“It’s so hard to keep track of an individual death, isn’t it?” she said. “There are so many deaths, so many injustices, they all blend together.”
“Well, that depends how closely they affect you.”
She smiled; she had bad teeth. “That’s right,” she said. “It isn’t morality at all, it’s personal convenience, personal emotions. None of us really care how many strangers get killed.”
Well, if you’re going to a cocktail party you have to expect cocktail party conversations. I said, “Naturally, it affects you more if it happens to somebody you know.” And even as I was saying it, I knew I was giving this girl an irresistible opportunity to quote John Donne.
Which she took. I received the tolling of the bell with my best glazed smile, and she said, “But the point really is morality, isn’t it? People are liberal or conservative these days, they believe in women’s rights or property rights or whatever, some of them are even still ethical, but nobody’s actually moral any more. Nobody hates sin.” Then she nodded, looking amused at herself, and said, “See? People smile if you even use the word sin.”
Was I smiling? Yes, I was. Wiping it off, I tried another catch phrase: “The only sin is getting caught.”
Nobody knew what to make of this book when it came out, and to the extent anyone remembers it, they still don’t. It isn’t a novel. It isn’t an anthology of previously published material; short stories, essays, whatever–it contains two stories, neither of which had ever seen the light of day before. A farcical novella about a critic/murderer who turns detective (while still committing murders), followed by a longish short story about a sailor who finds out his ex-wife is a movie star, goes to see her, then goes back to being a sailor. They’re both written in the first person by Donald E. Westlake, and that’s about all they have in common, aside from being in the same book. Or so it seems, anyway.
‘Newgate Callendar,’ still writing his pseudonymous crime fiction column for the New York Times that he inherited from Anthony Boucher, was baffled. He liked the first story a lot–it was what he and most people expected from Westlake–a funny mystery. But the second story, which he admitted was well-written, had no murder mystery in it (well, no dead body, put it that way), no heists, no illegal activity of any kind. It’s not crime fiction by any accepted definition. “What it is doing in this book is anybody’s guess” he wrote. Well, we’re anybody, so let’s guess.
Westlake’s work for M. Evans & Co. was eclectic, to say the least. You really never knew what was coming next. He published ten books with them (not including the western/crime hybrid he co-wrote with Brian Garfield). Except for the two Dortmunders, no one book much resembled any of the others–but they were all at least nominally in the genre he was known for, with the exception of the political thriller Ex Officio, his first book for them, which he published under another name, so nobody got confused by that.
Westlake was producing much less by this time, and the previous year he’d come out with Dancing Aztecs, a sprawling comedy epic, which must have taken longer to write than his usual thing, and had perhaps depleted his energies somewhat.
He’d finished with Parker, Grofield, Tobin–couldn’t really write as Stark or Coe anymore, at least for the time being. He was probably enjoying the novelty of just being one person for a while. But it was perhaps harder for him to write as much as he used to with only one voice, and the publishing industry still didn’t like putting out too many books by the same author in one year.
He’d just about run out his string with the ‘Nephew’ books–only so many viable variations in that story. His personal life was more complicated than ever, with two ex-wives, four growing sons, and a new relationship that was heading towards a third and final marriage. It has to have cut into his writing time at least a bit.
You could say that he simply owed M. Evans a book for that year (1977), so he foisted some odds and ends on them–but he gave them a Dortmunder later that same year. Hard to believe this was a mere contractual obligation volume–particularly since he published nothing with them in the next two years, only to finish off with one last rather head-scratching heist story set in Europe.
Westlake’s relationships with publishers often seem to have soured towards the end, and he’d head off to the next one. You get a shift in personnel at the top, a change in priorities, and all of a sudden the rapport isn’t there anymore. Or maybe his agent got him into another bidding war. He’d had an amazing run there, but it was winding down, along with the 70’s. The 80’s would be–problematic. But we’ll get there.
