fred describes how in order to escape one group of people he thinks mean him harm, he ends up fleeing an entirely different group of people–
I wouldn’t say I have an abnormal fear of heights, but that’s probably because I don’t consider a fear of heights abnormal. I mean, you can get killed if you’re up high and all of a sudden you’re down low. People who aren’t afraid of heights are people who haven’t stopped to think what happens when you reach the sidewalk in too much of a hurry. I have stopped to think about it and I therefore felt very small, weak, nervous, terrified and top-heavy as I went down those iron rungs on the front of the movie theater, expecting at any second to lose my grip, fall through the marquee like a dropped safe, and make an omelet of myself on the sidewalk.
Amazingly enough, I made it. The top of the marquee was some sort of thin sheet metal, painted black, which bucked and dipped and went sprong as I walked across it. Looking back and up, I saw the two men from the bookstore still up there on the roof, looking down; they made no move to follow me, but contented themselves with threateningly shaking their pipes.
What makes Richard Stark’s prose so effective is its ‘flatness’, as Westlake described it–the matter of fact manner in which extraordinary events are described. But there’s some of this in the way he writes his comedies as well. His comic fall guys may be more inclined to share their feelings about the situations they’re in than Parker, but there’s still this sense of detachment–perhaps more of a defense mechanism than anything else. The main difference is the sense of aggrieved indignation the comic protagonist feels at the unruly fates. A Westlake Nephew is always asking himself “Why Me?”, which of course was later the title of a Dortmunder novel. Parker has no such existential queries to pose.
Though he’s becoming more assertive as the story chugs along, Fred is still pretty darned passive. Gertie gets grabbed, and he’s very concerned about her–more than he would have thought possible–but he still isn’t really trying to find and rescue her. He’s been placed in protective custody at one point by his cop friend Reilly, and he hears there’s a woman there to see him–he immediately thinks it’s her, but it’s the other girl, whose name I still don’t remember. She’s described as having ‘marzipan breasts’, and I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it’s probably a good thing.
He spends a lot of time with this girl (I know I could look her name up, but I don’t want to), hiding in her apartment, talking to her about her relationship with Detective Reilly (they are sleeping together, but Reilly won’t divorce his wife because he’s Catholic), and at some point in the story, hearing that the escaped Gertie Divine is coming over to see Fred, tells him he doesn’t have much time to kiss her. This is not remotely credible, even in a fantastic story such as this.
Gertie comes over, and says “So this is the competition”, even though she and Fred have spent a few hours together. The romantic aspect of the book feels tacked on, perhaps intentionally so. It’s not a love story, but you have to have a girl in a Nephew book–I think Westlake was ill-advised to give Fred Fitch two, when it’s hard to swallow that he could get one, even with all that money.
It’s just a long series of MacGuffins. Fred is being threatened by these Brazilian toughs who say his uncle stole the money from their father, and he has to give it up or be killed. There’s this crime commission run by a Senator that’s involved. Fred repeatedly says he doesn’t even want the money, and then it all winds up to a total reversal of everything we’ve learned thus far. Fred’s been running into short cons all through the book–long cons are only for people with a lot of money, you see. And then it suddenly occurs to him that he’s somebody with a lot of money now, and the scales start to drop from his eyes.
Crime books about grifters doing long cons were nothing new, but they were always from the perspective of the conners, never the connees. Westlake’s buddy Lawrence Block had just done a truly nifty one in that vein, published in 1965, called The Girl With the Long Green Heart (to date, my favorite of all the Block novels I’ve read, highly recommended). Not long before that, Jim Thompson’s searing noir masterpiece The Grifters had come out, that Westlake would someday win his third Edgar (and an Oscar nomination) for adapting. So the innovation here was to put us in the position of the audience at a magic show, only we don’t know it’s a show–we’re so distracted by the short cons, we never stop to think about the long con.
Fred’s apotheosis, which must come to all Nephews at some point, is to have that moment of insight where a scam that would fool just about anybody fails to fool him. He is no longer the Mark of Marks. He’s gotten wise. And the sweetest aspect of this is that Gertie (who was in on the sting from the start) is proud of him for wising up.
Fred then cons the other girl (Karen! That’s her name! I’ll have forgotten it again two minutes from now.) into thinking she’s got a good deal with Reilly, even though he’ll never marry her–this strikes me as a bit mean, and too convenient, but the romantic subplots have to be wrapped up swiftly, along with all the others–it’s just a bit too hasty, and Fred explains to Reilly how he did it–over the phone, if you’d believe it–and P.G. Wodehouse would have done it a lot better, as would Shakespeare, so go read them if you like.
