“Hair,” Dortmunder said. This was suddenly absolutely clear in his mind. “We find a descendant with black hair, we figure out a way to get a little buncha that hair, we give it to Little Feather, and when they come to take hair for the test, she gives them Moody hair.”
Kelp said, “John, I knew you’d do it. The Moody hair matches the Moody body, and Little Feather’s in.”
“If we can find an heir,” Dortmunder said.
Irwin laughed. “This is wonderful,” he said. “The absolute accuracy of DNA testing! First, we put in a wrong body to match our wrong heiress, then we get a wrong wrong body, and now we’re gonna get the wrong wrong hair. One switched sample is gonna get compared with another switched sample. Absolutely nothing in the test is kosher.”
Kelp said, “Irwin, that’s the kind of test we like.”
Murch said, “Whoops. You wanna plan it, and organize it, and do it, all this weekend?”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” Dortmunder said, “but that’s what we got.”
“Then,” Murch said, “I don’t know we got much.”
“Well, it could be that luck is with us,” Dortmunder told him. Then he stopped and looked around at everybody and said, “I can’t believe what I just heard me say.”
Kelp said, “I’m a little taken aback myself, John.”
This novel features both a con and a heist, and the con takes up a lot more time. The heist is merely there to shore up the con, and from conception to execution occupies eight chapters in a fifty chapter book, which I think is fairly unique for the series as a whole. I have this little suspicion that Westlake thought of the heist first, decided it wasn’t quite enough of an idea to hang a novel on, but too much for a short story, and the market for novellas was just not there anymore.
So he found a way to plug it in here, thus allowing him to tell a Dortmunder story about a con while still satisfying the need for a heist. And a damned clever way at that. I could be wrong, I often am.
Not that cons, of the short variety, are anything new to Dortmunder. In the first two novels, we see him going door to door, selling encyclopedias to housewives–he shows them some brochures, they give him a down-payment, and they never see him again, or the encyclopedias ever. He doesn’t like it, and he’s not good at it, but he feels like he has to make some kind of dishonest living, and it’s relatively low-risk. After Bank Shot, he abandoned the encyclopedia thing, and if there was no big heist to plan for the moment, stuck to simple burglary, which was never as simple as he hoped.
J.C. Taylor brought a bit of the grift back to the series, via her many mail order scams, and eventually her own fake country–but always in a strictly ancillary fashion. This would be the only novel in the series to feature a classic long con. Well, classic in the Dortmunder sense of the word, put it that way. Nothing succeeds as planned.
I don’t much like any of the covers I found for this novel (except maybe the Japanese edition I put up for Part 1), and for reasons perhaps a mental health specialist will explain to me someday, often feel obliged to find other images to go with the covers. It makes sense to me, and that’s all that really matters, right?
What you see up top is a photo of the current St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council (my, don’t they look fierce!), and below that is The Kittatinny House, a rambling old pile that once overlooked the Delaware River, on what is now part of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Originally only accommodating 25 guests, it ended up as a super-swanky resort hotel that could sleep 250. In its final form, it burned to the ground in 1931.
I’d never heard of it before I started doing research for this review. I’d say it’s a fair bet that Westlake knew about it, and quite a few other bits and pieces of real history (some of it relating to the odd custom of House Museums and we’ll get back to that), all of which went into this Mulligan stew of alternate history he’s cooking up here. He usually knows more than his readers, and he always knows more than he’s saying. It’s annoying. Like my propensity for prologues.
Here’s the thing. I don’t really feel like doing an in-depth synopsis of this one. No percentage in it. So I’m going to revisit my old custom of titled subheadings, and see where that gets us. Hopefully somewhere under 7,000 words. We’ll see. Let’s start out with–
The Arraignment of Redcorn:
Little Feather uncrossed her arms and said, “You don’t act like you’re my lawyer, you act like you’re the other guy’s lawyer.” She pointed to the letter she’d sent. “I am Little Feather Redcorn,” she said. “My mother was Doeface Redcorn, my grandmother was Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, my grandfather was Bearpaw Redcorn, who was lost at sea in the United States Navy in World War Two, and they were all Pottaknobbee, and I’m Pottaknobbee. I’m Pottaknobbee all the way back to my great-grandfather Joseph Redcorn, who fell off the Empire State Building.”
At that, Dawson blinked and said, “Are you trying to make fun–”
“He was working on it, when they were building it, he was up on top with a bunch of Mohawks. My mama told me the family always believed the Mohawks pushed him, so I believe it, too.”
Where we left things last time was that Little Feather had been hauled off to the local hoosegow, at the behest of Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda, who co-manage the reservation’s casino, are stealing from it on a regular basis, and thus don’t want anybody other than themselves looking at their overcooked books. They assume Little Feather’s a fake, but they’re not taking any chances. Scare her off, before this thing mushrooms. Only thing is, as we’ve already seen, Little Feather don’t scare easy.
She’s worried, sure. Nothing like this was supposed to happen, at least not this soon. But see, in her mind, she’s not really a fake. She’s a real Indian (says her mother was a full-blooded Choctee, and no that’s not a real tribe either, though it sounds like Choctaw), who has lived exactly the life she says she has, and so what if she doesn’t really belong to this specific tribe? Her ancestors got robbed by the whites just as much as any Pottaknobbees ever did, and she grew up just as poor. She’s not lying so much as badly stretching an inconvenient truth. Entirely possible she’s got some non-native ancestry as well, but you know what she’d say to that?
(Lucky horse.)
The secret to a good con is confidence, hence the name. She’s got so much confidence in herself, it doesn’t matter what name she goes by. She’s still the same person down beneath. Any name she goes by isn’t her real name, just like her forebears never called themselves Indians or Native Americans. She’s going to get her split, and she’s going to have the best house on the reservation, and as God is her witness–well, that’s a different book. Possibly different God as well, opinions differ.
So even though her public defender, Marjorie Dawson, a rather frumpy woman of around the same age as herself, acts at first as if her only job is to convince Little Feather to sign a statement admitting she lied, Little Feather’s strict adherence to that lie shakes Dawson’s own assurance, and makes her start to ask herself if this woman could be telling the truth. Believe in the lie enough, and others believe it too.
Then she’s brought up before another in a line of bored curmudgeonly judges we meet in the Dortmunder books, sick of the usual run of uninspired criminals they typically encounter in their daily grind. They need a little break in the routine, which Dortmunder & Co. will provide.
Judge T. Wallace Higbee had come to realize that what it was all about was stupidity. All through law school and through his years of private practice, he had believed that the subject was the law itself, but in the last twelve years, since, at the age of fifty-seven, he had been elected to the bench, he had come to realize that all the training and all the experience came down to this: It was his task in life to acknowledge and then to punish stupidity.
Joe Doakes steals a car, drives it to his girlfriend’s house, leaves the engine running while he goes inside to have a loud argument with his girlfriend, causing a neighbor to call the police, who arrived to quiet a domestic dispute but then leaves with a car thief, who eventually appears before Judge T. Wallace Higbee, who gives him two to five in Dannemora? For what? Car theft? No; stupidity.
Bobby Doakes, high on various illegal substances, decides he’s thirsty and needs a beer, but it’s four in the morning and the convenience store is closed, so he breaks in the back door, drinks several beers, falls asleep in the storeroom, is found there in the morning, and Judge Higbee gives him four to eight for stupidity.
