Metaphysical Coincidence: Brian Garfield, 1939-2018.

The English call them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of suspense.

They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don’t fall into restrictive categories. And they’re not circumscribed by artificial systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance. The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury, Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake. (Now there’s a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was a first novel.

The game’s object: To perch the reader on edge — to keep him flipping pages to find out what’s going to happen next.

From Ten Rules For Suspense Fiction, by Brian Garfield

Not long ago, I happened to catch a bit of the original Death Wish movie on cable.  I realized I’d never read the original novel by Brian Garfield, whose Hopscotch (made into what I consider a much better movie) I reviewed here a few years back.  I also reviewed Garfield’s Gangway, but solely because he co-wrote it with Westlake (that’s the back dust jacket image you see up top).  And of course The Stepfather, which was co-produced by Garfield, was his concept (and Carol Lefcourt’s), but Westlake ended up writing the screenplay.  It is by far the most successful of their collaborations.

So I checked, and yes, Death Wish is e-vailable.  So is the follow-up Garfield wrote to it, simultaneously protesting and exploiting the international box office success of the film adaptation of his first novel, that he despised on many levels.  (Which is probably the main reason both are e-vailable.)

So what the hell?  Got both, read both.  Finished them up a week or two back.  Figured there was an article or two in it.  You may have noticed that in my last article I made some reference to this.  I posted that article on New Year’s Eve.  I did not remember that was the ten year anniversary of Mr. Westlake’s demise.  Nor did I know it was the two day anniversary (give or take) of Mr. Garfield’s.  Found out yesterday.

He went on December 28th.  Made it to 79, so he beat Westlake by a few years. (Not the only time Garfield ever beat Westlake, going by another photo of one of their many poker games.)

Garfield was a relative late-comer to the Westlake inner circle, who didn’t cut his teeth in the sleaze paperback industry, or by writing science fiction and crime fic for the pulps.  Nor to the best of my knowledge did he ever know Scott Meredith. But he got his first novel published at 18, which beats Westlake by quite a few years.  Though he was also born in Gotham, he ended up way out west, in more ways than one.  Sometimes under an alias, cuz he was one bad hombre.

This was the main professional point of difference between them, since the only western Westlake (generally averse to period writing) ever published was the one they worked on together, and we can guess whose idea that was.

So crime was their meeting point–but with a difference.  No heists for Garfield, no comic capering, no hapless Nephews fleeing irate mobsters.  Needing a back-up for the shrinking westerns market, Garfield didn’t write straight-up crime fiction, or classic mysteries, cozy or hard-boiled.  He wrote ‘suspense.’  And what the hell is that?  See up top.  (Great article.  I guess it wouldn’t be fair to blame him for Grisham.  That’d be like blaming Westlake for all the hacks who’ve gotten rich copying him.)

Garfield’s two best-known novels are respectively about an accountant who moonlights at hunting muggers and a forcibly retired CIA agent baiting his former employers into hunting him.  They live up to his suspense writer’s credo in spades.  They are also complex insightful looks into the psyches of men who stray from the beaten path, which is what Westlake would have liked about them.  They are, first and foremost, about human beings, and the formula is adjusted to that end.

They both bear a considerable debt to Westlake.   Hopscotch in particular goes out of its way to reference him.  And in reading Death Wish, I found myself convinced that Westlake had, in his way, returned the favor (he name-checked Garfield more than once, particularly in some of the Dortmunders, but that’s not what I mean.  Get to that later.)

Garfield, like Westlake, was fascinated by identity, though the theme is less defined in his work (not that I’ve read enough of it to definitively opine on that). He also had a deep respect for professionals, and a curiosity about what happens to them when they have to redefine themselves in some way, find a new mode of living, working.

Garfield, like Westlake, saw many of his books adapted into films.  Sometimes by him, usually not.  He had a closer connection to Hollywood (Westlake never seems to have aspired to producing anything), and that came with both pluses and minuses.  There’s only so much of yourself to go around in one lifetime.

