He got out of the shower, toweled himself dry, and walked nude into the room, stopping short in the doorway. Seated on the chair across the room was a coal black Negro girl in a green pants suit, looking like Robin Hood got up for a Commando raid. She looked Grofield up and down and said, as though to herself, “They are smaller.”
“I don’t believe it,” Grofield said.
“Take my word for it,” she said.
“I don’t believe God could be so cruel,” Grofield said. “All I want to do is sleep. I don’t want anything complicated now.”
“Nothing complicated,” the girl said briskly. Behind her camouflage, she was a stunning girl, with large flashing eyes and close-cropped hair in the natural style, very wooly. She spoke with a vaguely British accent. She said, “All you have to do is tell me who sent you here and why. Then I’ll go away and you can sleep.”
“My doctor,” Grofield said. “For the waters.”
“What?”
“My doctor sent me here. For the waters.”
“What waters?” She sounded more annoyed than confused.
“I was misinformed,” Grofield said. “Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains, Casablanca, 1942. I hope you have an exit line, because you’re exiting.” He walked toward the bed.
So here we are at the third Grofield novel, published by Macmillan in 1969, which begins with the same fouled-up armored car heist as a Parker novel named Slayground, published by Random House in 1971, even though the next Parker novel Deadly Edge (also dated 1971) clearly takes place before the events of the earlier Grofield novel. And just to make things even more convoluted, Slayground has two copyright dates–1969 and 1971. Confused yet? You will be.
You will read in many souces that The Blackbird has the same opening chapter as Slayground–not quite exactly the case. We see the same sequence of events that Slayground begins with, true enough, but in this book we see them from Grofield’s POV.
In the latter book, Stark sticks with Parker, showing us the action from his perspective–the paragraphs that don’t describe what one of them is doing or seeing are identical (which is evidently the reason for Slayground having two different copyright years). In Slayground, the chapter ends with Parker running into an amusement park with a satchel of money. In The Blackbird, Grofield (appropriately enough) blacks out, subsequent to the getaway car crashing.
Probably by the time Grofield woke up in a nearby hospital, Parker’s very bad day at the fair had already concluded and he was back at a house in Northern New Jersey we’ll be learning about in another book. So that’s where the experiment in parallel plotting ends, but I’m curious–has anybody else ever done this? Start two completely different books from two completely different publishers with two completely different protagonists with the same opening chapter, from two different vantage points?
And did Westlake write these books at around the same time, as Sarah Weinman says in her introduction to the Grofield novels for the University of Chicago reprints? She says it was about publishing schedules–that’s quite plausible, and she may have had inside information to that effect (not entirely clear). After Gold Medal decided to stop publishing the Parker novels as first edition paperbacks, it took a while for Westlake to work out a deal with Random House to publish them in hardcover. He might have had two or three written by that time. For a while there, Grofield was the only Stark character with a job.
However, given that Slayground clearly takes place after the events of Deadly Edge (in the last chapter, Parker goes back to the house in New Jersey), I’m wondering if Westlake wrote The Blackbird before either of them, and decided to give Grofield a sales boost, by having Parker make what was then his only cameo appearance in another character’s book (up until a certain Joe Gores novel in ’72).
Did he get curious later as to what happened to Parker after Grofield blacked out, and decide to write that story? Or did he write The Blackbird and Slayground together, and then decide to fill in the gap of how Parker and Claire came to live in New Jersey with Deadly Edge, before publishing Slayground, and add in the reference to New Jersey in Slayground? See, I told you you’d be confused. Join the club. Anybody knows for sure, pipe up by all means.
So. Grofield wakes up in the hospital, with police guards, and he figures he’s screwed. He is, but not the way he thinks. There are Feds there who want to talk to him. Not FBI. Not CIA. Not Treasury. Some other branch in the great spreading tree that is U.S. Defense/Intelligence/Law Enforcement/Etc.
They do not seem to know Grofield already worked for the government (after a fashion) around a year back (see The Handle), along with Parker, and that it didn’t work out so well for the government (though Grofield was the one who got shot multiple times).
They seem to know everything about Grofield–like for example, that he’s on good terms with with both General Pozos of Guerrero and Unum Marba of Undurwa, who we met in the two previous books–so you’d think they’d know about the Cockaigne job as well, but you can rationalize it as typically poor communication between different agencies. It’s not really that implausible. That’s how 9/11 happened, right? Oh of course, that was a vast government conspiracy. No plane ever hit the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden was a patsy, or a plant. Because vast sprawling government bureaucracies are just that well-organized. I’m rolling my eyes now.
Grofield has a choice, and you will note it’s not entirely dissimilar to the choice made by J. Eugene Raxford in The Spy in the Ointment, published about three years earlier. Eugene’s choice is A)Go undercover with terrorists who think he’s one of them or B)Wait for the terrorists to figure out he’s not one of them and kill him.
Grofield’s choice is simpler–A)Go undercover at a gathering of third world leaders in Canada (including Pozos and Marba) who may find out he’s a U.S. agent and kill him or B)Go to jail, do not pass go, and collect Social Security much later, if ever. He’s not happy with this choice. Nobody would be happy with this choice. But these are his options.
He accepts the deal offered with the tacit understanding by all concerned that he’s going to try to run out on them the moment he gets the chance. He tries really hard–and Grofield has already demonstrated his talent at shaking a tail in The Handle. Makes a run at the airport. No dice–they bugged his clothes. He can’t shake them the way he did the agents in The Handle. He wonders out loud to an agent name of Murray if they’ve even implanted some kind of tracking device inside his body–this is a rather prescient little passage in its way–
“My God!” Grofield said. He felt physically weak. “What a thing even to think about!”
Murray looked thoughtful. “But you know,” he said slowly, “that isn’t such a bad idea. You take your known Commie, say, your incorrigible criminal, like you, for instance, you take whoever it might be you’re interested in, you put the little transmitter in them, then any time you wanted to know what they were up to you’d just triangulate on them, see where they were, go on over and check them out.”
“That’s the most evil thing I ever heard in my life,” Grofield said.
“Why?” Murray seemed honestly puzzled. “We wouldn’t use it on good people,” he said. “Just bad people.” He smiled broadly, delighted with himself. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put that in the suggestion box back in the office.”
Grofield looked at him. “I keep having the strong feeling,” he said, “that for the sake of generations unborn I ought to strangle you here and now.”
Murray chuckled, not taking him seriously. “Oh you,” he said. You’ve just got a vested interest, that’s all. Being a thief and everything.”