Fred and Gertie seem to be an item, but it’s not entirely clear–when last we see them, she’s making them dinner at her apartment, so she did not move in with him. We learn that he got the money, and Gertie convinced him to buy the townhouse he lives in with his uncle’s bequest, as opposed to giving it all away (“Are you crazy? That’s money!”), so the building will never get torn down, and he never has to leave his comfortable digs–other than having Gertie in his life, and no longer being an easy target for grifters, his daily existence seems entirely unchanged. He’s still got the same job. He’s still a nice affable unexceptional guy, who will kick you in the shin if you pretend you just found a bag full of money.
We never learn what happened to Mr. Wilkins’ book about the conquest of Gaul through air power. We do learn who killed Fred’s uncle, and another interesting character we didn’t see enough of–a very short man who appears in one very short chapter. It’s not really that important, but he probably wouldn’t have won the Edgar for Best Mystery Novel of the Year if he hadn’t put a mystery in there somewhere.
It’s a really important book for Westlake, on a lot of levels. It’s got an innovative and unique premise, and it’s full of clever funny moments, and some really good writing. I just don’t happen to think it’s one of his best books, mainly because I think the supporting characters, though fun, are a bit too spottily developed, the best of the bunch is offstage most of the time, and the story feels a bit nailed together at points.
It’s still a book that has something to say about human gullibility, and the fact that the biggest reason we keep falling for all the ridiculous scams out there (some of them a lot more dangerous than others–they found those WMD’s in Iraq yet?) is that most of us don’t really know ourselves that well. Fred’s basically the same guy at the end, but he’s gotten wise to himself, and thus to everyone around him.
Like Fred, we know there’s no end of liars out there, and yet we still have a tendency to believe what people tell us to our faces. That’s true of nearly everyone, and on some level we all know it, and I think the way Westlake tickled that particular funnybone is what got him the Edgar.
It would lead to far better books in the future–you can see the building blocks for the great Westlake comedies of the 70’s and beyond being assembled here, as in the previous Nephew Books. Edgar or no Edgar, I don’t think this book holds a candle to most of them. And yet I am still writing all these reviews as ‘fredfitch’. Go figure.
And figure this, if you will–our next book is 42 pages long, including illustrations. It’s about a little boy and his toy dump truck. And it’s probably the rarest and most expensive collectible of any Westlake book ever published, certainly under his own name. I am never owning a copy of this book. But I’ve read it. And what’s more, I have it scanned into my gmail account.
And anybody who wants to read it need only respond in the comments section, and give me their email–I’ll forward it to you in its entirety. Not nearly enough of my readers comment on the reviews, and I hope this will induce some of you to chime in. I make this one-time offer, you might say, as a fillip. I expect to do an extra century in purgatory for that pun, but so worth it.
PS: That’s P.T. Barnum up top, next to Bill Cosby. I put his picture up there because he’s referenced in the book–that old saying attributed to Barnum, that there’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him. Only it seems he never actually said that. Conned again!
(Very very belated postscript: I see people are still reading this one, and I feel the need to confess–when I wrote this review, and put Cosby’s photo up top, I was not making a reference to the current scandal regarding his extralegal extramarital exploits–and amazingly, the earliest allegation of drug-assisted rape goes back two years before this book came out! I didn’t really become aware of the allegations–which are a lot more than allegations by this point in time–until some time after I posted the review. No doubt Cosby fooled a whole lot of people for a very long time. Not that it really matters so much, compared to what his victims went through, but just as well that movie starring him as the mark of marks never got made. And all I can say is–conned once more! And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I took the name Fred Fitch. I may not get born quite every minute, but I come close sometimes. Shame on me.)
The Westlake Review 
Why yes, I would like a copy (gtulonen at gmail).
Oh dear, I really LIKE Kahawa.
Greg, you shall have it today.
Anthony, I like Kahawa too–up to a point. But The Ax is arguably the best book Westlake ever wrote–hell, it’s arguably the best book anybody in the entire genre ever wrote. Kahawa wouldn’t make my Top 40 among Westlake’s novels, and doesn’t fit the genre the Edgar is geared towards nearly as well. Maybe I’ll change my mind once I reread it in order to review it. But I doubt that.
Btw, while technically, my offer of a free scanned copy of Philip holds good for anyone who comments in this thread and provides an addy (doing it the way Greg did should protect you from spam-bots), I was hoping there’d be some comments about God Save The Mark. Ray will chime in eventually, but why should Ray have all the fun?