If Garfield’s literary oeuvre is less impressive than Westlake’s overall–I’d have to say it is, and of course I would–it’s partly because he had fingers in a few too many pies.  Jack of many trades, master of most, he fell short of supreme mastery as a novelist.  (I’d say the same for William Goldman, and he was arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, as well as a magnificent novelist, but again, spread himself too thin.  The novel is the harshest of all mistresses.)

Garfield made his choices, and they may well have been the right ones–for him. Posterity will have its say, but point is, it will have something to say about Brian Garfield. He made his mark and then some.

Most of all like Westlake, he never retired (though his last book came out in 2008–nonfiction, and I keep meaning to read it).  I assume health was part of the reason for that, not taking it easy.  What can such as they retire to?  You keep going until you can’t.  Nobody runs forever.  Just like nobody stops doing what they love to do.  Unless they have a death wish.

My focus here is Westlake (it has been known to blur at times).  I’m going to review Death Wish.  And Death Sentence.  And try to put them in a Westlakeian context.  But the most important task of any reviewer is to ask the question–who wrote this?  If a novel doesn’t tell you who the novelist is, the novelist didn’t do his or her job.

Brian Garfield always got the job done.  And reading him at his best is like holding a tiger by the tail.  He and the tiger were old friends, don’t you know.

Review: Hopscotch

“Our kind has been on this planet for perhaps two million years,” Yaskov said, “and during all but one percent of that period, we lived as hunters.  The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man.  The one most rewarding.  It was your way of life but your government took it away from you.  I offer to return it to you.”

“It’s self-destructive lunacy, is what it is.”

“Well my dear Miles, you can’t lead our kind of life and expect to live forever.  But at least we can be alive for a time.”

“It’s all computers now.   World War Three will be known as the Paperkrieg.  There’s no need for my kind of toy gladiator any more.  We’re as obsolete as fur-trapping explorers.”

“It’s hardly gone that far, old friend.  Otherwise, why should I be making you this offer?”

“Because you can’t face obsolescence–you won’t acknowledge it the way I’ve done.  You’re as redundant as I am–you just don’t know it yet.”  Kendig smiled meaninglessly.  “We’ve seven’d out.  All of us.”

“I don’t know the expression, but you make it sound clear enough.”

“It’s to do with a dice game.”

This is going to be one of my shorter reviews, and it could be argued that I’m violating the mission statement of this blog by posting it at all.  The book being reviewed here was not written by Donald E. Westlake, but rather by his longtime friend, Brian Garfield.   Nor can I pretend to any great familiarity with Garfield’s work.  What happened was, Garfield and Westlake co-wrote the last book I reviewed here, and I felt like I needed to read some Garfield as part of my background research, and this novel was easily available to me, and I kind of wanted to read it anyhow.

What I learned, upon reading it, is that 1)Garfield is a hell of a writer (I’m hardly the first to reach this conclusion) and 2)He was, at least in this instance, very powerfully influenced by Westlake, and specifically by what Westlake wrote as Richard Stark.   And he wasn’t shy about tacitly admitting that in the book itself.   I should perhaps mention that this is the book that won Garfield the Edgar Award for best mystery novel, even though it’s a spy thriller, but we discussed that little oddity of the Edgars when I was reviewing God Save The Mark.

I knew the story going in, or thought I did–I went to see Hopscotch (the movie) shortly after it premiered in 1980, liked it so much I went to see it twice.  It’s long been a favorite of mine.  It’s right at the tail-end of Walter Matthau’s career as a leading man (he was 60 when it came out); probably the last picture he made where he was the unquestioned star, the story entirely about his character, even though Glenda Jackson has a memorable supporting role, and there’s a great cast overall, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, etc.  Neat little flick, and you can watch it for free on Hulu, for the price of sitting through a few bad commercials.

And going in with such strongly positive memories of the film, I was amazed at how quickly the book supplanted it in my loyalties.  It’s not that the film’s script (co-written by Garfield) tells such a different story–most major elements of the plot are there, in altered form–but the approach to it is light-hearted, comic, almost innocent–a sort of espionage quadrille.  Which is what they figured they could sell to a mainstream movie audience looking for a nice Matthau comedy, with a bit of a romance hook between him and Jackson (since they’d just done a romantic comedy together a few years before).