Relax, Grofield. It’s been over 40 years, and they still aren’t there yet. Just stay off the internet, and watch out for tiny helicopters–oh never mind, you’d be retired by then. Or dead.
They don’t need tracking devices–they know about his acting career. There’s no way he can elude them indefinitely. He gets them the intel they’re after–the purpose of the gathering of tinpot dictators in Quebec City–or the next time he sees his lovely wife Mary will be on visiting day.
And somehow, superhumanly faithful and patient though she is, it’s hard to imagine Mary waiting 25 years to life. I mean, fair is fair–the last time Grofield went away for a job, he bedded three fetching blondes over the course of maybe two months, and one of them showed up on Mary’s doorstep with his money from the job–wearing support stockings. Like that makes it any better. And he’s going to cheat on her yet again, but not with a blonde this time. He’s an equal opportunity philanderer.
In the scene I opened this review with, he meets Vivian Kamdela, who is from Undurwa, the same country as Onum Marba, and that’s no coincidence–she works for him, and has been assigned to find out why Grofield is there. Strong-willed, educated, and rather contemptuous of Grofield’s every-man-for-himself attitude. Throughout the book, they’re having a back and forth philosophical dialogue strongly resembling that between Oliver Abbott and Leona Roof in Up Your Banners, only these two are not falling in love at any point in time. Vivian is very patriotic and loyal to her country, and believes in being a good soldier. Grofield only believes in being Grofield.
There’s clearly an attraction (of course there is, it’s a Grofield novel), but her reaction to him is even more hostile than that of the female leads in the two previous books–in all three cases, he’s faced with a strong-willed female he’d happily bed given the opportunity, who wants to use him for some agenda that puts his life in danger–difference here is that Vivian’s agenda isn’t personal, but political.
They go for a romantic carriage ride through historic Quebec City, during which Grofield finally meets Mr. Marba again, who respects Grofield’s abilities–which he observed up-close in the previous book–but naturally distrusts him, since he can even use truth as a weapon. Grofield, acting very much against orders, tells Marba who he’s working for, and what he’s supposed to learn. He just wants to find some way out of this mess, and figures Marba might help him. The ride back with Vivian is much less friendly than the ride there.
She faced him again, still frozen-eyed. “If you must know,” she said, “on the way up I thought you were a patriot. I thought you were working for your country out of conviction. A patriot might be my enemy, if his country was my country’s enemy, but at least I would be able to respect him. But you aren’t a patriot, you were forced to be here and you don’t care at all that you are betraying your country. You don’t care for anything but yourself, you don’t understand the existence of anything larger than yourself. I despise you, Mr. Grofield, and I do not want to talk to you any more. And I don’t want you to talk to me.”
“Some day, Miss Kamdela,” Grofield said, “we’ll have a nice long talk about patriotism vs. the draft. In the meantime, I’m going to take care of my own skin whether you approve of me or not.”
It is often hard for me to understand how political conservatives have ever considered Donald Westlake (under any name) to be one of them (as many clearly do). Not that us liberals should ever have regarded him as a reliable ally, either. We’ve already seen him devastate the Anarchist/Libertarian argument in Anarchaos, and he made his feelings clear about aspiring left-wing revolutionaries in Up Your Banners, and quite a few other books. “A plague on all your houses” would probably sum his attitude up fairly well. So good luck trying to stick a label on him.
Grofield is briefly abducted and drugged by some faction, seemingly linked to an extremist French Canadian separatist movement, but their agenda is unclear–they want to know what he knows, and he doesn’t really know anything yet–he didn’t even know there was such a thing as French-Canadian separatist movements. I have to say, he’s much less knowledgeable about politics here than he was in The Damsel–one suspects Westlake decided it just wasn’t believable for somebody as indifferent to politics as Grofield to know much of anything about it. His bugged clothing saves him, bringing in his handlers to the rescue.
But then he gets grabbed again, this time by Marba’s group, who have decided to neutralize him–confiding in Marba was maybe not such a great idea. He’s taken on a plane ride into the frozen wastes of Northern Canada (sorry Canuck readers, but you know better than me what it’s like up there–I can barely make it through a New York City winter these days), given new unbugged clothes, and they finally set down at a remote lodge by a frozen lake, that is only accessible by air, or snowmobile.
Grofield is exactly where the people who recruited him wanted him to be, but not at all in the way they (or he) wanted–he’s got no way to report back, and to make sure he doesn’t learn anything useful to American intelligence, he’s locked in a bleak isolated room with nothing to do but wait for the gathering of third world governments to end.
Grofield can’t stand confinement any more than Parker could, but his reaction to it is different than Parker’s would be–he breaks down the door, and goes to complain about his treatment–taken to see Undurwa’s head of state (who has been told by the irritated Miss Kamdela that this Grofield is not to be trusted), he fails to understand the mentality of a dictator–so alien to a free spirit like himself–and totally blows the interview. He talks to the man as if they were equals. Oh dear.
The military dictator, Colonel Rahgos, says Grofield has unfortunately given him no choice but to order him killed. Nothing personal, of course (it’s a bit personal; military dictators dislike free spirits on general principle). Grofield in this instance does respond the way Parker would–by jumping through a nearby window, after grabbing the Colonel’s overcoat. Which isn’t going to be nearly enough. It’s winter. In Northern Canada. If he can’t find shelter, and better clothing, and fast, they won’t need to kill him.
What follows is Grofield adapting to the situation, as he always does, improvising his way into a nearby structure guarded by only two armed men–normally not such a problem for him, except he’s in the process of freezing to death. But through a combination of ingenuity and dumb luck, he figures out a way to ride up on an electrically operated door, and conceal himself on the ceiling–then at an opportune moment, incapacitates the guards, obtaining boots, a heavy mackinaw, and an automatic rifle. There are supplies in the building, and snowmobiles. He appropriates both, and makes his escape.
Only not quite. He had to wait until dawn to see where he was going, and in the distance, he sees that something very bad is happening at the compound–it seems to be under attack. Not from his government, but (as it turns out) the people who had grabbed him earlier. Lots of shooting and burning going on. He sees no reason to involved himself in it–but then he meets Vivian–who assumes he’s behind it, naturally. But he convinces her otherwise, and the fact that he’s her only chance of surviving has a rather thawing effect on her frosty demeanor. They evade an airplane piloted by some of the attackers, and by this time she’s fully on Team Grofield.
She tells him what’s been going on–four African American soldiers managed to steal a really nasty biological weapon from a military storehouse. They’ve hidden it somewhere in the surrounding area, and are auctioning it off to the highest third world bidders. There’s enough of it to kill everybody on the planet forty times over (Uncle Sam being nothing if not thorough), so there’s plenty to go around–and as Vivian explains, even if they never wanted to use it, the threat of a neighbor having it would be enough to make them want to have some too, just as a counter-balance.