Jane Doakes steals a neighbor’s checkbook, kites checks at a supermarket and a drugstore, doesn’t think about putting the checkbook back until two days later, by which time the neighbor has discovered the theft and reported it and is on watch, and catches Jane in the act. Two to five for stupidity.
Maybe, Judge Higbee told himself from time to time, maybe in big cities like New York and London there are criminal masterminds, geniuses of crime, and judges forced to shake their heads in admiration at the subtlety and brilliance of the felonious behaviors described to them while handing down their sentences. Maybe. But out here in the world, the only true crime, and it just keeps being committed over and over, is stupidity.
And after giving Little Feather a thorough grilling in his courtroom, Judge Higbee is grudgingly forced to acknowledge that she may be lying, but she’s not stupid (and therefore, in his private worldview, not guilty). And after a while, he begins to wonder if it’s actually Fox and Oglanda who have been stupid–done something they need to hide, and that’s why they’re so determined to get rid of this woman.
So not only does Fox’s and Oglanda’s preemptive strike fail–it backfires. Turns out there’s a memorial plaque at the reservation headquarters for Joseph Redcorn, that the Mohawks presented the tribes with (and which the tribes have always interpreted as guilty conscience because they pushed him). Even Guilderpost’s research never turned that up, but it provides some needed verisimilitude to back up the con.
Little Feather gets released on bail (she puts up her mobile home as collateral), and her co-conspirators arrange for her to stay in touch with them discreetly, knowing she’ll be watched. It’s mostly up to her now, and they just have to wait until somebody thinks to bring up DNA testing. Then they’re all set. They think. But this is a Dortmunder novel. It’s never going to be that simple. Which brings us to–
The Un-Busy Body:
“If I was them,” Dortmunder said, “and I’m in the spot they’re in, what do I do? And I’m beginning to think I know what I do.”
Tiny said, “What you did.”
Dortmundre nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking, Tiny.”
Kelp said, “They would, wouldn’t they?”
Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny all nodded, not happy. Guilderpost and Irwin both looked baffled. Guilderpost said, “What do you mean?”
Dortmunder said, “What did we do, to make sure the DNA was a match?”
“You put grampa in there,” Little Feather said.
“So if I’m on the other side,” Dortmunder said, “what do I do?”
“No!” Guilderpost cried. “They wouldn’t dare!”
“I bet they would,” Dortmunder said.
Back when I reviewed the second of the Westlake crime comedies, The Busy Body (also the second ‘Nephew’ book, since before Dortmunder turned up, they were one and the same), I made a connection. I said that 1966 novel’s star-crossed mobbed-up protagonist, Aloysius Engel, was clearly a Dortmunder prototype. I hold to that claim now, and present this book as evidence. Westlake is revisiting ideas from The Busy Body here, but is turning them on their heads. He knows what he did. And what he’s doing now is returning to the scene of the crime. Namely a graveyard.
The joke this time is that once Little Feather’s grandfather goes into that grave in Queens, he stays there. It’s a bit unclear what happens to Joseph Redcorn, who was clearly just born unlucky, and stayed that way after the Mohawks pushed him. Once both sides have fully lawyered up, and the subject of DNA testing is raised by the other side, as Guilderpost anticipated, Dortmunder correctly anticipates what Fox and Oglanda will do–dig up the deceased Pottaknobbee they’re afraid might really be Little Feather’s grampa, and replace him with somebody she’s definitely not related to. Guilderpost’s aggrieved moral indignation at this suggestion is rather priceless.
So what can they do about it? Little Feather isn’t supposed to have anybody backing her up here, so they can’t guard the grave without tipping their hand. They could dig up the body–again–and then put it back in there–again–after the tribes have planted their own ringer, but Dortmunder feels like if you do grave-robbing not once but three times, it’s starting to become your job, and that’s not a career path he’s particularly interested in.
Tiny comes up with the answer–switch the headstones. So Little Feather’s grampa, who was posing as Joseph Redcorn, is now posing as one Burwick Moody, buried very nearby, under a very similar marker. He died about three years after Joseph Redcorn, on December 5th 1933.
“That’s the day Prohibition ended,” Dortmunder said.
Tiny looked at him. “You know stuff like that?”
“I like it when they repeal laws,” Dortmunder explained.
Worth mentioning. My favorite exchange of the book may actually be one that happens before that, as they make the long drive back down from the Adirondacks to Queens, in a stolen Jeep (with MD plates, naturally, because Kelp). Seems the jeep has some kind of built-in electronic compass (GPS is not mentioned). Tiny brings it up. Tiny notices things.
As Dortmunder looked, the S E changed to S. He looked out at the road, and it was curving to the right. “So now it’s south,” he said.
“You got it,” Tiny told him. “Comin down, that’s what I been doing back here. Watchin the letters. A whole lotta S. A little N back there when Kelp got confused on the Sprain.
“The signage stunk,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder looked at Kelp’s profile, gleaming like a Halloween mask in the dashboard lights. “Signage,” he said. “Is that a word?”
“Not for those pitiful markers they had back there,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder decided to go back to conversation number one, and said to Tiny, “And the numbers are the temperature, right? Outside the car.”
“You got it again,” Tiny told him.
Forgetting about signage, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “Did you know about that?”
“Did I know about what?”
“Southwest,” Tiny said.
“The car here, Dortmunder explained to Kelp,” it tells you which way you’re going, south, east, whatever, and what the temperature is outside. It’s up there.”
Kelp looked up there.
“Back on the road!” Dortmunder yelled.
Kelp steered around the truck he’d been going to smash into and said, “That’s not bad, is it?” The temperature outside, and which way you’re going.”
“Very useful,” Dortmunder suggested.
“A car like this,” Kelp said, “you could take this across deserts, jungles, trackless wastes.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “How many of these things do you suppose have been across deserts and jungles and trackless wastes?”
“Oh, two or three,” Kelp said, and took the exit, and Tiny said “South.”
So they can just switch the stones back again after the wrong body is dug up and replaced with another wrong body. Here’s the problem. The reason Aloysius Engel failed to find the body he was supposed to find in that earlier comedy of errors is that he’s a natural-born schlemiel. It seems schlemiel-dom is not a uniquely causasian thing. Well, that’s only fair, right?
The Native Nephew:
Benny Whitefish and his cousin Geerome Sycamore, and his other cousin Herbie Antelope loaded the coffin into the rented van and shut the doors. Then Geerome went behind the tombstone and threw up.
Benny was pleased that Geerome had thrown up, because it meant there was at least one person around here who was a bigger goofus than himself, but of course, since Uncle Roger had put him in charge of this mission, he had to say, in a manly kind of fashion, “That’s okay, Geerome, it could of happened to anybody. Don’t think a thing about it.”
Benny Whitefish is an actual nephew, of Roger Fox–Westlake’s not being at all subtle about this, and most people still miss the joke, I bet. We first meet him because he’s assigned to keep an eye on Little Feather, and being a horny young guy, that’s a job he can get into. He immediately takes a liking to her, and she immediately spots him as her tail, and as somebody she can twist around her clever card-dealing finger without half-trying.
So before you know it, he’s on her side, and is speaking up for her at the Tribal Council, which theoretically is how the tribe is supposed to govern itself, except that since all the money comes from the casino, all the real power is with Fox and Oglanda.