The book is none of those things.  It truly is written in the spirit of Richard Stark (as reinterpreted by Brian Garfield) and to the extent there’s any humor in it, it’s very black indeed.  It’s not a quadrille, so much as a tango–a dance of life and death.  It’s romantic all right, but in the same spirit as the Parker novels.  Not at all what Hollywood means by romance.

The film’s score is full of Mozart, with a bit of Rossini mixed in (Matthau, a lifelong fan of Wolfgang Amadeus, can even whistle some of his compositions like a crazed canary), but a score for the novel would be rather more Wagnerian, I think–Götterdämmerung.  Or even better, some delta blues, or New Orleans jazz, the kind they play at funerals– a fair bit of  the story is set in the American South.  Or maybe music would just get in the way.   Because to the extent this novel’s protagonist resembles a Richard Stark protagonist, it sure as hell isn’t Alan Grofield.  He’s not hearing any movie score in his head.

He does go see a movie in the course of the story, though–The Outfit, with Robert Duvall.  He’s just killing some time in the theater, as we sometimes see Parker do on a job; not really interested in the film–he walks out after an hour, as the story is building to its climax, so nobody will notice him leaving–he’s got to use the bathroom to put on a disguise, That’s a very obvious tip of the hat to Stark.  As is his later briefly adopting the alias of Jules Parker.  That’s almost too obvious.

The protagonist’s name is Miles Kendig, and he used to work for the CIA.   He was good–quite possibly the best, though like any good intelligence man, he drew as little attention to himself as possible, which meant that relatively few people knew how good he really was.  Just a handful of fellow pros.   And even they may underestimate him at times.

On a mission to the Balkans, he was badly wounded, nearly killed.  Once he recovered, the higher-ups decided he was past his prime, over the hill (he’s 53 when we first meet him).  They wouldn’t put him in the field anymore–he could ride a desk for a while, if he wanted, or take retirement.  He took the desk–just long enough to expunge his personnel records–when he leaves, they don’t even have a photograph of him, and because of his low profile, only a few people at the Agency could pull him out of a line-up.  He’s a self-made tabula rasa.

As the book opens, he’s retired, playing high stakes poker in Paris, not caring if he wins or loses, and so of course he wins big, as he has before.  The glamorous sophisticated 40-ish European woman who was his primary opponent in the game (Jeanne Moreau, maybe?) picks him up afterwards, and he reluctantly allows himself to be seduced (he’s no fashion plate, he’s mainly not interested, and women are drawn to him like flies to honey–sound familiar?).

He’s also dabbled in fast cars, and other things people to do distract themselves from a purposeless existence.  He’s got money, adventure, sex, freedom, and his health.  And he’s terminally bored.  Without his work, something has died inside him.  He’s trying to find a reason go to on living, and failing, badly.

Then a former adversary of his, a Russian spymaster named Yaskov, makes the proposition referred to in the passage from the novel I kicked this review off with–come work for us–we see your value, even if those fools do not.  And he can’t do it.  Even though the illusions of conventional patriotism have largely been destroyed in him, he can’t go over to the other side.  It’s not who he is.  And since he wouldn’t believe in what he was doing, he’d just be working for the sake of working, going through the motions.  It wouldn’t fix what’s broken in him.

But as he mulls it over, an alternative presents itself.  He can’t ply his trade for his own country anymore, or for any other country, but he can still ply it for himself.  He can issue a challenge–the name of the game is Catch Me If You Can (or Hopscotch, if you prefer).  But first he needs the appropriate bait.  So he starts work on a book.  A book about what he knows.  And he starts sending out pages–to publishers, and to spy agencies.  The pages are full of some very direct and telling hints of what the book’s content will be.

He knows a lot.  More than anyone realized.  This is something the book explains much better than the film–a field agent typically only knows what’s relevant to his work–that way he can only tell so much if he’s captured and tortured.  In the movie, Kendig quit immediately after his boss told him to sit behind a desk (movie plot shorthand)–in the novel, he took that desk job long enough to read a whole lot of very interesting top secret files–and Miles Kendig never forgets anything he reads.