Now Grofield is not the altruistic sort. That’s been very well established. It takes a whole hell of a lot to motivate him to do anything at all for anyone other than himself. What he wants to do now is head south, find a phone, and call his handlers–let them handle it. If the sale was going ahead as planned, that’s exactly what he’d do.
But Vivian, being a practical levelheaded sort of girl under all her patriotic zeal, convinces him that this won’t work–clearly what’s happened is that some more dangerous entity than these little impoverished countries intends to get the whole stockpile, and then maybe drop it on major American cities, or blackmail the western governments–when you can kill everybody in the world forty times over, your options are fairly expansive.
Grofield’s options, by contrast, are very limited–if he chooses escape, then these people will get the gas canisters, and make off with them, long before the cavalry arrives. There’s nobody else to stop them. Grofield doesn’t want to be James Freakin’ Bond. But that’s the role he’s been forcibly cast in. And he’s really really pissed about that.
He’ll play the role, because he’s a professional and all, but he won’t enjoy it one bit, and he’s going to take some ethical shortcuts, because he just wants to get back alive, and play the role he’s more comfortable in–taking other people’s money. However, for his actor/heister lifestyle to continue, he does need civilization as we know it to go on functioning. Not much demand for an actor in a post-apocalyptic world, and since everybody would be stealing, his other profession would get much too crowded. So once more into the breach.
Vivian tells him only the four black American soldiers–Grofield’s countrymen–know the location of the gas cannisters. Grofield and Vivian fight their way through the chaotic scene at the compound, get to the soldiers, who are being held prisoner, preparatory to having the information tortured out of them–and what happens then–okay, major spoiler alert–
One of the four said to Grofield, “I don’t know where you came from, man, but you’re beautiful.” All four of them were grinning in relief.
Grofield said, “Did you tell anybody where the canisters are?”
“Are you crazy? That’s what kept us alive.”
“Nobody at all?” Grofield insisted.
“Not even the chaplain,” the spokesman said.
“That’s good,” Grofield said, and pointed the machine gun at them and pulled the trigger.
Here we see that Grofield maybe does pass muster as a Stark protagonist after all. He’s learned a few things from Parker. If it needs doing, do it. These men had betrayed their country (which to be sure, hasn’t exactly done right by them most of the time), and Grofield doesn’t give a damn about that. But they put the lives of everyone on the planet at risk in the process. They were self-evidently going to kill Grofield as soon as they didn’t need him. And even if that wasn’t true, the only way to be sure the people attacking the compound don’t get the gas is to make sure nobody–absolutely nobody–knows where it is. They gots to go.
So why make the soldiers black? It just raises the question of race in a way seemingly unnecessary to the story being told–so clearly Westlake, who was working on a book about American racial turmoil around the same time, wanted to raise that issue–but not deal with it seriously, because it’s not a serious book.
Now, we don’t get to know these men–not even their names–so it’s not as shocking as it might be for Grofield to just whack them. We’ve seen him kill lots of white guys before now, and not waste a moment’s time worrying about it–but still–pretty damn cold. And dealt with by Stark in his usual terse offhanded anti-climactic approach to violence.
The point, I’d guess, is who would be most likely to have such a low opinion of society as to not give a damn what happens to it? Obviously the people society treats the worst. Not most of them–but it only takes a few. And, as Westlake said in Up Your Banners, nobody condescends up–if you keep treating people with kid gloves because you’re sorry for the way they’ve been treated, or guilty about it, you’re not really treating them as equals. Rather the opposite. People deserve to be judged by the content of their character–those who sell weapons of mass destruction to the highest bidder can’t really be said to have any character at all.
He’s had mainly sympathetic black characters in his books up to now–Grofield himself makes a metatextual comment to Vivian about how black guys are never the villains in this kind of story (not really true–see Live and Let Die, clearly an influence on this book). Time for a little balance. Black men can be just as despicable as white men, if they set their minds to it.
While it’s a bit hard to buy that four black soldiers could steal such a deadly weapon without the government noticing, we Americans do tend to misplace our toys rather a lot, don’t we? So allowing for that level of bureaucratic incompetence, as Westlake invariably does, what’s the simplest answer to Grofield’s dilemma?
Vivian can’t believe he chose that answer, and once they’ve gotten clear of the bad guys (well, the worse guys), she really lights into him–accuses him of killing the men just because they’re black. But she’s forced to concede eventually that it was the only way–to stop the weapons from getting into the worst possible hands–and for the two of them to survive.
And having forgiven Grofield, seen that there is some merit to his worldview, even if she can’t entirely share it, and of course being impressed by his capabilities–well, this is the third Grofield novel to end with him bedding the hostile broad. I’m a guy, so I’m not complaining, but it is getting a mite repetitive. By the bye, he explains to her in mid-coitus that while white men seem to have smaller procreative members than black men on average, it’s actually only true when they’re in the flaccid state (hey, don’t ask me). She finds this very sexy, for some reason. It’s good to be the hero–as long as you survive.
Overall, I think this is the best of the three Grofields published by Macmillan–Westlake has gotten much closer to figuring out how to write like Stark without writing about Parker. I think actually that’s one of the reasons he put Grofield in that situation with the four soldiers–to prove that Grofield could be just as cold and capable. But somehow, he’s not nearly as convincing, or compelling. He’s still too much of a Mary Sue, if you know what I mean (if not, click the link).
I’d take any of the Parkers over this book. Of course, Parker wouldn’t have let himself get involved in this kind of story to begin with–as I said in an earlier review, Parker forces the narrative to bow to his agenda–Grofield, however grudgingly, will ultimately agree to be whatever the story calls on him to be–even a hero who saves the world from dastardly villains seeking doomsday devices. He’ll do it in his own unique style, with a lot fewer pretensions than Philip Marlowe or James Bond, but he’ll do it. An actor learns to make do with the roles he’s offered. The show must go on.
Grofield is an interesting experiment, and by no means a completely failed one. Stark will give him one last chance to be the protagonist, working on familiar Stark territory at long last, and we finally get to see Mary again (and she shows us why Grofield always goes back to her, however far he strays). The Blackbird won’t be the best Grofield novel for very long. But ultimately, Westlake had to acknowledge that enough was enough–he’d taken this character as far as he could go. There wasn’t enough there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.