The Tribal Council functioned mostly like a zoning board. Back in the good old days, the Tribal Council had waged war against tribal enemies, had overseen the distribution of meat after a hunt, maintained religious orthodoxy (a combination of ancestor and tree worship at that time), punished adultery and theft and treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors, arranged executions, oversaw the torturing of captured enemies, conducted the young men of the tribe through the rites of manhood, and arranged marriages (most of which worked out pretty well). These days, the Tribal Council gave out building permits.
Tommy Dog was chairman of the Tribal Council for this quarter, he being a Kiota and the chairmanship alternating every quarter between the tribes, to be fair to everybody and to distribute the power and the glory equally, and because nobody else wanted the job.
Yeah, I’ve had those kinds of jobs too. Tommy Dog has no encouragment for poor Benny, since he has no power to question Roger and Frank, who control the purse strings. Or the wampum pouch strings, I dunno. As Tommy looks back at Benny, he thinks to himself he resembles those paintings of the Defeated Indian, head hung dejectedly. This is not a very PC book, it should go without saying, but in a comic universe, you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not funny. If everybody is absurd, nobody is absurd, right? Even playing field. Except it’s not, really. Not when it comes to Benny.
He and his buddies get caught at the graveyard with what is supposed to be Joseph Redcorn’s coffin, but isn’t. This is a major plot complication, needless to say, so Benny’s pulling his weight, storywise. What happened was, the groundskeeper there figured out there was too much going on at night, people prowling around who aren’t supposed to be there, so he called the cops, and Benny’s the one got fingered. So where that leaves things is that now they’re going to test Burwick Moody’s DNA, not Little Feather’s grampa’s (which in a weird way, means Benny’s mission succeeded, only his uncle doesn’t know it, and neither does Benny).
And since the coffin has now been removed from what Fox and Oglanda were insisting was sacred tribal burial ground, by members of the tribe who (their lawyer argues) were merely trying to return a member of their community to his proper place, they can’t use that as an excuse for not testing the remains.
More on that later–what happens now is that Benny and his cousins spend the night at Riker’s Island, and they’d probably find the Plains Indian Sundance more relaxing. (Okay, I guess you can’t really say he didn’t earn his reward, but it’s more by way of suffering than actually doing stuff.)
Here’s the thing–Benny deserved a few more chapters. He’s not developed that much. By the end of the book, he’s shacked up with Little Feather, and that’s a grand and generous reward for any sub-protagonist. But unlike the other Westlake Nephews, Benny never gets to earn The Girl, make a grand heroic gesture. He never figures out what’s what, or who’s who; never has that insightful moment of self-realization that is the very heart of Nephewdom, and that’s basically because it’s a Dortmunder book. The Dortmunders ultimately replaced the Nephews in Westlake’s comic stylings; rendered them obsolescent. It’s not about Benny.
But think how much better the Nephew of Drowned Hopes made out, and he’s a total shit. The Nephew in Dancing Aztecs (where there is no dominating central protagonist) may be a total mama’s boy, but he’s a mama’s boy who wins. Did Benny have to be such a total nebbish? Did his subplot have to be so patronizing? Couldn’t he have counted coup just once? Points deducted from your score, Mr. Westlake. You could have given him a few more chapters.
Obviously the Native American hero of this book is a heroine. And given that Dortmunder himself was born in a town called Dead Indian, and is (I believe) the living embodiment of the Indian trickster figure Coyote, you could argue he himself is partly Indian (Dortmunder is partly everything, that’s part of his appeal). More than anything else, Benny’s another Westlake commentary on how guys under the age of 30 don’t really know themselves–Westlake remembers that form of naive listless hormone-addled identity confusion all too well.
But he’s a lot less sympathetic here. Maybe because he’s old and cranky now, has increasingly less patience with the stupidity of the young (there’s a reason Judge Higbee’s voice is so strong in this book, in spite of him being a fairly minor character). Happens to the best of us. But lest you lose patience with me, maybe we better move on from Benny Whitefish.
Truth is, Dortmunder has his own problems to worry about, and they are also problems with the book itself, that must be addressed and dealt with. This book isn’t about a heist. Aren’t all Dortmunder stories supposed to be about some kind of theft? Stealing bodies isn’t the same thing. Neither is conning people. Which leads us, quite naturally, to a question–
What Color is Dortmunder’s Parachute?:
“I mean,” Dortmunder said, “why am I in this place? I’m not a con artist. I’m not a grafter. I’m a thief. There’s nothing here to steal. We’re just riding Little Feather’s coattails–never mind, Tiny, you know what I mean–and we’re horning in on somebody else’s scam, and if they don’t manage to kill us–and you know, Tiny, that’s still Plan A they’ve got over there in their minds, and you can’t walk around with a hand grenade strapped on forever, for instance, you’re not even wearing it now–what do we get out of it?”
“What Color Is Your Parachute? is about job-hunting and career-changing, but it’s also about figuring out who you are as a person and what you want out of life.”
I always hated that book. Mainly because I associated it with having to look for a job. And that’s what Dortmunder is doing, all through this book. And he feels just the same way about it. Job-hunting sucks. Particularly when you already know what your real job is, but they ask you to do something else instead.
Case in point–Dortmunder critiques Guilderpost’s professional technique, with regards to how they stay in touch with Little Feather. This leads to a disagremeent within the makeshift gang–Tiny and Kelp say that John’s the planner, the organizer–Guilderpost is most offended, says that’s his job.
Dortmunder said, “That’s not what they mean. We do different things, Fitzroy, you and me. You figure out someplace where you can make people believe something’s true that isn’t true. Make them believe you got an old Dutch land grant screws up their title to their property. Make them believe maybe there is just one more Pottaknobbee alive in the world. That’s not what I do.”
“No, of course not,” Guilderpost said, and Irwin, sounding slight snotty, said, “I’ve been wondering about that, John. What is it that you do?”
“I figure out,” Dortmunder told him, “how to go into a place where I’m not supposed to be, and come back out again, without getting caught or having anything stick to me.”
“It’s like D day,” Kelp explained, “only like, you know, smaller.”
“We also go for quieter,” Dortmunder said.
So he can, in fact, make sound practical suggestions about how they can avoid falling under the scrutiny of the law–there’s a police tail on Little Feather as well, and much more professional than Benny’s (though Benny’s the one gets invited in for coffee). But that’s more like a consultancy gig, which hardly satisfies his need to work, and neither does switching headstones, and he’s still brooding about that later on, to May, before he heads back upstate again.
He starts off on his childhood at the orphanage of the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, and how they had these cereal bowls with pictures of Looney Tunes characters on the bottom, and he usually got Elmer Fudd. May is confused, wonders if he’s saying he’d like her to find some of those bowls for him to eat his cereal out of.
“No,” he said, and slowly shook his head. Then he let go of the spoon–it didn’t drop; it remained angled into the gunk–and at least he looked up at May across the kitchen table and said, “What I want, I think, is, you know what I mean, some purpose in life.”
“You don’t have a purpose in life?”
“I usually got a purpose,” he said. “Usually, I kind of know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, but look at me now.”
“I know,” she agreed. “I’ve been looking at you, John. It’s this Anastasia thing, isn’t it?”
“I mean, what am I doing here?” he demanded. Slowly, the spoon eased downward. Silently, it touched the edge of the bowl. “There’s nothing for me to do,” he complained, “except sit around and wait for other people to scheme things out, and then all of a sudden Little Feather’s supposed to give me a hundred thousand large, and guess how much I believe that one.”