So when his bosses find out what he’s got in mind, various carefully worded threats are issued, which Kendig merely laughs at.  Because what he wants is for them to come after him, with the purpose of killing him.  And by evading them, through the methodical application of a lifetime of training, he can prove he’s the best there is at what he does, and slip the shackles of existential ennui.

Actually revealing the secrets to the world–many of which are explosive in nature, political assassinations and so forth–is not his primary goal.  He isn’t Edward Snowden.  He doesn’t think he can bring about a better freer more transparent world, nor does he have any interest in being lauded as a whistleblower, or put on any Nobel short lists.  He just wants to stop feeling dead inside.  He’s been the hunter for most of his life–now he’ll try being the hunted.

The CIA assigns Kendig’s best pupil, Joe Cutter, to track him down.  Joe picks Leonard Ross, a younger agent, to assist him, since Ross at least knows what Kendig looks like.   Cutter doesn’t like what Kendig is doing, but he understands it, better than anyone else (they’ll be forcing him out too, one of these days).  He isn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of killing his teacher, but he’ll do as he’s ordered.   And Kendig goes out of his way to provoke Cutter, wanting to make sure his protégé gives the job his all.

Now I’d normally launch into a detailed synopsis here, going over the plot with a fine-toothed comb, leaking spoilers all over the carpet, possibly stretching it out into a two-parter, but this is The Westlake Review, not The Garfield Gazette.  I greatly admire this book, but my point is how Garfield, who in a sense became Westlake’s protégé, absorbed the lessons he learned from Westlake’s novels, particularly the Parker novels, and applied them to his own quite distinct purposes.  Not that Stark is the only influence here–there’s a character named Joe Tobin–an FBI agent, called into the hunt when Kendig goes to ground in Georgia to write his book.  Kendig’s deep depression that he’s trying to shake off, along with his nagging conscience, do seem more reminiscent of Tucker Coe than Richard Stark.

There’s also a CIA man named Glenn Follett, and that’s about as glaringly obvious a reference to Ken Follett as one could imagine–except that when this book came out, the internationally best-selling author of espionage thrillers hadn’t had a best seller yet–he’d published only two novels, both quite recently, and wasn’t very well known at all.   Clearly Garfield had him pegged as a comer, and felt like tipping his hat–and yet, we’re left in no doubt that Glenn Follett, though a capable man, is not in the same league as ‘Jules Parker’–there’s a lot of little inside references like this, and you’re not always quite sure what they mean, but they mean something, that’s for damn certain.   As with Westlake, the inside jokes are there for those able to appreciate them.

The book switches back and forth between chapters from Kendig’s perspective, watching him play his deadly game with deadly calm, moving around, creating false identities, laying false trails for the hunters, always a few steps ahead of the hounds–and chapters from the perspective of Cutter and Ross and the other people hunting Kendig.  Including Yaskov, because once the Soviets realize how much information Kendig has, they’re desperate to lay hands on him–and then, once they realize that he’s compromising them almost as much as the Americans, they just want him dead as much as the CIA does.

And this, of course, is very Starkian as well, but Stark didn’t invent the idea of switching perspectives in fiction (don’t ask me who did).  The book isn’t broken up into four parts–it’s not that direct an homage.  The idea is the same, though–to contrast Kendig’s mentality with that of his pursuers.  Only Cutter and Yaskov (and eventually Ross) come close to fully understanding him, but because they’re all organization men–cogs in a machine, whether they like it or not–they can’t ever fully understand a man who has decided to cut all ties, be totally free.  One does get the feeling they envy him, though.

Yaskov, the wily old Russian, who Cutter observes would have just as happily been a czarist spy if he’d been born a few generations sooner (what difference, really?), arranges a meet with Cutter and Ross, to swap intel on Kendig–and makes this rather trenchant remark to Cutter, that as you might imagine, perked my ears right up–

“Kendig and I are among the last of the old wolves,” Yaskov said, “but perhaps there’s still hope.  I’m told you conform to the breed more than most of our colleagues.”