The title itself is odd–Enough what? The first story isn’t really long enough for a hardcover mystery, so maybe the second is just to pad things out, so the book buyer would feel it was worth the $7.95 pricetag. I love the cartoon-strip artwork on the cover of the first edition, but it says absolutely nothing about the contents.
None of the covers ever managed to address both stories, which demonstrates an underlying problem of the book. How many people looking for a nice little comic crime novel really want to stick around for a somber, poignant, and impossible-to-pigeonhole story about a sailor and his starlet ex?
The dedication reads “For Avram Avakian, fondly, this two-reeler.” Avakian being the guy who made a workmanlike but rather uninspired film from Westlake’s screenplay for Cops and Robbers, which Westlake later turned into an excellent novel. Westlake felt that Avakian was a brilliant film editor who didn’t possess the full skill set to be a successful director.
The opening quote is from Ambrose Bierce (a favorite writer of Westlake’s, which is an interesting coincidence, since I was mildly obsessed with Bierce as a kid, and didn’t know Westlake was similarly afflicted until well after I started reading him)–it’s from The Devil’s Dictionary–“Enough: too much.” (Or perhaps, two much?)
And then there’s a quote from Thomas DeQuincey (who I keep meaning to read), specifically geared towards the first story, which basically says if a man commits murder, this may lead to worse sins, like bad manners.
Allow me to theorize (like anyone can stop me). He normally gave M. Evans two books a year–maybe they didn’t insist on it, but he wasn’t getting paid for books he didn’t produce. Dancing Aztecs had, of necessity, been his sole contribution for ’76. He had a Dortmunder for ’77, but he needed something else.
He had an idea for a mystery novel, but it wasn’t ‘enough’ for a full-length book. And at some point in time–maybe recently, maybe years before–he’d turned out a short story, that he liked, but couldn’t find a buyer for, because it wasn’t what people expected from him, and it was too long for a magazine. He talked M. Evans into publishing them both in the same volume. That way with the Dortmunder published shortly afterwards he’d have two books for ’77–not much, for him–but enough. And then he published no books at all for over two years. Well, I didn’t say it would be a flawless theory.
We can’t discount the possibility that Westlake did think there was a link between these two stories, different as they are. That one served as counterpoint to the other, and of course they’re both about identity, because that’s what he writes about. Probably a few years earlier, he’d have published the second story under a pseudonym, but he was fresh out of pseudonyms. Maybe he wanted to remind people yet again that Westlake wasn’t just the comic caper guy.
And maybe I’ve speculated long enough about Enough. I debated about whether to review the two stories in it together or separately, and mainly decided on the latter because in subsequent editions they were often published separately, particularly overseas.
The second story actually got a film adaptation, many years later, in France–which must have come as a surprise to Mr. Westlake. It would have come as a surprise to ‘Newgate Callendar’ as well, but he’d died the year before. Really no surprise a part-time mystery reviewer and full-time music critic liked the first story better–the protagonist is, after all, a critic who solves mysteries, while bedding luscious ladies, outsmarting (and cuckolding) befuddled homicide detectives. Seriously, show me a critic who’ll give that story a bad review.
Carey Thorpe is another of Westlake’s unapologetic cads–in many ways reminiscent of Art Dodge in Two Much. But he has a somewhat more conventional profession–he’s a film critic, moderately successful, who writes semi-scholarly articles for various obscure film journals, as well as reviewing recent releases for a small Manhattan weekly called The Kips Bay Voice (for those who are not Gothamites, Kips Bay is a neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan, just below 34th, and since the British used it to land their invading forces during the Revolutionary War, has never been known for much of anything other than absurdly high rents).
As we meet him, he is standing over the dead body of one of his two girlfriends, Laura Penney. They had quarreled, and he hit her, and she hit her head on her own coffee table, and is no more among the living. If this were the vibrant J. Morgan Cunningham writing this, he’d say the manner of her passing was almost a cliché, but this is a murder mystery novel, let’s remember.