And then comes the bad news–the wheels have fallen off the con. Benny Whitefish’s blundered grave robbery has undone their succcessful grave robbery. They can’t pipe up and say “Hey, that’s not Little Feather’s grampa!” without revealing how they know that. And now Dortmunder’s very specific set of skills comes into play, at last–but how? What’s the job here? The grave is being closely guarded now. They can’t switch bodies again, or headstones–Burwick Moody’s grave is open now, so even if they could sneak in and switch the stones back again, it wouldn’t work.
But as you can see up top, there’s another solution. Dortmunder’s gift for lateral thinking comes into play–if you can’t change the DNA at one end, change it at the other. All they need to do is find a descendant of Burwick Moody with the same color hair as Little Feather, get some of that hair, and her own formidable skill set, honed at many a blackjack table, will allow her to present that hair as her own, and she gets her share of the casino. If the genes match, you must attach.
(Sidebar–I don’t know how advanced genetic testing was when this story takes place–or even when exactly this story takes place. Sometime in the 90’s, definitely. At what point in time would DNA testing show not only if such and such person was a close relation of yours, but whether or not the person tested was of Native American ancestry? I feel like I’ve done enough nit-picking for one review, so let’s just assume that all the court case requires, given that nobody contests the fact that it’s Joseph Redcorn in that grave, even though it isn’t, is to verify Little Feather is related to him.)
So off goes Fitzroy Guilderpost, to comb the internet for news of Burwick Moody’s present-day descendants. He comes back to the diner they’re meeting at, with good news and bad news–yes, there is a female descendant, named Viveca Quinlan. She has black hair. She lives not far away, in Pennsylvania. But the bad news is a lulu.
See, Burwick Moody’s sister married an artist, Russell Thurbush, of the Delaware River School, and you know better than to try and look that up online, right? There’s a Hudson River School, and there’s something called ‘Pennsylvania Impressionism’ (one somehow imagines Renoir and Monet rolling their eyes), and obviously I did not know better than to try and look it up online.
Russell Thurbush got himself a reputation, sold a lot of paintings to very rich people, invested his money wisely, and built himself a huge mansion by the Delaware Water Gap, which is now a House Museum, and I told you we’d get back to that. Well see, Viveca Quinlan lives with her two daughters in said Museum, or rather a section of it set aside for her family’s personal use, while tourists get to go through the rest, looking at old things. It’s a bit like being the First Lady, except you don’t get to be on Oprah.
So that’s it, right? The house is full of very valuable objets d’art and antiques, and there’s alarm systems, and guards, and all of that. No possible way to get in there and nab a few follicles from her hairbrush. Good idea, John, but forget it. Hey, why are you smiling? “At last,” Dortmunder said, “A job for me.” Because that’s what color his parachute is.
So that chapter leads to seven additional chapters of heist planning and executing, and it’s a pretty good heist, that comes off amazingly smooth, thanks to a blizzard, which is pretty funny, considering that I’m finishing and posting this review on Tuesday, March 14th (finally, an excuse to focus on the job they don’t pay me for). I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, read the book. Stan Murch gets dragooned into it, and there’s some great moments with him, and with his mom, and the usual hijinks at the OJ Bar and Grill, and I could do a section on all of that, but I’m almost to 5,000 words now, so maybe not.
What I do want to talk about is what you might call a bonus identity puzzle Mr. Westlake sneaks in here, Lagniappe upon Lagniappe You remember how Dortmunder rescued that nun quite literally imprisoned in an office tower serving as a metaphorical medieval castle? Well, there’s yet another imprisoned woman in this book. Her imprisonment is purely psychological in nature, but the castle itself is quite real, if more along Victorian lines, architecturally speaking. Dortmunder rescues her without ever knowing it. But somebody knows, and that leads us to–
The Mendaciously Majestic Munificence of Murch’s Mom ( AKA, Are you there, God? It’s me, ‘Margaret.’):
“There was a rustling sound downstairs,” Viveca said.
“Didn’t hear it,” Margaret said.
Viveca leaned close and dropped her voice. “It’s mice,” she confided.
Margaret looked interested. “Oh yeah?”
“In the winter,” Viveca said, “there’s just no way to keep them out, since there’s nobody ever down there.”
“Huh.” Margaret said. “Tell me about this husband of yours.”
“Frank.”
“Be as frank as you want,” Margaret said, but then she shook her head and patted the air and said, “No, just a joke, I get it, the name is Frank. And Frank said he was leaving the house, not you.”
“Yes. And I know it’s true.”
“You want him back, you feel like shit, you–whoops, sorry, you really feel terrible all the time, and you can’t control your daughters because you don’t feel good enough about yourself, and you don’t know what’s gonna happen next. Have I got the story here?”
“Yes,” Viveca said. She felt humble in the presence of this wise older woman.
“Okay,” the wise older woman said, “I tell you what you do. Tomorrow, when you get your phone back, you call this Frank. You tell him, ‘Honey, rent a truck and come get us, all of us, we’re blowin this mausoleum.'”
“Oh dear,” Viveca said. “I don’t know, Margaret.”
“What you tell him is,” Margaret insisted, “this separation is over. Come on, Frank, rent a truck or hire a lawyer, because we’re either gettin back together or we’re gettin a divorce.”
You ever think about the people who live in house museums? Now most of them probably chose to do so–I used to work with a guy who got free rent that way for a while, he just had to be there during museum hours to let people in, and the rest of the time it was just him and Mr. Poe. Or was that a different house museum, I forget. The stories get jumbled together over time.
But imagine it’s your family’s house, or used to be–your famous ancestor’s legacy to posterity, and you’re supposed to safeguard it, but mainly that’s down to other people now, and you’re just a ghost yourself now, living in a house that isn’t really a home anymore?
That’s the situation Viveca Quinlan, last surviving adult relation of Burwick Moody and Russell Thurbush is, on the night of the blizzard, when Dortmunder & Co. arrive to do a bit of quiet thievery of the valuables downstairs, while Murch’s Mom (real name Gladys), posing as a traveler stranded in the snow, keeps everyone occupied, and obtains the needed hair sample from the bathroom, easy as pie.
And she needs to give the boys some time to browse through the gift shop, if you know what I mean, so she and Viveca and Viveca’s girls and the security guard all play Uno together, for hours, and there’s plenty of time in-between to talk, and she’s the type you just know you can confide in, and Viveca has been so lonely, as ghosts in decaying isolated Victorian piles tend to be, you’ve read the stories. This story involves a husband who decided he didn’t feel like being a ghost, and went back to New York to practice law, and there’s another woman, to which ‘Margaret’ merely says “Men.”
And obviously Murch’s Mom’s only real mission statement is to make sure nobody finds out there was ever a burglary going on there, but there’s more to her than that–we found that out in Drowned Hopes, same time we found out what her real first name was. So even while she’s hiding who she really is, she’s still showing her true colors. Anyway, just like her boy, she’s a born know-it-all, lives to hand out advice. Stan will start pontificating on the best route to take on the New York City thoroughfares at the drop of a hat. She’s giving a somewhat different type of navigational assistance here. Anybody can hit a dead-end. You just turn around and get back on the main road.
So by the time she’s ready to go, she’s saved a marriage, and possibly as many as four lives, and she never bothers to tell anybody about it, except to say she thinks maybe she did some good in there, when she gets picked up by the stolen snowplow they’re using for the heist. Stan just takes to mean they all made out like bandits, which is fine with her as well. Exeunt ‘Margaret.’