What distinguishes Grofield most from Parker is the sense of humor–there’s humor in the Parker novels, sure, but it’s very subdued, played so close to the vest as to be nearly indistinguishible–you don’t laugh reading them. Grofield is always joking, never taking anything seriously, least of all himself–it’s endearing in its way, but the thing is, he’s so determined to find the humor in every situation, so convinced of how funny he is, that you don’t really laugh reading about his adventures either. He’s trying too hard.
Suppose there was a Westlake protagonist who aspired to be like Parker–who wanted to be cold and capable and competent–and who really is, in so many ways–but life keeps conspiring to make him look ridiculous, and there’s nothing he can do about it? Comedy always works best when the protagonist doesn’t want to see the joke–nothing funnier than wounded dignity. Than things not working out as planned. Buster Keaton never laughed at anything, and that’s why everybody laughed at him. Parker doesn’t want to make us laugh–refuses to participate in comic ventures–Grofield, for all his wit, can’t make us do much more than chortle–the Westlake Nephews are diverting, amusing, but the bellylaughs somehow just aren’t there.
Donald E. Westlake, having had his biggest success with a comic crime novel, has been trying for half a decade now to be funny–really funny. But he hasn’t had the right foil. He’s going to find him now. And perhaps you see him in your mind’s eye, walking out of prison with a perpetual hangdog air, like a malnourished coyote, and now a car bears down upon him–and is that a girly scream emitting from his mouth? What the heck?
The Blackbird was the last Donald Westlake novel to bear a 1960’s publication date (and they can be somewhat misleading, but never mind that now). The 70’s are here, and they’re going to be something quite quite extraordinary in this particular writer’s career. Westlake the comedian has fully emerged from his chrysalis. And the crime novel will never be the same again.
(But first, I’m going to do one more thing about Grofield–patience, readers. Dortmunder is coming–save me a seat at the OC Bar & Grill–I’ll have a bourbon–something cheap–but oh so sustaining).
The Westlake Review 
I had long assumed that DW wrote Slayground first (the amusement park detail is crucial to Slayground, incidental to TBB), but I suppose we’ll never know for sure. Either way, I found Parker’s subsequent adventure far more compelling than Grofield’s, although this is, as you note, the best Grofield novel (until the next one). The only thing that stuck with me after my first reading (many years ago) was Grofield’s murder of the four soldiers. If feel like the whole novel was structured around that act — outrageous and horrifying and so, so memorable. On my second read (in preparation for this blog entry), it seemed far less horrifying. Simply pragmatic, with Grofield standing in for Alexander slicing through the Gordian Knot.
Part of my problem with the first three Grofield novels is that they’re genre exercises that border on parody (this is a spy novel set in the wilds of Canada, for crying out loud), but the best parodies are perpetuated by people with a true love for the genre being mocked (“Young Frankenstein” comes to mind). But Westlake doesn’t seem to have any particular fondness for the men’s adventure novel, the drawing room mystery, or the espionage thriller. And it shows. He proficiently navigates them all, of course. The man’s a professional. But there’s a dispassionate distance with each outing. And Grofield seems seriously annoyed that he’s being shoehorned into these other genres.
We have a rich history of heroes who’d rather be doing anything else (Harrison Ford has made some good coin playing them), but Grofield’s sourness through these first three novels sours me too. The least he could do is enjoy himself.
I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of the Grofield Project thus far. I wouldn’t call it parody, even–it’s almost Pirandello-esque. One character in search of an exit.
I never feel like I’ve wasted my time reading them. Then again, could be a long time before I read any of them again, now that I’ve got the reviews done. The next one–well, I’ve read it once to date–looking forward to finding out how it holds up. But that can wait.
This and The Damsel have a lot of politics in the mix. Westlake likes to put an apolitical character in a highly charged political situation, just to see what happens.
They say the best parodies are affectionate, but they’re also far from respectful–This is Spinal Tap was made by some guys who clearly thought Heavy Metal was one of the stupidest musical forms of all time (and said so, repeatedly)–but then they went on the road and played that music to live audiences for months at a time. Call it a love/hate thing. Parody is fun because it’s a way of punishing cultural forms for making you buy into them, in spite of yourself. We’re really poking fun at our own credulity.
Westlake did enjoy this type of story, very much. But he also thought it could be very very dumb. And as Maxwell Smart might say, ‘when the man’s right, he’s right’. 😉
My favorite passage on this read was Grofield’s fretting over what it would mean for his acting career if he goes on the run.
I don’t see how his career could get any worse, actually–he’s acting under one of the least common names in North America–the same name he’s committing armed robbery under–there’s no way he could ever be a star as Alan Grofield. If he had to change his name and appearance, maybe he’d unbend, take some work in Hollywood, and actually be able to support himself without robbing supermarkets.
But see, Stark would never let him do that–Stark abhors all compromise, and punishes it severely. Grofield needs to move over to the Westlake Talent Agency. WTA takes much better care of its clients. Though it must be said, they have to do a lot more pratfalls there.
For me The Blackbird was another variation of The Damsel. So I rank The Dame higher than this one. It sure reads like a parody. When all the others made Commies the most dangerous enemies, Westlake wrote plots where Africans scheme behind close doors and almost rule the world.
It started to feel more close to reality for me when Grofield ended up almost without clothes against Canadian winter, and I, who could say that he knows what Canadians winters feel like, imagined a lone man against hard winter. That’s your death more horrible than from a bullet.
As for the theories what was first, I guess Stark wrote Deadly Edge for GM and couldn’t sell it, then he wrote Slayground and The Blackbird while being out of work, and then when he could seel the books, McMillan has more flexible schedule and they squeezed The Blackbird in sooner than RH could do.
But the most strange thing is, you as a birdman didn’t say a word about blackbirds. Eh, Chris?
I’d actually say that it resembles The Damsel much less than The Dame does–and not just because the sex interest isn’t a blonde (‘love interest’ does not describe the role of Grofield’s women in the first three books). Or because of the similarity in title of the first two. Or because of the organized crime angle in the first two. Or because of Grofield in both of the first books being basically blackmailed into helping the pretty but petulant blonde girl save a male relative from some situation that is entirely the male relative’s fault for being in. Or because both of the first two books involve Grofield being on the road with the pretty blonde girl, and having a nice sexy interlude with her while on the run from hoodlums. Or etc.
No, I’d say The Blackbird is much less like The Damsel than The Dame is, because it’s so much more like a book by Richard Stark–the way Grofield is forced to work with the government (like Parker and he were in The Handle), but is fighting them all the way. Like the way he deals with that dilemma regarding the American soldiers. I honestly feel like this is the first Grofield that doesn’t feel like it was ghostwritten for Stark by Westlake.