Hmm.   I wonder sometimes about conversations Westlake had with his closest comrades about the nature of Parker, and what might have been said in these discussions.   Or left unsaid, while remaining implicit.

I’m barely giving the flavor of the book–most of the major plot points made it into the film, but in very altered form–the way they play out in the book is so different as to constitute an entirely different story, and there are some fascinating things that didn’t get into the film at all–like Kendig finding a double of himself, a down on his luck American, and paying him to impersonate Kendig, for a hefty fee–which the man does with considerable pleasure, and surprising skill.

The ploy doesn’t really fool Cutter, who knows Kendig too well, but resources are still expended to track the impostor down on an ocean liner.  I suspect the point of that episode isn’t to display Kendig’s resourcefulness, but to make a very Westlakeian comment about identity.  The double–a secret sharer, you might say–had lost himself in the wake of a bad marriage, and now, by pretending to be a fugitive secret agent, seems to have rediscovered his own agency in life.

Kendig doesn’t kill one person in this novel (he doesn’t even like to carry a gun), and goes out of his way to make sure no one is killed because of him.  That is not much like Parker, or even Grofield.  And this is Garfield’s variation on the theme–Kendig isn’t really a wolf in human form, you see.  He’s very much a man, who had to become like a wolf, to do his job.  We learn about his forlorn search for his long-lost father, who died poor and alone just before Kendig located him–the experience left lasting scars, that impacted all the choices he made afterwards, and he begins to understand that as the story builds to its conclusion.

Kendig has very understandable human goals and aspirations, and a very human form of melancholia, and yet at the end, he seems ready to really live again, maybe even love, without the stimulus of having trained killers on his trail night and day.  But for that to happen, he has to shake those killers once and for all, and maybe you should read the book.  Or you can watch the movie, which has its own unique pleasures to impart (and a character who isn’t in the book at all–a rather kick-ass London-based publisher named–I kid you not–Parker Westlake). But seriously–read the book first.   I wish I had.

Garfield has Cutter think to himself at one point that he’s glad he played poker with Kendig–it’s his opinion that there’s no better way to understand your rival.  Or your friend.  And in writing this book, Garfield proved he understood them both very well.  His old poker buddy, Donald E. Westlake–and his rival, Richard Stark.  (I don’t think Garfield ever really did much in the comic caper area after Gangway!, though he was perhaps taking a few pointers when co-writing the script for the film adaptation–and he and Westlake would later collaborate on a film, but that one is decidedly not a comedy).

Garfield’s interest in espionage and those who practice that dark art continues to this very day, not always in the form of fiction   He’s got a new book out about Richard Meinertzhagen, a legendary adventurer, who may have been an even more legendary con artist.  I hope to get around to it soon.

But now, I have to prepare myself for what may be the biggest challenge of my book-blogging career to date.   Miles Kendig, as I have already mentioned, is not so terribly hard to understand.  But Parker is, and our next book–the 16th Parker novel, and the last to appear in print for a very long time–is just one identity puzzle after another–frequently reviewed, but never in any great depth, that I can see.  I must warn you in advance, I have no idea how long this one is going to go–I very much doubt a two-parter will suffice, and I would not rule out a four-parter.  We’ll play the hand we’re dealt, and see how the cards stack up.

And now a little music to set the mood.  I was thinking about Bad Moon Rising, but that’s a bit too on the nose, don’t you think?

Any Rory Gallagher fans in the house?  He was always a million miles away from all the rest.

Review: Gangway!

Gabe had a window seat on the train, but there hadn’t been anything to see for three thousand miles.

There had been green days: grass flats, fourteen Indians riding around the train in warbonnets chasing five spavined buffalo.  There had been brown days: the occasional yokel on a horse and at intervals an excuse for a town–a few tottering shacks, buckboard wagons, tall idiots festooned with huge revolvers and silly hats.

He remembered the curl of Twill’s lip.  “West of the Hudson River, it’s all horse manure.”

A wise observation, that.  It smelled that way–even Chicago.  Especially Chicago, stinking to high heaven of beef carcasses.  It was only a thousand miles after Chicago that you started to remember the place with a certain wistful fondness.  It wasn’t a city, but at least by God it was trying.