The narrator informs us that Viveca and her girls moved into her husband’s apartment two days later. When the volunteers returned in the spring, when the museum reopened, and noticed a few items missing here and there, they assumed Viveca had just taken them with her as keepsakes, or they’d been sold off by the foundation that runs the mansion, and so they said nothing about it to anybody, because it was none of their business.
(The stolen items end up with Arnie Albright, the fecklessly offensive fence, who gets his own minor subplot here, and who will take some time unloading the loot, but the gang will see a nice bit of cash. Eventually. Someday.)
The omniscient deity of this universe concludes the chapter, with great satisfaction–At last, the perfect crime. He might as well have added, I’m here, ‘Margaret.’
And that leaves us nothing but–
A not entirely satisfactory conclusion, except for Benny Whitefish (lucky horse):
The DNA test proves beyond any doubt that Viveca Quinlan is related to Burwick Moody, though that’s not what the court decision will say. Roger and Frank have a little discussion about what will happen to to them once the tribes find out they’ve been cheated of tens of millions of dollars, and the general consensus is they’d be lucky to just get lynched on a street corner–if the mob goes with the traditional punishments, things could get really unpleasant.
Before that happens, however, there’s a cross to deal with. Dortmunder knew from the start that Fitzroy and Irwin wouldn’t be willing to pony up their hundred large apiece. There may be honor among thieves, but not among grifters–Jim Thompson could tell you that (Lawrence Block is a bit more on the fence about it).
But see, a grifter has to know his or her limitations–you’re supposed to win with the tools of your trade, namely lies. Not with guns, which is what Fitzroy and Irwin try–they figure they can follow Stan back to where the gang is dividing up the loot from their heist, surprise them, take them out hard with the Glock machine pistols they’ve acquired (mainly for Tiny’s sake, one assumes), and then they just need to make sure Little Feather doesn’t develop selective amnesia, like the real fake Anastasia.
And when the dust has settled RosenGabel and Guilderpost (I’m starting to lose count of how many ways Westlake found to reference that famed Shakespearean duo who thought they were the leads, and ended up relegated to a mere Stoppard play) are not dead, but they have been disarmed, and exiled, and frightened out of their wits, and left in a very poor position to ever make any claims on Little Feather’s good fortunes. One can’t really say they learned their lesson, but they still end up in detention.
As to the other nefarious duo in this book, it comes down to one last identity puzzle. Roger knows he’s a thief, and thieves have exit strategies–his is an offshore account in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He’s going to take the money and run. Frank says he can’t do that, his family is here, his home is here. He never really processed what he’d become, so he stays, and burns the books that prove he’s a thief.
And you remember Mr. Westlake had mentioned, in several previous stories, how casinos like to pump a bit of extra oxygen in there, to keep the suckers, I mean customers, lively and active and ready to lose more money at the tables? Well, turns out Silver Chasm Indian casino does that too. By the time Frank has finished rolling around in the snow outside, to put out his burning clothes, the casino is gone. With the wind.
So a while later, Little Feather comes downstate in her mobile home, which Kelp thoughtfully helps her hook up to the city power supply, and they all meet there one last time, to hear the bad news. There’s no casino. It will take a decade or more to get the money to rebuild it. She’s accepted as the last Pottaknobbee, the tribes will take care of her, she’s found a home of sorts (and does this mean she now has to spend a third of the year chairing the Tribal Council? Those meetings are going to get a lot more interesting).
So no hundred g’s apiece for the gang. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Benny Whitefish is now her official protector, and he’s brought in briefly, still not quite able to process his good fortune. And since he’s in the next room in a mobile home while she’s telling them the bad news, I’m going to assume he’s Nephew enough for Little Feather to have told him the whole unfiltered truth about who she is, and Nephew enough not to give a damn, as long as he gets to see her naked. Attaboy.
So that’s the first of the Final Five. It may well be, as Greg Tulonen thinks, the best of them as well. I’ll decide that as I work my way through the next four. I may have found any number of little flaws in it, but Westlake put so much into even his most ill-conceived efforts (which this is not), that it feels churlish to cavil and complain about that. Lagniappe isn’t about getting the very best. Lagniappe is about getting something extra.
And what we’ll be getting next time will be the last of my “Mr Westlake and (fill in name of decade here)” pieces. Because as I see it, this here is the last of his 90’s novels, whether it was written in ’99 or ’00. The next book in our queue was published in 2002, and it’s also a heist story–but not with Dortmunder. Or Parker. Or even Grofield. A new beginning, you might say. Cue Lord Tennyson. Yeah, I’ll explain that. Later. After we’ve dug ourselves out. Stan, could you loan us that snowplow? Aw c’mon, just for Lagniappe.
(Part of Friday’s Forgotten Books)
The Westlake Review 
Dortmunder’s smile is one of the most satisfying moments in the series for me, coming as it does deep in the tenth book in the series. (We may have seen Dortmunder smile before this moment, but they’re thin on the ground.) It’s a well-earned smile, because it embodies everything I love about the series, its ceaseless inversion of expectations. In What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, his colleagues’ good news was Dortmunder’s bad news. In BN, his colleagues’ bad news is Dortmunder’s good news, the best news ever. An impossible heist just for him. He’s a coyote used to scraps who’s been given an unexpected banquet. And what a heist it is — not enough to carry a novel, as you note, but still pretty nifty. Maybe the kindest, gentlest heist in all of heist literature. I so admire Westlake’s ability to quickly sketch a backstory for the most minor of characters. Godspeed, Viveca Quinlan. The good tend to prosper by crossing Dortmunder’s path, even if they never find out the reason.
My other favorite moment with Murch’s Mom is from Jimmy the Kid (the bikers at the burger joint), and just so happens that involves the Delaware Water Gap as well. He liked writing about that area. Though John is quite certainly right that Olana was one of the things in his mind when he imagined the Thorbush house museum. Thurstead. Forgot to mention the name.
Honestly, there was a real danger of this turning into another four parter, and I like this book, honest I do, but that would be just too much. I had to focus mainly on what sets this book apart from the others. And just FYI, Part 2 is just a bit over 7,000 words. It was under, but then I decided I just had to put in the rest of Judge Higbee’s ruminations on stupidity, and that took it over.
If only stupidity was a crime, huh?
But then who’d be left to run the country?
But then who’s running it now?
🙂
The Dortmunder smile that I recall the best is the one on the last page of Good Behavior. It’s startling to encounter as the concluding image of a Dortmunder book (and it made me wonder if this would be the end of the series, as we discussed when that book came up here).
In retrospect, whatever Westlake may or may not have thought at the time of writing that book, Dortmunder was never going to end on a smile. Well, not his smile, anyway. More of a shrug.
Rather than a Pennsylvania hotel, I believe Westlake based the Thurbush house on Frederick Church’s Olana. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olana_State_Historic_Site)
It overlooks the Hudson and visiting it should be on everyone’s bucket list. Coolest house ever. Note that it is only about 15 or 20 miles from Westlake’s residence, so odds are he had been there and thought cleaning the place out would be a Dortmundery thing to do.
I think one solid hint to that is the fictional “Delaware River School” of painting. But I don’t think it’s just one house, anymore The Silver Chasm is just one reservation casino. Westlake also spent some time around The Delaware Water Gap, as we saw in Jimmy the Kid. Good catch, though–I was looking for Hudson River artists who had museum houses, and somehow missed Olana, though of course I’d heard of it (never been). However, nobody from Church’s family was living at Olana since the 1960’s.