It isn’t all the way there, but there’s real progress being made here. Honestly, you KNOW Parker would have killed Pat Chelm when she said he had to go back and save her brother or else she’d rat on him. The moment she made that threat, he’d look at her and see a talking corpse. Even if they’d already had sex, which of course they wouldn’t have had. Now Stark wouldn’t put Parker in that position–but if he were in that position, he’d kill her, go home to Claire, and forget about it. Grofield gets put in that position because he just isn’t that cold-blooded–but he’s quite willing to abandon Vivian to her fate, until she apologizes and asks for his help. In that situation, in that climate, that would be the same as shooting her, only less merciful.
In The Blackbird, please note–the sex is pushed way to the end of the story. The very end. Grofield isn’t even that interested in sex until then, though he’s certainly interested in Vivian. He’s got too much else on his mind. He’s becoming a real Stark protagonist here. He’s becoming more like Parker–only retaining his humor, and his humanity. But when his humanity gets in the way of survival, he puts it on mute, and does what needs be done. Parker would approve–of everything except his conversation with Colonel Rhagos. Parker would have seen that as a waste of time. He’d have gone right to that building with the snowmobiles–or else he’d have found some way to take out Rhagos, maybe blame it on somebody else at the gathering. Grofield, so very American, just says “You can’t treat me like this!” Oh yes they can, Grofield.
What you see happen in these three books is that the part with the girl keeps getting pushed further and further back. In The Damsel, Grofield meets The Girl in the first paragraph–in the second, he meets her a few chapters in–in the third, the meet-up with Vivian is even further back in the book, and she actually is a less important part of the narrative, though still in many ways a more interesting character than the previous two. And of course in the final novel, that’s no girl–that’s Grofield’s wife. And what happens between them feels much more real, and of course–well, we’ll talk about that later.
I think you haven’t read this one in a while–first of all, the Africans are just one group–there’s a wide collection of third world nations, including Guerrero, which is in Latin America (well, it isn’t, but you know what I mean). They aren’t out to rule the world, individually or collectively. They’re just buying a very dangerous weapon because everybody else on the block is going to have it, so why shouldn’t they? This may sound parodic, but honestly, we should be so lucky.
The big conference in Canada–that’s a writer’s conceit. But proliferation does happen in more or less the way Westlake describes, and for the same basic motives. Though Vivian is being a bit naive–Colonel Rhagos would have another reason for wanting the gas–he could use it to wipe out dissidents and rebellious factions in his own country–so that he could avoid the bloody fate of his predecessors. I don’t think that was happening by the time Westlake was writing this. It’s happened plenty since then. I think Westlake was actually very sympathetic to the little nations of the world–I think that’s fairly obvious–he wrote his one and only work of history as an homage to a small black island nation that outmaneuvered the great British empire (well, not so great by that time). He likes and admires these people quite a lot. He’s not so sold on their leaders.
Your theory as to the order of writing seems very workable to me. Except Deadly Edge feels so–current. It doesn’t feel like a GM Parker. Not one tiny bit. It’s a major shift in the style and content of the books. As is Slayground, of course. But The Blackbird seems moored in an earlier style. It’s an advance for Grofield, but not a quantum leap–and it certainly looks dated when compared to 70’s Stark. Including the next Grofield. It’d be nice to know.
I didn’t mention birds, because birds aren’t mentioned in the novel–frankly, I’m not so sure I like that title. I really only like one of the Grofield titles. The last one.
You know, I never paid attention to the sex angle here. It didn’t matter to me. It’s just a trick from paperback books, a cliche you know all about. So I just skip these cliches, as I know that Grofield will get laid after all.
As much as Westlake liked small nations, he didn’t write them that credible and believable as, say, Ross Thomas did. Reading about Westlake’s Africans I feel sympathy for them, yet I rarely believe in them.
I know what you’re saying about Deadly Edge being current and different from GM novels. Considering that Westlake wrote fast, he might have written all four GM novels in 1,5 year, then waited til they were published, and he found out early enough that his contract came to an end. Then, already with knowledge that he’s free agent under the name Stark, he started to write Deadly Edge. Well, we can speculate until the end of times.
Well, we also know he’s going to live (at least as long as he’s got his own franchise), and sex isn’t the only cliche Westlake plays with here–honestly, an interracial relationship is less of a cliche than a lone operative trying to avert doomsday. In all events, I stick to my guns–The Damsel and The Dame resemble each other more than either of the other two Grofields, and not just in terms of the sex angle (which I poke fun at, but still enjoy quite a lot). The main difference is that The Dame has less action and more talk–because it’s a drawing room mystery. There has to be a lot of talking.
You may be right about Ross Thomas–never read a thing of his. I found an essay about him by Ethan Iverson, and I see that he was of the Raymond Chandler school, which puts him at odds with Westlake, stylistically speaking. The quote provided makes him sound a bit like a smarter better-informed Mickey Spillane–I don’t entirely mean that as a compliment, but you can only tell so much from a few paragraphs. The bio I read makes it clear he’d had a great deal more experience in foreign affairs than Westlake, or most writers of popular fiction. But then that was true of Ian Fleming as well, and who takes him seriously as a political commentator these days? Do I even want to know the answer to that question?
Westlake knew Mexico and Puerto Rico pretty well, and went back to them in his fiction regularly–you’ll see that most of the time he makes up small countries for parts of the world he hasn’t been to–this way, he himself can decide what those countries are like. Saves a lot of time and trouble doing research.
He isn’t trying to do a realistic take on foreign intrigue. He’s satirizing, and he’s philosophizing. And I strongly suspect I’d still prefer his ideas to Thomas’ if I’d read the latter, but I just don’t have time to find out right now.
Westlake would say that the same types of people exist everywhere. Those who want to lead, those who want to follow, and those who want to go their own way, whatever the price. And he’s on the side of the last group. I think his portrait of Colonel Rhagos–a man who can’t brook any opposition, because a man in his position associates opposition with death–was pretty convincing for somebody who had never been to Africa or probably visited any country living under dictatorship at that point in his life.
But in such a fantastic story, how much realism do you really need? How much do you really want? Do we fault Jonathan Swift for his lack of realism? Realism is not likely to be the point of a book about a man who supports his acting career through armed robbery, is it now? I think I made that point already.
Westlake clearly did write all these books fairly close together. But to me, The Blackbird feels like something written a bit earlier than Deadly Edge and Slayground–there’s a distinct shift in his writing as Stark as the 70’s dawn. As we shall see.
But then he gets grabbed again, this time by Marba’s group, who have decided to neutralize him–confiding in Marba was maybe not such a great idea.