Thing is, nobody knew he and Laura were sexually intimate–they were seen at various social events, screenings and such, but because he has a somewhat more serious girlfriend, Kit Markowitz, and he wanted to date both of them at once without either of them knowing, he’s created the illusion that when he’s seen with the other it’s only for the purposes of having somebody on his arm at the aforementioned social events. The quarrel that led to Laura’s death was a byproduct of this deception.
Carey, who is separated from his wife Shirley (only an offstage character in this play), doesn’t sound to be all that much of a hunk, but he’s clever and charming enough to talk his way into bed with any number of desirable females, though talking his way out again is a more challenging proposition, as many a rake has learned.
He’s been under a lot of stress from work and multiple bedmates and insufficient funds and an estranged wife who wants his head on a platter (which ties neatly into the insufficient funds thing), and he’s been taking a lot of valium, which allows him a somewhat more abstracted view of his increasingly dire situation (maybe a bit too abstracted).
But even when he’s not popping pills, he’s never going to be the soul of compassion. His main agenda here is going to be to make sure he doesn’t take the rap for Laura’s death, so he tidies up the crime scene a bit, and makes his exit. When two police detectives greet him at Laura’s apartment (he’s keeping the date he knows she put in her appointment book, because it would look suspicious if he didn’t), and inform him of her demise, he is suitably horrified–and rather surprised to find that as the investigation proceeds, neither of them seriously suspects him. They’re nothing like the police detectives in the movies he reviews.
Carey thinks of everything in terms of movies–when somebody buzzes him into Laura’s apartment, and just for a moment he thinks she’s alive, he starts envisioning Gene Tierney. The first detective, named Bray, reminds him of Dana Andrews–he wonders if that makes him Clifton Webb. The second detective, Fred Staples, doesn’t remind him of anybody, but he, surprisingly, is a fan of Carey’s reviews in the Kip’s Bay Voice. He says his wife loves them too. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
For a short book, this one has a lot of plot twists, and I don’t have the patience to cover them all. I’ll list a few–there’s a blackmailing private detective (working for a company called Tobin-Global, and let me just say, this story makes me miss Tucker Coe very badly), who was tailing Carey on behalf of his wife, and wants ten grand to keep quiet. Carey liquidates every asset he has, then actually robs a bank to get most of the rest–then realizing the detective has set himself up as an ideal suspect that Carey could finger in turn, makes him give the money back.
As if things weren’t complicated enough already, Carey is rather effortlessly seduced by Fred Staples’ outwardly placid and domestic blonde wife Patricia, while Carey is screening Gaslight for her (Gaslight becomes their code word for sex). Contrary to his first impressions, she turns out to be a total narcissist, and a really incredible lay. He knows this is a bad idea, screwing the wife of a detective investigating a murder he himself committed, but he just can’t seem to stop acting on bad ideas.
In the meantime, the private detective (who reminds Carey of Martin Balsalm in Psycho), unwilling to play the patsy, refuses to go away quietly, and you know that recurring line from the Parker novels about how you shouldn’t make murder the answer to everything? Seems like Carey never read any Parker novels, and that line never made it into any of the movie versions. And private detectives rarely come off well in Donald Westlake novels.
So is that the end of his problems? Alas, no. Because the detectives suspect his favorite girlfriend, Kit Markowitz, of murdering Laura in a fit of jealous rage. She doesn’t have an alibi, and once they question her, the indignant Kit decides to play girl detective–she even throws a party (with Carey’s help) where she invites all the potential suspects.
That’s where the little exchange up top occurs, Carey talking to a woman who showed up with two gay male friends–who just got married in San Francisco–interesting little bit of social data there, we tend to forget that gay marriage was going on for decades, with varying degrees of legality, long before it became a major national issue. The dialogue rather reminded me of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which only goes to show that Carey is not the only one out there who is constantly making connections with movies. God is a luxury Carey can’t afford either, not that he ever brings up religion.