He was thinking about what happened at this and certain other such house museums–the concept of how your identity could get wrapped up in a place, to the point where you lose track of who you are, and what’s really important. He might well have been thinking about whether his own home could someday be turned into some kind of museum. There are so many house museums out there, many related to people who are nothing like household words.
Another example is quite close to me–or was. John James Audubon made a fortune selling deluxe octavo editions of his bird paintings. He built himself a gentleman’s estate along the Hudson, right here in North Manhattan, which was mainly farmland back then. He called it Minniesland. And as his and his family’s fortunes failed once more, it got chipped away a bit at a time, as the city grew up around it. Until nothing was left but the house itself, surrounded by apartment buildings, inhabited by a different family.
And then they lost the house! No, I don’t mean it burned down, or was condemned. I mean the city took the house apart, board by board, and stored it, with the intention of reconstructing it somewhere else, as a museum.
And they lost the entire house! Nobody knows what happened to it. It was the Depression, might have gone for building material to make hobo shanties, or maybe firewood. No trace of it has ever been found. The house built by the most famous and influential American artist of all time. That was situated in Manhattan. Audubon’s still there, in a nearby graveyard. A stone’s throw from Ed Koch. Well, I assume that’s them buried there under those stones, but who knows by now?
Not even Donald Westlake could improve on that story. It’s almost too strange even for a Dortmunder book.
Thank’s for the D-Day quote. Cracks me up every time.
Way I see it is, the more I use his writing in place of mine, the better the review is.
Possible his estate might see it differently, but since I’m not getting paid, they got no beef. 😉
It reminds me of my favorite sentence from The Mourner:
Narrator jokes are thin on the ground in the Parker novels (especially the Original 16), but that one’s a beaut (and so is the D Day joke, of course).
I suppose that could be Parker’s thought we’re hearing there, as opposed to Stark’s, since he reportedly was there during WWII. Westlake wasn’t, of course–never saw a shot fired in anger, far as we know. But there were movies. Stark’s life experiences are presumably quite similar to Westlake’s, since he’s just Westlake’s personality and intellect, stripped of all non-essential elements.
Dortmunder served in Korea, but never brings it up. Only reason we know about it is Major Iko’s dossier. Parker thinks about his war rarely, mentions it never. Dortmunder was presumably drafted, shrugged philosophically when the notice came. But Parker would have been much too young to be drafted (no older than 13)–he would have had to volunteer, and lie about his age, which we can be sure he did quite convincingly, since it’s impossible to believe he was ever young on the inside.
But that really begs a question, doesn’t it? Patriotism wouldn’t have been the reason. Neither would money, given a GI’s pay. To prove his manhood? See the world? C’mon. What was he doing over there? What was he running from, or to?
The real explanation is no doubt prosaic–it’s a convention of the genre for the tough hero to have been a soldier at some point. Westlake liked to give his heroes brief undistinguished military backgrounds, like himself. Dortmunder would have been draft eligible during Korea, so he was sent to Korea, because he’s unlucky. But a man of Parker’s age, born in the U.S., shouldn’t have been fighting in Europe during The Big One. And Westlake knew that when he wrote The Hunter.
Maybe because Parker was linked in his mind with Ray Kelly of 361, who had just gotten back from a stint in the army. But he’s older than Ray. Too old for Korea. And too–Parker–to have avoided being involved in the most violent era of human history to date. Parker never looks for wars. They just find him. And usually end up wishing they hadn’t.
Perhaps Parker saw the Army as an enormous bank vault guarded by the sloppiest bureaucracy in the world.
But if that’s the case, why did he balk at the suggestion of knocking over an upstate air force base in peacetime? He got involved in the black market during his army service, that we know–and that was really really common, not just during WWII (still is, I’m sure, maybe less now). My dad nearly got in serious trouble while stationed in Europe during the Cold War, because he wouldn’t play ball with these guys selling PX supplies on the black market in Germany.
So maybe that was his introduction to the criminal underworld. But how he got into heisting, met guys like Joe Sheer–that’s probably a different story.
Good point. I’m venturing pretty far afield here, but Billy Wilder made a terrific (if largely forgotten) movie set amidst the black market in post-WWII Berlin, called “A Foreign Affair.” The nominal hero, an Army captain, is introduced receiving a cake from his sweetheart back home, hand-delivered by a no-nonsense visiting congresswoman. He later trades it on a black market for a mattress he can give to his Nazi-sympathizing lover, whom he’s been schtupping on the floor of her bombed-out apartment. It’s a shockingly cynical (for the time) portrait of the military immediately following the War.
Regarding your final point, I’m enormously grateful that Parker was never popular enough to warrant a prequel novel (or series of novels) on Parker’s criminal origins, written by somebody else.
I live in fear that this will happen someday. Prequels, sequels, whatever. I would assume Westlake made his opinions of this kind of thing pretty clear (he wasn’t that impressed by Ross Macdonald writing posthumous Philip Marlowe novels but calling him Lew Archer, and he wasn’t that sold on Marlowe in the first place).
It’s okay for some things–I like some of the Conan pastiches written by friends and admirers of Robert E. Howard. I guess we’d be the poorer if Batman stories had only been written by the original creators (though we’d be none the poorer if there were a whole lot fewer such stories than there are, and untold thousands more coming, never fear).
It sounds weird, but there’s something about Parker, about Stark, that’s just too pure to survive that kind of mercenary enterprise. It would ruin everything.
And of course I know A Foreign Affair–that’s forgotten? I was watching it on PBS as a kid. Love Jean Arthur. Hate her hair in that movie. And honestly, Marlene Dietrich’s picture should be in the slang dictionary under the term “good sport.” 🙂
Bad News is a very solid installment in the Dortmunder series. It’s also one where the main reason I like it is just “I really really vibed with it”.
I dug ( 😏 ) the atmosphere of the locations in this book. The wintery New York, the spooky scary cemetery, the Wallmart-esque store at the opening, the Indian Casino, the snug “Tea Cosy” inn compared with the significantly seedier motel Dortmunder and crew have to settle with later in the story. Again “I really really vibed with it”.
This might contain my favorite Dortmunder opening to date. Yes, even more than the likes of Good Behavior . First off, as I mentioned before, I really liked the location of where Dortmunder was robbing. And then, of course, there was how Dortmunder was able to get out of the sticky situation he got himself in. For someone who’s not keen on being a conman, John’s terrifyingly good at making people believe the most outlandish bullshit. Of course, that was Dortmunder getting out of trouble which is most likely a different skill set. Either way, the sheer audacity of this guy is what elevates this opening above many others.
For the first time since The Hot Rock , I got extreme Parker vibes from Dortmunder, especially in the way he first outsmarts Guilderpost and Irwin by just taking the damn coffin in the van with him. Like before with Dortmunder’s first interaction with Major Iko, you wouldn’t need to change much of this scene to make it a Parker scene. I wonder if this might have something to do with Westlake starting up Parker again after so long.
Little Feather Redcorn (for better or worse, she certainly earned the right to that name) is a really fun character. I honestly got the vibe that she would’ve fit in the Violent World of Parker just as, if not more than the Comically Criminal World of Dortmunder. Part of it is her toughness, part of it is her almost instinctual propensity for double crosses. But to be fair, neither of those traits are foreign to the Dortmunder series. No, I think what makes Little Feather especially worthy of being a Parker character is her stubborn insistence on being a Redcorn. Sure, for the most part it’s just her putting on a con, but as the book goes on, one gets the feeling it’s no longer just her need to maintain the lie. It’s like there’s this contrarian spiteful side to Little Feather later on, as if she’s going on with this façade more as a fuck you to the three tribes than a desire for a third of the casino’s profits.