This bothers me. “I know this Grofield: he’s clever, resourceful, adept at violence, a professional criminal who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Let’s take him with us. What could go wrong?”
Well, in the end what goes wrong has nothing to do with Grofield, and he actually prevents things from going even worse–what bothers me is we don’t get to find out what happened to Marba. We don’t, do we? I’m already into the next book, and there’s only so much plot information my brain can process at one time. As lovely as Vivian is, I rather wish the tenuous friendship between Grofield and Marba that began in the previous book had been better developed, but sex always wins.
I think the idea is “We don’t want to kill him, because that would confirm we’re up to something big. We do want to keep him from being in a position to communicate with his handlers, in case he’s already learned things we don’t want them to know.” As you say, Marba knows Grofield is resourceful.
And Marba’s plan would have worked fine, except that they didn’t have a secure room at the lodge to lock him up in. And Grofield can’t abide confinement.
Just to answer this – since I’ve just finished the book: we know what happens to Marba. He becomes Undurwa’s leader, filling the void after Colonel Rahgos (conveniently) is killed during the attack. Admittedly, we learn this on the last page and this seems kind of an afterthought (but I was glad to know about it, I have a bit of fondness for Marba).
Thanks for your blog, BTW, I’ve been reading the whole Parker/Grofield saga for a year now and I love going to your reviews after having finished an episode !
(sounds of someone rummaging through great piles of books, sneezing occasionally, and also swearing under his breath).
Well, I’ll take your word for it. It sounds like what Westlake would have done. I also liked Marba. I liked writing this review. And in just a few more months, I should be back to reviewing Stark novels again. Only eight left. And Grofield isn’t in any of them. I’m half and half about whether to regret that. But it is what it is.
There’s nothing in the text to support this, but I suspect that Marba took advantage of the confusion during the attack to kill Rahgos himself. Marba has recently seen Rahgos decide to murder a man because he’s too much trouble, and that’s not a great quality in a boss.
If the Grofield series had continued past Lemons Never Lie, good chance we’d have seen Mr. Marba again. Westlake liked writing about Africans, and it occurs to me to wonder–at this point in time, before he made that trip to research Kahawa, how many had he met personally? In New York, you can meet people from literally anywhere. But Marba could have also been based on people he read about in the news, in that time of great political turmoil in Africa.
Can you think of another American mystery author–of any race–who spent so much time writing about the politics and people of non-white countries? I’ve read most of Chester Himes (and fully intend to read all of him before I’m done), and he wrote pretty much exclusively about America (while living in European exile, like Joyce).
Westlake was a great believer in the maxim “Nothing human is alien to me.”
About 2/3rds of the way through, I started seeing Grofield as a variation on Peter Gunn. Cleverly and stylishly going through all kinds of complications, but with a coldhearted pragmatism (no pun intended). I could almost hear the Henry Mancini music. And Ken of course started reminding me of Jacoby.
That helped kick this book into a higher gear which made it quite enjoyable. That was quite a contrast from the beginning, when I thought, Oh no, another Grofield book about international intrigue.
Also, the ending echoed Casablanca, in particular Humphrey Bogart’s conversion to patriotism. Grofield’s “conversion” was more limited and ambiguous than Bogart’s, but the general feeling was similar.
And this book, more than any previous Westlake, seemed to be written with the movies in mind. The Canadian scenery. The many action scenes towards the end of the book, in particular, the dramatic duel on the ice between the ski mobile and the airplane.
While the influence of that show is pervasive to this day, I’d say it was the influences on it that Westlake was primarily working from. Grofield has a lot less swagger going on, and he uses guns as little as possible. Still, he probably heard that theme music in his head at times, at least back in the early days. Coldhearted pragmatism was Hammett’s thing a long time earlier. Also, you really think any woman was going to make a disparaging comment about Gunn’s–you know–gun?
The scenario is more out of James Bond, Matt Helm, Johnny Fedora. But again, Grofield will play the hell out of any role you cast him in–it is very definitely not patriotism that motivates him here. You destroy the world, acting jobs are going to get pretty thin on the ground. As to Casablanca, Rick Blaine is only pretending not to give a damn about this crazy world–it’s an act. When it comes to minding his own business, until given no alternative, Grofield is not putting on a performance. He means it.
You have a point about the movies–Westlake must have wondered, many times, why Hollywood always picked Parker, and Grofield never even made it into the movies once. Yeah, a character based on him is in Cavalier’s adaptation of The Score, but not a very interesting character, and he’s not an actor. I think they must have figured people would scoff that an actor could perform armed robberies, then never be recognized in his other profession. It’s easier to shrug this off in the books than in a visual medium.
Still, by the time he wrote The Blackbird, he must have gotten accustomed to Grofield never getting a film, and he liked the challenge of verbally describing scenes that seemed ideal for a film. Much as he liked the pictures, to him the best pictures were those people created in their heads while reading a good story.
My feeling is, he wrote this precisely to create a movie that couldn’t (or at least wouldn’t) actually be made. The racial element isn’t really necessary, is it? And in 1969, you were rarely if ever going to see a film where a married white adventurer beds a beautiful educated black woman–let alone after mowing down several black men before her eyes. Bond’s #1 Girl in a film wasn’t black until 2002 (and it’s never happened since).
Clint Eastwood has a thing with Vonetta McGee in The Eiger Sanction in 1975. The Trevanian novel (where the love interest is also black and named Jemima) came out in 1972. So Westlake might have realized the racial taboos were ready to be tested. Still, he couldn’t have thought this could possibly be faithfully adapted. (Neither was the Trevanian novel).
As I mentioned, this was published the same year as Up Your Banners (1969), and he found the contrast between the lovers sexy (because it is). He’d experimented with an interracial love story, and wanted to try the same basic scenario with a guy whose attitude towards sex is a lot more casual (and a black woman who didn’t grow up around American racism). Still, pretty perfunctory, in spite of all the danger they’ve survived together. But that’s the form, right? In a spy story, they just fall into bed. Unusual that it takes until the very end for that to happen. Almost courtly.
You can find scenes from ancient mythological epics that seem to have been written as film treatments. And many of those were made into films. Thousands of years later.
…Huh. Well shit. My original thesis for my forthcoming summation of this series was: “The Grofield’s were an interesting experiment but it was mostly a good thing the project only lasted 4 novels, with only the fourth one being actually good.”
Then I read The Blackbird. Not only did I enjoy it a great deal, but now I’m actually bummed this only lasted 4 Installments. I don’t doubt that Lemons Never Lie is the best, I do very much agree that this is the first Grofield that’s actually good. Not merely decent or ok, but an honest to god GOOD story.