Don Westlake had a blinding-fast mind. He always seemed to have on the tip of his tongue the sort of wonderful witty rejoinders that occur to most of us a day or two too late. In 1970 we got the idea that it would be amusing to try combining our strengths in a Western comedy novel. We wrote Gangway!, and it turned out to be quite funny, I think. Henry sold it and it did fairly well. But our ambitions to sell it as a basis for a movie didn’t work out. And we’d done it in a silly way—each of us would write a draft, then turn it over to the other, who’d rewrite the whole thing and give it back. It was about four times as much work as either of us would have put in individually on a book. So we didn’t try that again. But it was fun, and we got to know each other’s working styles.

Brian Garfield, speaking to Levi Stahl.

They really did meet at a poker game, in 1965.   That’s what Brian Garfield said in this interview, and I see no reason to doubt him.  I’ve already spoken about the enduring friendship between Westlake and Lawrence Block, but there was yet another great literary bromance in Westlake’s life that stretched across the decades, and that was with this guy, born about six years after Westlake, in 1939.  My significant other, seeing his name on a book I was reading, asked if he might have inspired Alan Grofield.  The similarity in the names is an interesting coincidence, as are the parallels in the relationships (Parker to Grofield, Westlake to Garfield)–even the age difference is similar–but since Grofield first appeared in 1964, probably not.   Too bad.

The game depicted in the above photo from the back cover of this book took place some years later, in 1972, when Garfield was hard at work on the book most people remember him for now, Death Wish.  Arguably more famous than anything Westlake ever wrote, but that’s at least partly because of the Charles Bronson movie (screenplay by Wendell Mayes, who wrote a whole lot of better movies, but a nice bonus to get such a solid pro adapting you).

Garfield was born in New York City, like Westlake himself, but grew up in Arizona, about as far from upstate New York in climate and culture as you can get in this country.   While Westlake got his start writing a mix of science fiction, mystery, and pseudo-porn, Garfield wrote mysteries and westerns–a lot more westerns than mysteries in the early days–over forty novels in that genre, many of the early ones under pseudonyms.

As a mature author, his wheelhouse would eventually turn out to be a mixture of crime and thriller/suspense, sometimes with a touch of espionage, but his roots were in the horse opera.  His first published novel was a western published under his own name, entitled Range Justice, and came out in 1960, same year as The Mercenaries, Westlake’s first novel under his own name, but that’s a mite deceptive–Westlake had a big jump on Garfield, professionally speaking.  Garfield would be catching up fast over the next decade or so.

Westlake was not a westerns guy.  Like any American kid born in the first seven decades of the 20th century, he knew the genre–you couldn’t avoid it, any more than you could baseball.  He wasn’t much interested in writing for it.   He wasn’t that much interested in the west most of the time, if you get right down to it.  He’d write stories set out west–Parker novels, for example, or novels about Hollywood–but in most cases, the setting was more or less incidental to the story, though always keenly observed.

Westlake was more about the city than the country, and if he wrote about the country, it was the way city people tend to do–somewhere you escape to, quiet and bucolic, a good place to relax (or hide out)–but still adjacent to the city, so you can get back to civilization quickly when you need it, and you will.

So according to Garfield, this book was written around 1970 (at least that’s when they had the idea), and their mutual agent, Henry Morrison (who also attended those poker games), got it published at M. Evans & Co., a few years later.  It was right around 1970 (with the pseudonymous political thriller Ex Officio) that M. Evans had started its ten-novel run with Westlake (and one two-novella collection we’ll be getting to soon enough).   All the subsequent books he produced for them were published under his own name, and no two are alike, or really much like anything he did before or since.   But this collaborative effort was unusual even by the standards of his work for M. Evans.

Is it a true western?  I’ve seen people suggest otherwise.  I think they’re right as far as they go–the western novel is a fairly rigid form, perhaps the most conservative of all genres, and I don’t just mean politically.  There are certain elements that have to be present, that the readership demands, and if they aren’t there, it isn’t a western–but the form is a lot less rigorously classicist in its other mediums, such as film and television, which is how most people have enjoyed it.