A minor character that I found myself really liking was, surprisingly enough, Marjorie Dawson. Mainly because she was a capital L loser. A cog in the machine that knew what she was and had no express desire to move up in her life. And yet for all that she’s dull, she’s not dim. Certainly not as dim as others assume she is. But even after she’s proven to be more than she appears, Marjorie Dawson still has no real aspirations to move up. At most, it’s implied that the judge holds a slightly higher opinion of her than before. And you know, I really like this characterization. Yeah, Dawson doesn’t want much but she’s content with that.
I myself liked the conclusion to Bad News. I’m aware it’s unsatisfying to some, but I thought it was the only way the book could end. If nothing else, the Dortmunder portion of the ending chapter was simply perfect. Him glumly walking down the snowy streets of New York on New Years Eve, and then later giving this speech in the mobile home:
“I’m gonna forget the whole thing, if I possibly can. Tomorrow, we start a whole year, and it’s gonna be a better year, I just believe it is, and I’m gonna start it by going over to Jersey and pick up some cameras I left there.”
10/10, no notes.
Now, for the heist portion of this book. I’m of two minds, here. On the one hand, I was rather surprised and eventually slightly impressed that Westlake was seemingly forgoing Stan Murch and the beloved O.J. Bar and Grille for this outing. It was a rather bold move…aaaaaaand then Dortmunder gets the opportunity to pull a heist and here come in Stan Murch, his mom, and Rollo and the O.J. and its many regulars. I’m not gonna lie, I initially felt a tad disappointed we were going back to formula after the first two halves of Bad News indicated we wouldn’t be this time.
That. Being. Said. As the heist subplot gets going, I quickly fell in love. It’s short, surprisingly sweet in moments, and of course it ends with the perfect punchline. So yeah, overall, the heist subplot gets a pass.
One final thing I wanted to discuss and it’s a complete nitpick. So, Anne Marie wants to throw together a Thanksgiving dinner for her, Kelp, Dortmunder, May, Tiny, and J.C., ok right on…and Kelp apparently doesn’t know what a thanksgiving dinner is? Like, I can buy Kelp not celebrating Thanksgiving, but with how ingrained the holidat is in society, you’d think he’d at least have a vague idea of what it is. Especially since Kelp is supposed to be the most sociable one of the group. I mean, ok, it’s clearly a joke meant to poke fun at grumpy New Yorkers, but I find myself more confused than laughing.
Overall, though, Bad News is a pretty damn good installment. It’s not as high quality as some previous Dortmunders (nor is it ambitious as other installments), but it’s a solid fun time and sometimes that’s all I need.
Here I was, thinking you didn’t like Dortmunder anymore, and you give Bad News a 10. A solid 7 for me. There’s much here to like, but need to leave some room up top. I mean, that would make Jimmy the Kid a 15, at least.
It’s not that Dortmunder is a good con man. It’s that nobody would ever look at the guy and think “Master Criminal.” In an odd sort of way, his face really is his fortune. He just has to think of a pathetic enough sob story, and people will buy it.
Setting the scene is something Westlake worked hard at. The odder, the better. I actually read The Accidental Tourist. It’s not my usual thing, but I saw the movie, got a mad crush on Amy Wright, decided to try the book–damn, they really do adapt some novels almost to the letter. Just none by Westlake. Wait, did I read the book first? It really doesn’t matter.
To be a reader of fiction is to be an armchair traveler, as opposed to a traveling armchair. Now this would normally mean very romantic locales, but what Westlake does is make us enjoy very prosaic oddball locales, perhaps in our own backyard, and if not, there are places just like them in our various backyards. Places we might have driven past a hundred times, and never stopped to enjoy them. He makes us stop and enjoy them.
Little Feather, the professional card dealer, was dealt a very bad hand by life. You see what I mean about the Patented Westlake Implicit Pun? I didn’t even catch that one until just now. But there’s not an ounce of whine there. (Maybe a few ounces of wine, now and again). She’s going to get her own back, come what may.
It’s very very hard to get accepted into a tribe. For good reasons, I might add. They don’t really believe in genetics, per se. (More wasichu trickery).
Her actual DNA test would show she’s part Indian, but that’s not good enough (ask Elizabeth Warren). Has to prove she’s the daughter of a specific tribal member. And you’re right, she really is not the least bit concerned with the sanctity of the Pottaknobbee (who in fact don’t exist anymore, and never existed at all in our world, more’s the pity).
My take here is, much as she’d never admit it, she just wants to come in out of the cold, and have a family, now that she’s of a certain age, and has seen enough of the outside world to know she don’t like it much. Never mind if it’s her real family or not. She’ll bring her experience and sang froid (I don’t know how that translates into Pottaknobbee) to the tribal table, and it’s not like Indian tribes didn’t used to ‘adopt’ outsiders all the time (sometimes without asking permission first). She’ll contribute. And when old age comes, she’ll have a fire to sit by. (And in upstate New York, you need a fire, trust me. Okay, not that kind, but one must needs be philosophical in the world of Dortmunder.)
Marjorie is a loser, but she’s a professional. And in the world of Westlake, that’s what matters. She’s not a bad lawyer, just an unlucky one. Which I think we can say with authority is the only kind of lawyer that would get treated sympathetically in a Dortmunder novel. (There’s another one much along the same lines coming, by the bye).
Your experience with this book is, I think, fairly typical of the latter Dortmunders. They take a while to lure you in, break down your resistance. He’s taking his time with them. He knows there’s not going to be that many more. (Just four more after this one). There’s nothing that really needs to be said with them. But much that’s still worth saying. And might one inquire, who has complained about the ending?
I think we can assume Andy Kelp didn’t have anything resembling a traditional upbringing. I mean, at least Dortmunder grew up in an orphanage. Andy has family, we know because of Victor, but given his lifelong interests, unlikely there were big Thanksgiving Dinners, or if there were, he just wasn’t paying attention. This is along the lines of Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet, being mildly interested to hear from Watson that the earth is round. He went to good schools, read voraciously. It just wasn’t relevant to him, and the irrelevant isn’t retained. I would assume that’s the point.
Obviously there has to be a heist. And just for once, absolutely nothing goes wrong. For which Dortmunder & Co. are truly thankful. Pass the potatoes, please?
At least give me time to sort my own plate, geez!
Anyway, I should clarify that I rated the ending a perfect 10. The book itself is more a solid 8 for me…which is still higher than your rating but nevertheless, a straight record is a happy record.
Of course, I’m not exempt from misreading stuff. You had titled your portion of the ending “A not entirely satisfying conclusion, except for Benny Whitefish (lucky horse)”. This led me to believe that the ending wasn’t popular with fans. That you may have been referring to the in universe character’s satisfaction rates was completely lost on me.
Fair enough on Kelp not knowing about Thanksgiving dinners. In retrospect, that’s not the most outlandish thing to happen in this installment alone.
And yeah, you’re ultimately right that there has to be a heist with the OJ and the Murch’s and so on and so forth. And hell, as Anthony pointed out, it’s a good formula so why not use it? That being said, I think my initial quibble had to do with this subplot happening so late in the game. Had it happened much earlier, I doubt I’d have a problem with it at all.