Unfortunately for Kit, she turns out to be a pretty good detective after all, and she figures out who the killer is–and rather inexplicably, chooses to tell him that in private. Now this is a major problem with the story. Are we supposed to believe the otherwise bright and perceptive Kit is so engrossed in her role as detective that she thinks Carey will simply turn himself in, or the police will break in just in the nick of time–or that she’ll have a hold on him, to keep him from straying in future? None of the above happens, and he feels just terrible about what he does next, but in for a dime…..
So this is all entertaining enough, but frankly it’s rather sub-par Westlake, full of characters that are intentionally tissue-paper thin (this is a farce, after all, but Westlake doesn’t normally use that as an excuse for poor characterization). And yet for all that, it’s still worth reading, and it’s worth asking why.
The central gimmick, what sets the story apart, is that in the midst of trying to avoid being identified as the murderer, and committing two further murders (and a minor bank heist) towards that end, Carey finds out he’s a far better detective than he ever was a film critic.
Fred Staples is just delighted to pal around with (as he sees it) a celebrity, and Carey wants to keep an eye on him and his partner to make sure they don’t get the right idea about him. So he accompanies them on another case, and he just happens to solve it–in that way that fictional detectives in bad mystery stories so often do. Just spots something the professionals missed.
It’s not something he particularly wanted to happen, it’s not something he ever aspired to do. He just wants to attend film screenings, write articles, go to bed with pretty girls, and live a generally shallow meaningless pleasure-filled existence, like any civilized man who reads Esquire.
But having done it once, to Fred’s awestruck delight, Carey finds himself in demand as a consulting detective. And over and over, he spots that one little clue that cracks the case. He has a gift for both committing murders and solving them. Go figure.
Now if he actually wanted this to happen, it would be impossibly contrived and far-fetched (like most detective novels), but because it’s just something Carey finds himself doing reflexively, more or less because it’s so damned obvious to him that he can’t keep from speaking up, and because, after all, it’s what detectives are always doing in the movies, you sort of let him slide, because you want to see how far Westlake can stretch this gag out. And he can stretch it pretty damn far.
First he solves the mytery of a murdered director, shot while he was screening his own film. Turns out the killer was an aspiring screenwriter whose work was used without attribution. He immediately confesses, as fingered killers so often do in mystery stories, because trials are so messy and time-consuming for dramatic purposes.
There’s this leitmotif of otherwise sensible people behaving like cheap genre tropes, when they really ought to know better, because they, like Carey, think that’s how you’re supposed to behave in this type of situation–the movies have programmed them. Life imitating bad art, badly.
Then there’s another murder, this one a gay travel writer murdered by a lover–Carey realizes the man put a coded message into what he was writing at his desk when he realized he was in danger. See, the murdered copy-writer refers to Antigua as being right next to St. Martin. They check a map.
When he removed his finger, I bent to read the lettering: “Anguilla.”
“Anguilla, Antigua.” Staples shrugged, saying, “He was upset from the argument, that’s all, he just got mixed up.”
“Does that make sense?” I studied Ailburg’s writing again, shaking my head. “No, it doesn’t.” This was his job, he knew what island was where. And look how he broke that sentence, starting a new line after the word ‘charming.’ It looks awkward.”
Staples said, “I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
Only because you’ve never read Under An English Heaven, officer.
Then there’s a seeming suicide that Carey realizes was a murder (see if you can spot the clue), but he decides not to finger the killer for personal reasons (this one’s a bit of a reference to The Sincerest Form of Flattery, a Westlake short story that appeared in The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution).
And finally, a classic locked door mystery at the consulate for some tiny obscure nonexistent Eastern European nation, and I have to confess, Westlake plays fair with all these mysteries, puts in enough information for the reader to solve them all, and I didn’t solve any of them–even on the second reading. Well, I remembered whodunnit, but I didn’t remember how Carey figured it out.