Okay…
1. Agree on Kahawa/Edgar. Do not agree on top 40 Westlake positioning. Kahawa is in my top ten. I always liked it when Westlake broke the pattern and did something off his beaten path (although Humans? Not as much).
2.. awcpg at icloud dot com
3. GSTM is a nice, amusing book. Laugh out loud here and there (and there and there). I think it would make an excellent case study in plot establishment in a “how to set up a mystery” creative writing class: You do this here. drop clues here here and here, disguise them using this this and this, x red herrings times y chapters, and there you have it. The book is a bit “formula,” is what I’m saying. I think that is why you didn’t like Karen – she was perhaps a bit formula too. But so was Gertie if we really want to be honest about it. Doris Day here, Mae West there, in other words.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped me from rereading it many times. Westlake, any Westlake, can be reread many times.
1. Well, put it this way–it’s one of Westlake’s Top 40–if you leave out Stark and Coe. I like his breaking the patterns, but this broke them a bit too much. He best novels tend to be fairly short novels. Kahawa is a freakin’ epic. It meanders along too much. I don’t fault him in the least for writing it, and I expect to give it a good review, but just can’t put it up there with his best work. Btw, Westlake said Humans was one of his personal faves. If The Afterlife is as he hoped it would be (see the very last piece in The Getaway Car), you can take that up with him later. Don’t tell him I sent you. 🙂
2)Gotcha.
3)Karen (that’s her name! forgot again.) is bad formula. Gertie is GREAT formula. That’s the difference. To call Karen the Doris Day of the piece is to wildly overpraise her–Doris Day was FUNNY. GSTM has elements of formula (as would any book that was remotely eligible for a genre-based award), but its concept and approach are so new that I have to award it major points, as I believe the Edgar voters did as well. I just think he did a lot more with the ideas in this book in later books.
I already referenced silent comedy and slapstick in this review, so let me paraphrase and repurpose a passage from Walter Kerr’s great book The Silent Clowns. Kerr was talking about the early days of Chaplin, and saying that if you look at those first crude Sennett comedies, there really isn’t that much to distinguish them from all the other short films Sennett was cranking out at the time–but Chaplin always did a bit more. He would add an extra flourish to the routine, the ‘ritual’, as Westlake sometimes called formulaic conventions. He made it interesting, and he somehow promised the viewer that there was even better coming. I think Westlake did the same with his comic writing of the 1960’s. Looking back, it’s not really all that funny–but the potential is there for so much more. And the potential was, eventually, realized.
i’d be interested in reading that story. bklynvegetarian at gmail dot com
No sooner said than done. Well, slightly sooner said than done, of course. What does that phrase even mean, anyway? You’d need a time machine or something. It’s very misleading. Never mind.
Thanks for the offer. I’d like a copy, and I’ll also use this opportunity to thank you for the weekly dose of Westlake! Love your blog and new entries never can come fast enough!
email wpbooks2 at lycos dot com. sorry for not putting it before.
I recall reading and enjoying GSTM at some point, but had no lasting memories of it; even reading this review it sounded only vaguely familiar. On the other hand, The Busy Body and The Fugitive Pigeon are still pretty clear in my mind, even though I doubt I read them any more recently.I’m sure I laughed out loud a few times while reading GSTM, and shook my head in admiration at a well-turned phrase, but it hasn’t stuck with me.
Oh, and I’d love to read the rarity. bschoner AT gmail DOT com. Thanks!
Lightweight fun, no more than that. Cons used on Fred were unfamiliar to me (for obvious reasons), probably these cons had been the most enjoyable element of the novel.
The rest – running around and all that – tire me quickly. Oh, whodunnit was also good.
I don’t see Cosby at all as Fred, that’s total miscast. I’d also go with Giamatti, he’s one of my faves.
I don’t think he intended it as much more than lightweight fun, though there is a little message in there if you want to find it. I wonder if the Edgar surprised him more than anyone. Then again, he’d seen the novels that had won in the past, so maybe not so much.
It is a bit more tiresome than usual, the running around talking to people thing (which is so common in this genre)–the ‘Nephew’ formula is starting to wear out already, and he’s going to have to find ways to renew it. I’ll say again that Westlake wrote a lot of mysteries, and some were very good, but he often had a hard time summoning up much enthusiasm for that form–he had started making it funny just as a way of making it new, but that was only going to work for so long.