Anthony jokes but I could actually see a Dortmunder sitcom set largely at the OJ working, with most of the crime shit happening off screen as part of the joke. It’d be kinda like what they did with The Tick in the early 2000’s with Patrock Warburton. I mean, ok, that didn’t last very long but it sure made for a cult hit!
Ah! Snark-fail! I’m well familiar with it. But yes, I meant for the characters, and in contrast to the previous ending, where everybody walked away with bulging wallets. (I assume in Benny’s case, something else was bulging).
I liked that the heist was essentially done on the fly, and as is often the case in this subgenre, the less planned job goes better, which I tend to think is not the case with real heists, but no doubt there are exceptions to every rule. Authors telling this type of story play with audience expectations. If it’s a perfectly planned job, something will go wrong, because otherwise it’s boring. If it’s slapped together at the last minute, somehow they pull it off without a hitch.
And since the real object of the heist is genetic material, it does have to come late in the game. And while they ultimately lose the casino money, Little Feather gets a home, The Dortmunder Gang gets a bunch of old tchotchkes to fence, and Benny Whitefish gets laid. Dortmunder gets the satisfaction of a job well-done, which does matter to him. And we get the satisfaction of finding out Gladys Murch has a heart. Not that we ever doubted it. Much.
Yes, I’d call the ending quite satisfying for the reader, and am glad to know there’s not some Dortmunder Discussion Board I wasn’t aware of where people nitpick the books endlessly. That’s my job. When I can summon the energy to do it. I am, by the way, now rereading Call Me A Cab. For what I believe is the fourth time. You said something about plates?
The current 6 to 10 episode streaming series seems to be the best format for some worthy writers and actors to finally give Dortmunder and gang the on-screen depiction they deserve. Alas, will never happen. And if it does, no high hopes here that they will get it right. Can’t do a book a season without padding the plots with extraneous crap, and the books are too stand-alone to be combined effectively. Although I do like the framing device of all the participants jammed into the back room of the O.J….
I think the real problem is, so much of what we love about the books is Westlake’s authorial voice, and barring an offscreen narrator, that’s not going to be there.
Mind you, some adaptations do that. Little Children, adapted from Todd Perrotta’s novel, comes to mind. They hired the Frontline narrator guy, Will Lyman, to reproduce whole chunks of Perrotta’s third person prose, to give the proceedings a sort of straight-faced mockumentary feel. Quite effective, as I recall. (Mainly what I recall is Kate Winslet getting banged by Patrick Wilson in the laundry room, reportedly giving the girl a bruised heinie in service of her art, but never mind that now, wonder if that’s on Youtube…?).
It’s rarely done, though. So something that was meant to be interspersed with wry commentary has to be taken straight up. Something’s always lost in translation. My problem with the Dortmunder and Parker adaptations is how rarely anything is gained. Endless subtractions, with few worthy additions.
Here would be a worthy experiment. An eight episode take on Jimmy the Kid. Episode 1 is the set-up with Kelp describing Child Heist to the gang. Episode 2 is all Parker. Episode 3 is all Dortmunder covering the same events as Episode 2. Remaining episodes alternate – either all Parker or all Dortmunder covering the same material. Appropriately distinct tones. Writers free to flesh out dialogue but not allowed to interject any plot twists not in the novel.
The problem is, though, the Parker segments are extremely minimal, pretty much by design. If we’re doing a multiple episode show then our hypothetical writers would have to add in show-exclusive plot twists.
Okay, but a lot of Dortmunder readers aren’t Stark readers, and vice versa. Most people, sad to say, are neither, in spite of the popularity of both series. It’s a lot to explain. And as the saying goes, when you’re explaining you’re losing. (Works about as well for storytelling as politics).
I’d buy it in the alternate universe where there has already been a Parker series, maybe still ongoing, and it’s such a hit they decide to try Dortmunder as well. If such a universe exists, show me the inter dimensional portal.
Maybe too nitpicky–people can pick up a lot from context when something is done just right. I’m just not so confident it could be done that right. So you’ve got not one but two fictional heister-verses to get wrong. At the same time.
I think we’ve seen enough failed standalone adaptations of Parker and Dortmunder to know–all or nothing at all. Maybe that’s the point Mr. Westlake was making when he said they couldn’t use Parker’s name unless they agreed to adapt all the books (before he’d written all the books). He agreed to let them use Dortmunder’s name, and what happened? Robert Fucking Redford as Dortmunder. And that wasn’t even the worst-case scenario (when it comes to Hollywood, there really isn’t a worst-case scenario these days–it can always be worse).
HG’s point is also valid. You can’t do a whole episode of just JTK Parker, because that’s not really Parker. It’s deliberately written as a rather threadbare pastiche of the Stark novels–the Stark of Dortmunder’s universe isn’t the real Stark either. By the time he wrote JTK, Westlake couldn’t get the Stark voice right anymore, and I still think there’s a chance he was recycling one of his failed attempts to bring the series back.
The idea is ironic counterpoint, and counterpoint only works if you have the original point to contrast and compare. Meaning it has to be intercut with the Dortmunder segments. Maybe do the Parker segments in black and white.
Or maybe just read the books again. 😉
At this point, Dortmunder novels are comfortable old sweaters. The heists, or at least the audacity of the heists, are no longer the main theme. Rather, they happen only to allow transitions to and from various snippets putting Dortmunder et al into familiar modern life scenarios in order for the author to mine a few laughs about prevailing societal trends. Stark becomes curious as to how Parker will react going back into prison. Westlake looks for the laughs when Dortmunder has no choice but to stay in a B&B.
Running gags a’plenty; e.g., obligatory scenes of Dortmunder confronting whatever the latest technology is, O.J. regulars proving they predated Norm and Cliff, funny car names. Perhaps Westlake staved off boredom just coming up with new ways to describe Tiny (“like a tank, but harder” is my favorite) and the hallway leading the back room of the O.J.
Somewhere before Bad News the Dortmunder series became the novel equivalent of a well written and produced sitcom. Sure, it’s formula, but it’s well done formula and contains enough gems to merit catching the next episode.
A sitcom vibe at times, but more than a sitcom, in that it does really sharp trenchant social commentary without getting into that “A Very Special Episode” vibe. Westlake doesn’t have much more to say about the characters themselves (all the major players have been asssembled, no I didn’t forget Judson, though at times I’d like to), but they make a good basis to lure people in, so that he can dust off the old soapbox–without getting preachy.
The sweater seems damned itchy to me. Because there’s always got to be something to irritate Dortmunder, if he’s going to start strutting his stuff in earnest.
Sitcoms are capable of trenchant social commentary. And there have been one or two shows that have either sidestepped the maudlin when sniffing around sensitive matters (Barney Miller, say) or, better, simply avoided sensitive story lines. Nobody watches The Big Bang Theory to suffer through stuff like a character dying of cancer. Similarly, characters don’t die, get raped, or suffer other “very special” fates in the Dortmunder novels (one death in the whole series, and Mr. Jimson certainly didn’t emit very special episode vibes). At worst, they get irked by having to suffer fools ungladly. (And, no, it is not my intention is to elevate TBBT to the same rarified atmosphere occupied by the Dortmunder books. I’m just noting a few purely mechanical similarities).
And since I maintain the analogy, I am pleased to note another sitcom trope: I think Westlake jumped the shark with the knights in armor ending to Nobody’s Perfect. But everybody survived to entertain us another day.