(All the chapters in this book have mystery novel titles, even when they don’t have an actual mystery in them–The Adventure of the Missing R–The Problem of the Copywriter’s Island–The Chainlock Mystery–The Death of the Party–see if you can guess which of these features Carey solving a murder mystery, and which is just him dealing with the complications attendant to his own personal murders).
So Carey’s rather enjoying being the criminal sociopath’s answer to Ellery Queen, but he’s gotten so wrapped up in playing detective/murderer that he misses the obvious denouement. Fred finds out Carey’s been diddling the missus. So he frames Carey with planted evidence. For murders Carey actually committed.
Fred does not know, nor will he ever, that Carey actually is the murderer–nor does he care who actually did the killings. He thinks he’s just being petty. Being framed for something you actually did is an old obsession with Westlake, ever since The Affair of the Purloined Microscope (see The Getaway Car). It’s just so–unprofessional. Detectives should care about their craft. Carey rubs it in just how much better a detective he is, by pointing out an obvious (to him) clue in that one case he’d decided not to solve–something Fred missed entirely. Fred is most admiring of Carey’s sagacity, but what’s that got to do with the fact that the man had sex with his wife?
So Carey is in Fred’s car, going to the inevitable Station House, knowing that he’s going to prison, because the only way he can prove he was framed is to admit his actual guilt. He’ll have to plead guilty, get the lightest sentence possible, and hope to rejoin the civilized world someday. And there’s every indication in the book that he will do that, and he might be a more successful film critic than ever–notoriety will bring him a wider readership. But it’s still so unfair. All he did was kill three people, and he didn’t mean to kill the first one, and the other two were just–loose ends. He’s guilty, but he’s not the least bit guilt-ridden. He’s only sorry he committed the sin of getting caught.
Westlake was experimenting with a very detached yet whimsical tone in this novel, and it doesn’t entirely work. And it doesn’t entirely fail. It’s one of those middling efforts, cleverly worked out, fun to read, and easily forgotten.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the very detailed knowledge of film that Westlake reveals–he probably could have been a fairly successful film critic, but I have this feeling he wouldn’t have been a very enthusiastic one. He can’t really make Carey live and breathe the way his best characters do, because he can’t identify with somebody who’d spend his life writing about movies–even writing smutty greeting cards would be more creative, because they’d at least be your smutty jokes. Movies are fun and all, but are they worth all that analysis? Is anything? (Yes, I do seriously wonder what he’d have thought about this blog).
In his capsule review of this same story, Ethan Iverson quoted a passage I surely would have used myself if he hadn’t beaten me to it–it’s an interview Carey does with some aging Hollywood director, one of those guys who made a bunch of classic films and never wrote the scripts for any of them, but he still gets the credit, and the money, and a gorgeous young thing to keep him warm in his declining years, because that’s how it works in Hollywood.
And it really sums up that mixture of affection and disdain Westlake always had towards the movies–how well a good filmmaker can tell a story, and how helpless he is without a good script, and yet look who gets all the worship and acclaim in that business. How can you say it’s your work when so many other people contributed? And how could somebody who has decided to just live in the reflected glow of that unreal medium ever know himself? Carey Thorpe got caught up in unreality, captured by it, and was ultimately undone by it. And yet it really doesn’t matter, because there doesn’t seem to have been much of a person there to start with. That’s the weakness of the book.
I think Westlake might have been influenced in the writing of this one by Charles Willeford’s The Burnt Orange Heresy, which is about an art critic, and which is roughly ten times the novel this is (and Westlake would have agreed). Willeford wrote a lot less than Westlake, and he had to make his shots count more. Westlake, having so much more ammo, could afford a few misses.
But while it’s not the kind of story we remember him for, the second part of this two-part tome was by no means a miss. It’s a palpable hit, and ‘Newgate Callendar’ should have seen that, but let’s just say Westlake had a point about critics. Yes, me too. It’s a fair cop, Mr. Westlake. But being a mere amateur, typing all this nonsense for absolutely no monetary compensation at all, I can always plead insanity. I’ll be out in two years, tops.
The Westlake Review 