My favorite of the Nephews so far, The Spy in the Ointment, didn’t have any of that chasing down clues stuff–it’s not a mystery. No Edgar potential there–even though spy novels frequently did win the Edgar, but I guess Le Carre and such do often format their stories as mysteries of a sort. Rosemary’s Baby also has mystery elements in it, even though it is clearly in the horror genre. I can’t blame the MWA for taking their organization’s name seriously.
Really, you could put a mystery into any other genre–science fiction, western, etc. It may be a shopworn convention, but also a very durable one. To make it work, you have to commit to it, and sometimes Westlake just couldn’t. Sometimes he just couldn’t pretend he gave a damn who killed whom. This was one of those times.
Giamatti would have been perfect, but I think Westlake would rather have had the check from Hollywood in the there and then. I don’t see how Cosby & Co. could have done a worse hack job than Castle & Co. did on The Busy Body (which I still consider the weakest of the Nephew books thus far reviewed). Sid Caesar at least physically resembled the protagonist, even if he had no idea how to play him, and in all fairness, a horrible script to work with.
You ever notice how Hollwoood rarely seems to pay much attention to the physical descriptions of Westlake’s protagonists? Parker has never been played by an actor who looked remotely like Parker–even when he wasn’t played by a Polish woman or a black man. Lee Marvin came closest, but still pretty far off the mark. Dortmunder has been played by Robert Redford, George C. Scott, and Martin Lawrence.
European filmmakers did a bit better, sometimes, but even Costa Gavras cast a 5’9 Jose Garcia as the hulking protagonist of The Ax. I haven’t seen that film yet, so I can’t say how effective he is, but c’mon–Burke Devore has got to be at least 6’2, probably taller.
Robert Mitchum looked a lot like I’d imagine Mitch Tobin to look (at least by that point in his career), and of course they never made that movie.
Anyway, it’s the book that matters most, n’est-ce pas?
Le Couperet (The Ax) is the best Westlake adaptation out there, and I’ve now seen most if not all. In fact if you look carefully you’ll see the Man himself in a quick cameo!
It’s on my list–but having had the great good fortune to see a pristine subtitled print of Mise a Sac at the Museum of Modern Art, I have to say that’s by far the best adaptation I’ve seen, though still far from perfect. The tone is perfect–the changes, for the most part, understandable. It doesn’t fully embrace the Stark ethos, but it doesn’t try to negate or subvert it, either. A very enjoyable film, that sticks pretty close to the original. Just not as close as I’d have liked.
While the copy of Mise A Sac I’ve seen isn’t pristine, it still pales, in my opinion, to Le Couperet. I will give you that Mise is possibly the best adaptation of Stark (I do really dig Point Blank), but when it comes to Westlake, I think you’ll be quite happy with le Couperet. Every person I’ve shown it to has loved it! Even some DEW hardcore!!!
I thought Westlake handled whodunnit here quite well, although the approach is the same as always.
And comparing books and film adaptations is pointless, at least for me, for whom Westlake books always will be superior than movies. I have no even scientific interest in film adaptations (I must confess, though, that I saw Parker and even liked it, but not as an adaptation of a Parker novel, but as an action film; as a Parker book adaptation it was ugly).
I didn’t think much of it even as a Jason Statham action film–his earlier work with Luc Besson is so much better, it’s not even a discussion. But pretty nearly all his recent films have been awful, most have flopped pretty hard (if he was the main attraction), and yet somehow he gets to keep making films. So do Stallone and Schwarzenegger, who are even further away from their last successes. These action hero stars have better tenure than most college professors! Whatever happened to “You’re only as good as your last picture?”
I was always struck by the fact that even though Westlake probably didn’t like many (or any?) of the changes Boorman made to The Hunter in Point Blank, he still thought it was the best movie ever made from any Richard Stark novel, and probably of any of his books. John Boorman made pretty much exactly the film he wanted to make (because Lee Marvin intervened for him), and Westlake appreciated the integrity of the film, even if he didn’t agree with everything Boorman said with it.
He loved the script William Goldman wrote for The Hot Rock, but Peter Yates (a fantastic director) just didn’t seem to get the material, and the results didn’t gel the way Point Blank did.
I’ll get around to some film reviews eventually.
Hopefully I’ll skip town by then. ))
Oh ye of little faith. 😉
Getting off the topic of God Save the Mark here but….
As wonderful as William Goldman’s script for The Hot Rock may have been, this is an excellent example of how difficult it was (is) to translate Westlake to the screen. The Hot Rock’s first sentence – “Dortmunder blew his nose” – is my all time favorite opening of any literary work (although “When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.” is right up there). In four words it sets the tone for the entire novel. THR has plenty of plot features seemingly tailor made for movies – car crash, flying a helicopter for the first time, prison break etc. – but it’s not the action so much as the beautiful writing describing the action that made Westlake such a joy to read.