And it’s even more surprising because I’m not a big fan of James Bond spy stories. Of course, it helps that The Blackbird feels more like Marathon Man than James Bond. Especially when it came to the cold damp location. What can I say? I love urban areas in winter time, it’s pretty to me.
But that’s not the only reason I dig The Blackbird. As you yourself noted, Westlake finally cracked the code as to how to get Grofield properly motivated. I never got the feeling Grofield could just walk out of here unscathed, not once. And unlike The Dame, Grofield’s motivation for getting INTO the plot also feels completely natural and in character.
I also really liked Vivian Kamdela as a sex interest, easily my favorite of the sex interests in this series. In many ways, she’s what I thought Pat was gonna be in The Dame, more hostile and less endeared to Grofield’s charms. I also like that she’s on more equal ground with Grofield, even out snarking him at points like when she gets to deliver the exit line. And no, it’s not because feminism 😛
It’s actually more to do with, what I feel, is the big reason this Installment succeeds where the others failed: Grofield’s actually out of his element. You ever notice how, depsite not being a swashbuckling adventurer or a gentleman detective, Grofield actually fits those roles more or less fine? He saves the general’s life and does all sorts of swashbuckling antics in The Damsel. He’s good at putting together plausible murder suspects and solves whodunnity despite not caring about the solution. He completes these goals with highly unorthodox methods sure, but he completes them none the less.
In The Blackbird, however? No. Grofield is a truly pitiful spy who’s almost always one upped by the real professionals in this occupation. All his attempts to run out on the American government are thwarted (he doesn’t even get out of his bugged up clothes by himself, that’s done by other professionals), his attempts at actual spywork are a miserable failure, he’s almost defeated by the third world at the lodge, and he doesn’t even get the dignity to pull a fast one on Ken at the end, the U.S. government pretty much gets what they want.
Grofield gets the upper hand, yes, and he does get the information to give Ken. But how does he do this, I ask? He approaches the situation like this was a score. He apprehends and spares the guards who are to willing to comply and he kills the ones who need to be killed. He forces the information out of Vivian with ultimatums and threats on her life, not through clever interrogations and truth serums. And what does Grofield do when he can’t reasonably get the cannisters? He kills the four americans who know where they are and dips. Not quite unlike Parker does in The Sour Lemon Score (though Parker didn’t kill the guy who knew where the boodle was). To summarize all this in shorter words: Grofield starts winning when he acts like heistman, because that’s who he is. Of course this one doesn’t feel ghostwritten by Westlake. That Starkian morality is easy to spot from a mile away.
This might be me, but I didn’t really find this book all that comedic. Aside from Grofield’s snark, there weren’t that many jokes in The Blackbird, if at all. In fact, it feels like a lot of modern crime films that are played fairly seriously but happen to have quippy protagonists.
There is one part that bugged me, however. And yes, it has to do with racial politics. So Gorfield kills the four americans. Perfect, no notes, that was a genius conclusion. Vivian is shocked and upset at him for doing this. That makes sense, especially if one were expecting a James Bond rescue, so to speak.
But then Vivian essentially pulls the race card on Grofield who then explains why that wasn’t the case. Even though it’s crystal clear to anyone paying attention that race didn’t factor into his decision?! Again, it’d be one thing if Vivian simply didn’t approve of Grofield killing the men, it’s some cold blooded shit. But it had nothing to do with race. Hell, I’m the resident SJW of this joint and even I recognize this! I never got the feeling Vivian would play that card.
Not to mention, the conflict ends rather quickly. It pretty much goes: Vivian: “das racist!” Grofield: “wat, no its not. heres why: [explains why das not racist].” (Run to cover from danger) Vivian: “oh ok ur right das not racist.”
I get that we’re practically at the end and there’s gotta be at least one sex scene between Grofield and the main lady, so yeah this couldn’t last too long. Even so, it’s resolved jarringly fast.
Also, it feels like Grofield is trying to justify his actions. Not to Vivian, but to us the audience. I get the vibe that Westlake wrote this bit in to preemptively defend Grofield from readers calling him racist. And it wasn’t necessary because, again, Grofield obviously wasn’t acting out of racism.
Most importantly though, the thing about this scene where Grofield explains why he wasn’t acting racist? It brings attention to other moments in the series, like when he made a blackface joke in The Damsel, or when he referred to Marba as a colored man in The Dame (at a time when that term was becoming outdated at best) in this very book where he didn’t realise the americans were at the lodge because he didn’t see any white people there. Now obviously I don’t think Westlake meant anything by these moments (it’s why I haven’t mentioned them until now). But when a character in the book specifically brings up the possibility that Grofield might be racist, well those other moments sure do come off in a very different light.
Other than that, though? The Blackbird is a downright impressive installment in the Grofield series (again, I’m now SAD there won’t be any more of these) and it’s proof that I made the right choice by not just skipping to Lemons Never Lie.
Wow, you like it more than me! This means I don’t have to defend it nearly so much. What am I going to write in response?
First, very good observation that Grofield is forced to fall back on one of his two major skill sets (somehow, the acting never seems to come into play with him, as it occasionally does for his successor, Sam Holt). He was forced to play spy, it doesn’t work out at all (he never thought it would, but Central Casting….), so back to the tried and true. Westlake had a knack for writing scenes about somebody figuring out how things work–like that mechanized door. Grofield doesn’t have to defeat the entire assembled cast of villains–just survive while they defeat each other.
Every generation somehow assumes it’s the one that invented what we now call ‘wokeness.’ It was very much a thing in the 60’s, and somehow Grofield never developed a fanbase among black men the way Parker did. Grofield is very definitely a white man, and while he’s not racist in the sense of worrying about which race is superior, he’s still got some of that self-consciousness where race is concerned that Parker never feels (which makes it easy for people of all races to identify with him). So you may be wrong in thinking there was no need for a disclaimer in the text–particularly since we’ve never seen Grofield kill in cold blood before. (Even Parker never just killed four guys he’d never seen before in his life, who weren’t drawing down on him–yet).
This was written around the same time as Up Your Banners, as I mentioned. That is a powerfully anti-racist work (that may never get an ebook, because it uses the n-word), but it’s anti-racist on Westlake’s own terms. He’s not going to do what Bucklin Moon did, and try (self-consciously) to write from the perspective of black people (in black dialect, which doesn’t go well). It would be hard to say who in that book is the most despicable–the rich white men who speak in comfortable terms of their own superiority without ever admitting they’re doing that–or the young black radical who is clearly using his own people to get what he wants out of life, and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process. We are one species, and at the end of the day, evil has no color. The Sheep and the Goats come in all colors, if I may reference the gospels.