Example – one scene that did not make the movie was crashing the train through the asylum fence. Quite a cinematic scene in theory, but I remember it without having read The Hot Rock in years because Westlake described the resulting silence as being like that in a cafeteria after somebody drops 1000 metal trays on the floor (I’m paraphrasing since I don’t have the book handy). The tone, the description, whatever you want to call it, is what is memorable – not so much the action itself. Since the movies give only the action, the wry observational writing style is lost.
Very well put, and I agree. But my problem with nearly all the Westlake adaptations is that they don’t succeed as movies. Not that they fail to convey everything Westlake conveys with his prose–that’s an unreasonable request to make of any filmmaker. But that they just don’t entertain very well, or present us with even a dumbed-down take on what Westlake was saying.
They usually manage to say the opposite of whatever he was saying–even Point Blank, a fine innovative film in its own right, is basically an attack on the values of the book it’s adapting. Flynn’s version of The Outfit may have met with Westlake’s approval in terms of its overall tone, but I always take his compliments there with a pinch of salt–he just tactfully failed to point out that it completely undermines and ignores what Westlake said in that book, and fails utterly in its attempt to translate Parker’s mindset. “The good guys always win!”
Since we’re talking William Goldman, perhaps the only writer who picked a film made from his screenplay (do I need to say which one?) and a novel that got made into a movie as the two works in his career he thought had worked out as well as he could have hoped–well, The Princess Bride should have been an impossible book to adapt, shouldn’t it? And Goldman very pointedly said the BOOK was what he was really proud of, even though he was the one who adapted it for the screen.
And yet they unquestionably did a fine job of it. Goldman wrote a very workmanlike script–that quite honestly, cut out the heart of the very sad penetrating rumination on the unavoidable clash between ideals and reality that is his novel–and it was adequately filmed (it’s Rob Reiner, what do you want?), and rather brilliantly cast, although none of the performances were much more than superficial, not that you can fault Andre the Giant for just being Andre the Giant in this context. The result is something that entertains to this day, and often leads people back to the book (like me), which I would hope anyone would agree is ten times better than the film.
And the catchphrases from that movie by way of the book (“Inconceivable!”) have become enduring pop cultural memes. That’s because of the movie, let’s face it. The movie is better known than the book, probably always will be. But the book lives on quite happily in the shadow of the movie, as I trust it ever shall. They complement each other.
There’s no equivalent for this among the many films made from Westlake’s novels, and I’m afraid this is partly because Westlake just flat-out refused to adapt his own work for the screen–Cops and Robbers is not the exception to this rule, because he wrote the screenplay first, and then wrote a vastly superior novelization of the screenplay–not the only time that ever happened, though it’s the only time a movie actually got made from his screenplay and/or treatment that then became a book.
Goldman was not as good a novelist as Westlake (because he was too busy writing screenplays). Westlake was not as good a screenwriter as Goldman (because he was too busy writing novels). They admired and respected each other, but there was that divide–dependent as he was on Hollywood for income supplementation, Westlake still definitively chose the world of books–more freedom, less money. Goldman strove heroically to straddle the divide, did so better than most, never had to contemplate the dismal prospect of getting a real job, as Westlake periodically did. I would assume they both wondered sometimes if they’d made the right choice. Doesn’t everyone?
Here’s what I think: if anybody had ever managed to make a movie of one of his books that turned out as good or better than the book itself, he’d have been miserable. He didn’t like the way the movies mangled his books, but he’d have liked it even less if they had managed to get them right, because that would have meant he’d made the wrong choice–that what he had to say could be said more effectively on film. I think he was always afraid that was true, so on some level, he found all the bad movies oddly gratifying.
Love the site! I read every review. Looking forward to Kahawa. And I would love a copy of the childrens’ book!
Peter, I don’t believe I have your addy? Sorry, didn’t get this until now. And Kahawa is a long long way off, but I certainly hope to find a few new things to say about it.
PS: Never mind, figured it out–and here I was, asking people to post their emails. See, I never edit anybody’s posts, but I could if I wanted, and when I hit edit, I see your addy. Honestly, I never had enough posters before now for me to need to know this. The Philip Fillip was a great success. 😉
Oh, I missed that. You meant n17omi at gmail. Sorry. GSTM wasn’t “the best” in my opinion, but as I said, I’ll read anything Westlake because, well, he’s really good.
So how did you manage to come by a scan of, ahem, fillip? I hope you’re gonna tell that story in the next post. (And yes please, you’re damn right I’d like a copy.)
Well, I’ve already told you via email, but for anybody else who is curious, I used interlibrary loan. But honestly, I’m a bit wary of going into detail, because no library could possibly charge a high enough fee to offset the potential profit to be made from never returning it. I’m sure none of us would ever dream of such a thing, but I have it on good authority there are actual crooks out there. They don’t just exist in the pages of Westlake novels.
Pls add me for a copy.
Late to the party. Great review. Looking forward to reading more. Will also take a copy of Westlake’s children’s book.
Geofferson at gmail dot com
Hope you both enjoy your ‘copies’. And welcome to the party, Geoff. Like the workers in the vineyard, you shall be reap the same reward as those who showed up at the start of the day, even though that is a clear violation of fair labor practices. 😉
I’d forgotten about that offer. Me too, please (though I clearly don’t need any inducement to comment.)
mike dot s dot schilling at gmail dot com
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In Chapter 12, Fred makes a crossword puzzle. The definition of which he is the proudest is “The poet’s on the pumpkin.”, five letters. Any idea of what that could be?
This would probably be too obvious an answer–and, of course, Whittier has seven letters.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53105/the-pumpkin
Never gave this much thought. Always just assumed it was Frost
By George you’ve got it! (Or Bob.) And having quoted Frost in my Ask The Parrot review, I really should have gotten that. Never grew pumpkins, so never occurred to me they get frosty.
It would have to be a poet Westlake felt a special affinity for. And that section of Upstate New York he was raised in is, in many ways, informally part of New England.
Thank you! A follow-on search led to this, which closes the loop nicely: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44956/when-the-frost-is-on-the-punkin . The author was very well known in his time: “Known as “The Hoosier Poet” because of his birth in Indiana and poems celebrating the state, and as “The Children’s Poet” due to his appeal for young readers, James Whitcomb Riley was one of his day’s best-selling writers. Full of sentiment and traditional in form, his work features rustic subjects who speak in a homely, countrified dialect. When Riley died, Woodrow Wilson called him “a man who imparted joyful pleasure and a thoughtful view of many things that other men would have missed,” and some 35,000 people filed past his casket in the Indiana State Capitol.”
Thanks again!
Let me say it one more time. Whoever you are, when you’re reading Westlake, and you think you’re more knowledgeable than him–you’re wrong. Always.
I never even heard of James Whitcomb Riley.
Thanks to both of you for solving a conundrum I had forgotten the existence of. (To be honest, when I do crosswords, I cheat.)
He was James Dean’s favorite poet. Which makes sense since Dean himself was from Fairmount Indiana and is buried there. Here’s a photograph of Dean reading and reciting Riley
(only reason I know any of this is because I’m a James Dean fan. 🙂
It’s great when rival obsessions become synergistic. 😉
Fredfitch, two things:
1) About you thanking us: Talk about having things backwards… BIG thanks to you for this amazing blog! Let me share something that will amuse you: About three hours ago (before I saw your post), I was pondering whether I should continue my re-reading of The Hook although I did not really enjoy it (I am re-reading all the Westlake books I have before giving them away). The Hook strikes me as considerably less boring than The Ax, but still not the Westlake I like best. As I pondered away, one consideration that came to my mind was: “I should go on reading it, so I will be able to better enjoy Fredfitch’s article on it in The Westlake Review”. Talk about having things backwards again… But it was a sincere thought and I offer it as a tribute to your excellent work.
2) About rival, or parallel, obsessions meshing constructively: I love the novelist J.F.Powers (“Morte d’Urban”, “Wheat that Springeth Green”). And guess what – It so happens he has one (or two, I don’t remember) characters adding salt to their beer to keep the foam going… I forgot exactly in which book, but could find out if necessary. He also has a monastic order that strikes me as a worthy predecessor of the Crispinites in Brothers Keepers. From “Morte d’Urban” (first published in 1956), “Overture” chapter: “The Order of St Clement labored under the curse of mediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning.” Sounds familiar? “Their history revealed little to brag about.” “The Clementines were noted in that they were noted for nothing at all.” Is it reasonable to conjecture that Westlake may have been at least superficially influenced by this? After all Brothers Keepers was first published in the seventies. Just saying.