And Westlake felt the only thing you absolutely had to believe in was yourself. The dialogue between the two lovers in the other book is echoed here between Grofield and Vivian. Maybe sometimes you need to fight for a cause (if only to survive), but if you don’t start from that foundation of self-understanding, nothing good will come of it. And you can never let anyone else tell you who you are.
So in this book, Vivian tells Grofield he’s a racist, because he did what absolutely needed doing, and he’s not buying it. (Yes, I suppose there’s a touch of mansplaining to it, but you know, I’ve had women explain quite a few things to me over the years, and I was usually better off for hearing the explanations.)
There’s a tendency in some parts of popular culture, then and now, to treat minorities as if they are not capable of doing wrong. Which is just as de-humanizing as assuming they’re not capable of doing right. Westlake sees this as yet another problem to worry at–how can he write about people of other races without being racist, but also without making them bland and–for want of a better word–colorless? He kept working at it, with mixed success(it’s not easy), and you won’t be surprised to learn he had his best results in a Parker novel, much later in the series (because in a Parker novel, doing wrong is doing right).
Btw–have you read Dancing Aztecs yet? That’s where he basically turned everybody into a comic ethnic stereotype–especially WASPs so we can realize we’re all funny as hell. And where’s the problem in that?
As you say, Grofield is a fish out of water in all three books to date. But next time the fish is back in his natural habitat, and he’s not any happier about it. He is, however, in a much more interesting story. Contrived, as all works of fiction are–but it’s much harder to spot the marionette strings. Westlake had at least partly solved the problem of how to write a Grofield story in an exotic foreign setting (if you think Canada is exotic). Now he’s got to find out if he can write a no-holds-barred Richard Stark novel–where Parker is nowhere to be found.
I’ll edit one more time to put in something I forgot to mention–are you noticing a trend here with your reviews? You see a problem. You mention some possible fixes for it. A book or two further on, some of those fixes turn up! Great minds think alike? Well, scheming minds, put it that way. Not necessarily the best-laid schemes, but since the whole point of these types of stories is things ganging aft aglae…….
So, the thing to take away here is that I should be given the adaptation rights for any and all Westlake projects, right? That…That’s clearly what you’re saying in your edit about scheming minds thinking alike, right? (Shyeah, right. If only I was that lucky. Then again, I’m probably better off just paying homage and tribute with my own original stuff.)
But yeah, I’m just as shocked as you are about how much I liked The Blackbird. I mean, I’m still not gonna rank it in my top ten Starks (probably not even top 15). But yeah, for what it is, I think it’s a rock solid effort! ….Lemons Never Lie is already better though, judging by the 50 or so pages I’ve read so far. (Like, not to jump the gun, but Jesus the whole setup of Grofield and Mary living in this big live theater with bed and living room sets and the passage: “They sat together on the sofa, facing the empty seats out there in the darkness, and talked, mostly about the plays they might do this coming season. Later on, they made love on the sofa, and fell asleep there, wrapped around each other.” It’s honestly fucking beautiful stuff. But, again, I’m totally jumping the gun.)
I mean, George V. Higgins has four books of his in E-format, and three of them have copious amounts of hard-R n-word usage (waaay more than Westlake ever used it in, I think, his entire bibliography). Hell, Why Me uses the n word (see? I DID read that article you linked to in the Damsel comments) and that has an E-book. I think it’s more that Up Your Banners is a fairly obscure outing from an extremely prolific author who wrote under countless publishing houses. Stuff falls under the cracks, you know? Especially when licensing and publishing rights are concerned.
I think what put me off about Vivian pulling the race card was not so much that it was a mistake, but that it felt like such a stupid mistake. Especially coming from her, who was explicitly shown to be a soldier who’s dealt with racial warfare for a good while. It felt uncharacteristic, more like something a political conservative’s strawman idea of a black radical would do, not something Vivian would do, if that makes sense. On the OTHER hand, to completely undermine my own argument, Vivian has shown to flip flop on how she views Grofield and has already been mistaken on his character before. So, yeah, there ya go. Grofield may play the fool but the joke’s actually on me.
Higgins has a market, and that market expects gritty urban realism, which means people use bad words. Dancing Aztecs uses the n-word (as an epithet, though we’re supposed to find the people using it that way naive and a mite cowardly), that’s evailable, but that’s what people expect from Westlake–comic caperings. Nobody expects a serious book about racial animus from him. Dancing Aztecs was one of his biggest sellers. And though race is invoked, it’s not really the subject–that is New York itself. And what could be more racist than to whitewash Gotham?
I see what you’re saying about Vivian, but then again, she’s a really hardcore SJW, no? Like the W part isn’t just metaphorical. She’s a goddam revolutionary. So she’s read all the literature. Fanon and such. She’s not really part of the American scene, but she’s not your typical African woman, whatever that means. She’s seen the world outside her world, presumably hung with black people in the Americas, and so could be expected to have some racial consciousness, and to have some suspicion towards white American running dogs.
She’s already bawled Grofield out after learning he’s doing this under duress, not out of patriotism, even though she might despise the country he’d be doing patriotic stuff for. She still thinks that’s what you’re supposed to do. Grofield thinks nothing of the kind. So this to me tracks with their overall personality conflict, without which a romantic subplot isn’t going to be much fun.
Now there is a counterpoint–people who come from an oppressed minority background may not have the luxury of unfettered individualism to the same extent as people who are part of this or that majority. As someone from an Irish background, I can relate to that. Your people can’t necessarily get along fine without you, so even if you’d like to just do your own thing, you may feel compelled to pitch in.
So an improvement to this book might be Vivian explaining that to Grofield–so she’d be teaching him while he’s teaching her. That does happen in Up Your Banners. But that wasn’t a crime novel. You can only get so deep into politics in a book like this before it weighs down the narrative. Anyway, they’re not going off into the sunset together. They’re going to stay in bed a few days, maybe talk out their differences between fucks, then go their separate ways and never meet again, just like the two previous books.
Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis. Hegel didn’t come up with that, you know. Well, you probably do know. I studied intellectual history in grad school, we did Hegel (Who, as my prof said, reads like a dead horse), and somehow I had to find that out from the internet.
I have Paul Westlake’s email somewhere, if you want to pitch that “Give me the rights to everything” spiel to him. He wouldn’t even give me a copy of his dad’s Red Harvest screenplay. I got it anyhow, of course. Someday I may even write something about it.
😉