1) I don’t know how anyone could find The Ax boring, but I am honored to serve as a reason for someone to go on reading a book they don’t like that much. The Hook is not, to my way of thinking, nearly as good a book as The Ax, but it does have certain charms of its own, and I’m still rather proud of my hooker analogy, that you can read about once you finish the book.
2)I’d be most surprised to learn Westlake didn’t read J.F. Powers, having been raised Irish Catholic in upstate New York. I would imagine there are some things drawn from his reading of Powers in Brothers Keepers, but you might be surprised to know I’ve never read Powers, even though I was raised Irish Catholic in New Jersey, and we had a few of his books about the house. Hmm. Something isn’t right there……
Feeling contrite about my Ax-blindness. I did reread it at least once, hoping to find what much better readers than I had found in it (“a flat out masterpiece” according to Levi Stahl’s great “Ivebeenreadinglately“ blog), but somehow I don’t get it. (Same story for Madame Bovary, I should say. I tend to like “Great Books”, or at least to pretend to myself I do, so what’s my problem with poor Emma?). This time with the Ax, I even went as far as skipping quite a few pages here and there, which I wouldn’t normally do even with lesser writers. Luckily there is more than enough Westlake to enjoy for all tastes…
He is the Elephant, and we are all the blind men, groping around his massive multi-faceted body of work. And the more you grope about, the more you realize that the seemingly disparate pieces all fit together.
Hi there, from France
For the last two or three years, I’ve been reading every Westlake novels in chronological order (well, not his early porn stuff, even though I’d be curious to look at a few pages of them).
Each time I end one of them, I faithfully come here to read your thoughts about it. I even read ALL the comments, as there’s many interesting debates there.
But I now realize I’m not going to be able to get every Westlake book in my library as I had hoped. Hundreds of dollars (euros, actually) for a book is a bit much, even for good old Don. So, as many have done before in this comments section, I beg you for a scanned copy: dulien.jury at gmail.com
By the way, have you read some Jean Patrick Manchette fiction? I’m not too keen on French crime writers but he’s one of the few I really like. Several months ago, I read a recently published compilation of his letters and there’s several excerpts of his correspondance with Westlake. He translated many of his books and, in his own fiction, clearly (as he admit himself) was influenced by Stark’s books.
Keep the good work, anyway! Hopefully, I’ll have read all Westlake (which also means the whole of your blog) in a few years.
Just sent. I think. It’s a bit tricky figuring out which email to forward. Do let me know if it all came through.
I would never spend that much on a book. I’ve been fortunate in obtaining his rarer stuff without going into debt. But this one–forget it. Interlibrary loan, and I just hope the library in question hasn’t had their copy stolen by some Ebay swindler. I’m almost afraid to look. I like to think that by making it available for free, I’m doing my bit to lower the asking price.
The question would have to be, who isn’t influenced by Westlake/Stark? Most cheerfully cop to it, and if they don’t get too specific about how–well, that’s a writer thing. Never reveal too much about your debts to other writers. He never did. But he always found some way to ‘fess up to them. And in his own way, repay them.
And no, haven’t read Manchette yet. Has he translated his own work? Je ne parle pas Francais.
I got it, many thanks!
Manchette’s novels are published in English by the NYRB if memory serves me well. I know it’s been a long road to translate them, it took many decades. And now, he wasn’t his own translator, poor guy died quite young (50-something year old) in the 90s.
Seems like several publishers are putting him out there–which books would you recommend in particular? I can always use more good crime fiction on my Kindle.
My favorite are Fatale and Three to kill. But The N’Gustro Affair, Nada, The Prone Gunman… Most of them are great.
It’s more a matter of what I wouldn’t recommand. His first novel (Laissez bronzer les cadavres) is good fun but not that interesting – anyway, I don’t think it’s available in English. The Mad and the Bad drags a little bit for my taste. No Room at the Morgue is very good but it’s quite different from his usual stuff (it’s a private eye story) and I’d keep it for later, as for the not-yet-translated sequel (Que d’Os). Finally, Ivory Pearl were written a long time after all his other novels (he weren’t able to write any fiction in the 80s except for a few short stories). I haven’t read it but it’s supposed to be quite different stuff and not even finished. I certainly wouldn’t start with it.
That gives me enough to start. If I really like it, I’ll probably get them all, being a completist by nature. You have to read a lot of a writer’s stuff to really get where he/she is coming from.
Just started Fatale today, while imbibing Hunan cuisine in midtown. Seems like quite a good translation. Scenic yet spare. Manchette is very much to my taste. Merci.
Froggy, I find I must thank you again for giving me a push. I should not have put off Manchette so long, though of course I needed translations in order to imbibe them (as many a monoglot Francophone had to put off certain Westlakes until Manchette got to them).
I’ve finished the eight of his novels available in English translation. I did not follow strict publication order, since I wasn’t sure where to start–on the whole, I don’t know as it mattered much.
You know how it goes–you figure to sample a writer you’re curious about and move on, then realize, to mingled horror and delight, that you need to know all of him/her. That this is a voice you must needs hearken to, keep digging until the vein is mined out. Which for now, it is. (Unless I learn French, and believe me, it’s been tried).
I finished with Ivory Pearl, a few hours ago, and never have I had a more delightfully frustrating time with a book. I suppose in a way it’s fitting that it ends with the author telling us what he plans to show us, but never will, at least not in this reality. (His unintended answer to The Last Tycoon, which I’ve never read, since Fitzgerald never had that kind of hold over me).
I didn’t think The Mad and the Bad dragged. I mean, a book where someone in a tight spot improvises Molotov cocktails in a supermarket can hardly be said to drag. In some ways, it anticipates Ivory Pearl, but this is a less fortunate and empowered (and far more violent) version of that title character, who never made the right connections to develop her inner depths.
But as you say, the man couldn’t write a bad book, nor did he ever write the same one twice. He had to believe there was a point to what he was writing, or he couldn’t write it. I suppose that’s one reason his oeuvre is so brief (in this regard, more like Willeford than Westlake–and hauntingly reminiscent of Hammett, only without the alcoholism, or Hellman).
I trust there shall be minimal delay in translating the others. Dépêchez-vous!
Hey, sorry, I’ve just discovered your last comments on Manchette !
(I came back on your blog yesterday evening, just after having finished Anarchaos, great read by the way and I’m as much a SF reader as a mystery reader, even though my heart favors horror/fantastic above all)
I’m really glad you enjoyed Manchette and not at all surprised you went on that binge. Actually there’s something in his novels that leaves you wanting for more.
Even among French noir writers, Manchette is an oddity. He’s supposed to have inspired a whole wave of authors in the 80s: what has been called “néo-polar”: left-wing young radicals using crime stories to give a grim picture of a corrupted society, this kind of stuff. But I find the lot of them (Pouy, Jonquet, Daeninckx…) quite boring, without Manchette’s attention to style. The guy certainly was a radical, having belonged to some underground far left organizations (mostly linked to Guy Debord’s situationnists) but the way he approaches politics in his novels strikes me as very abstract and, actually, feeding into his non-emotional aesthetics.
I think he couldn’t write a novel if he didn’t feel the need for it, indeed. He went into a long dry period in the 80s. He had to earn money though (and never lived in wealth) but he mostly did it by translating stuff and writing for film or TV.
The political stuff in Manchette never feels forced or self-conscious or even the least bit preachy, and that’s quite a feat in itself. It just feels like “This is how things are.” He sees the weak points in any position, but that is not the same thing as saying all positions are equal.
Westlake couldn’t write period stuff to save his life–his one experiment in Gangway! (with Garfield) doesn’t quite work. Has to be in the now for him to full engage.
But in Ivory Pearl, Manchette takes us back to a time we think we know, and shows us all these layers we hadn’t thought about, all these quiet developments that will bear deadly fruit later. Yet it’s still basically a story about individualists, not ideologues. About the give and take of personal connections (“The loyalty of friendship” as a red-haired hooker once sarcastically remarked to Parker), and how it conflicts with our various personal/political agendas. How can we ever perfectly balance what we believe with who we love? You just have to remember that neither means anything without the other.
I’m always haunted by what E.M. Forster wrote–“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the decency to betray my country.” Manchette’s theme in a nutshell. A world full of people who’d betray their friends for politics is not a world worth living in. You see it all through his work. Perhaps most poignantly in Nada. Now if that’s what being a ‘comrade’ means, I’m all for it. And I’m no anarchist. (Except in my approach to housekeeping.)
Good crime fiction deals with politics all the time–Hammett certainly did, though once he became explicitly left-wing, he was already getting into writer’s block. I feel in a way Manchette was completing a transition Hammett couldn’t find his way through with his early stuff. But he, like Hammett, started hitting a wall. Then, after a long break, he started seeing things he could do beyond the ordinary tropes of detective fiction. Westlake tried similar things with Kahawa, High Adventure, etc–not quite so well, I’d say–but at least he got to complete those books. Life gave Manchette the learned experience, but not the time and resources–and with Westlake, perhaps more the other way around. Anyway, we got good books to read, so we come out the winners.