I think this book, set in 1874, in boom town San Francisco, falls very neatly into the comedy western genre that had become overwhelmingly prevalent in Hollywood films during the late 60’s/early 70’s (presumably there were a lot of books as well, but I wouldn’t know), as the western movie genre began to die out, along with the TV western.  In fact, I would suspect Garfield and Westlake were thinking at least party about this 1969 release, and how they might improve upon it–

(Fun film.  Very lightweight stuff, but still worth renting, or catching on late-night cable–Ossie Davis has a memorable role as a two-fisted wisecracking blacksmith, Clint Walker is sturdy enough, and Angie Dickinson is as you’d expect, only more so, because the S&P people were loosening up on sex a bit.  Burt Reynolds is Burt Reynolds, as always, and what’s wrong with that?).

And as Garfield tells us in the interview, they weren’t just writing a novel together for a few bucks–they were hoping to sell it to Hollywood–trying to latch onto a trend.  Seems like they were a bit too far behind the curve–Hollywood was rapidly losing interest in westerns, comedic or otherwise.  But if they had sold the novel to the movies, that’s what the movie would have been sold as, no question.   So yeah, it’s a western.  It’s just not a standard ‘oater’, with the sixgun shoot-outs, the cowpokes, the schoolmarms, and the wide open prairie.  It’s what you might call a sub-genre–‘the dude goes west’.  Been a lot of those.

And it’s a comic caper to boot.   Westlake was just then becoming the supreme master of those, with The Hot Rock.  But this, sadly, is a lot closer to his first comic caper, Who Stole Sassi Manoon?   It’s actually not that bad.   Enjoyable light reading, if approached with limited expectations.  It’s a long way from the best work either man was capable of–when writing a novel, two heads are not necessarily better than one.

To be sure, there have been great writing duos in the mystery genre–“Ellery Queen” was actually the team of cousins Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee.  The mystery novels of “Wade Miller” and “Whit Masterson” were written by the team of Robert Wade and Bill Miller.  Two people who work together often in this way can achieve a sort of synergy, each doing what he or she is best at, and the results can be impressive.  But much more often, you get something written by committee.  Prose fiction is not a team sport.

Westlake and Lawrence Block had co-written a few sleaze books, mainly alternating chapters, each getting to use his own distinctive style, make up the plot as they went along, each reacting to the other’s choices–Westlake and Garfield both worked on all the chapters in this one, going for consistency in tone.  Which makes it damned hard to know who is responsible for what.

You can make educated guesses, but here’s the thing–each man was well-familar with the work of the other, and Garfield in particular was very influenced by Westlake, so even if you see something that strikes you as very much a Westlake plot twist, or a Westlake character, or a Westlake gag–could just be Garfield channeling Westlake. Less likely it would be the other way around, since Garfield’s style was still evolving at this point, but Westlake would have tried to make his stuff match-up with Garfield’s, and might have deferred to him more since Garfield knew this genre (and the geographic region it’s set in) so much better.

Westlake must have read some western novels, as well as gone to movies–in that faux interview of himself and his pseudonyms that I’ve referenced many times here, he makes a rather disparaging reference to Dirty Dingus Magee, and in the context of the discussion, it seems like he means the novel The Ballad of Dingus Magee, by David Markson, not the Frank Sinatra film based on it, even though he uses the movie title.  The two may have gotten mixed up in his mind.

He had a pronounced aversion to genre writing that got too self-consciously joky and gimmick-laden–as you can see from last week’s book, if he wrote a sustained parody, it was probably going to be of something he didn’t like.  So his intention here is not parodic, not even satiric–he’s going to try and craft an urban western farce, similar in tone and effect to his popular ‘Nephew’ books, with a protagonist who has much in common with Aloysius Engel of The Busy Body, and (less fortunately) Kelly Bram Nicholas IV of Who Stole Sassi Manoon?   I don’t consider this a Nephew story, because certain key elements are missing, but you could argue this picks up where The Busy Body left off–a confirmed New Yorker forced to go west–only it’s the old west.

Westlake would have gone into this venture with mixed emotions–liking the idea of working with a friend whose abilities he respected; curious to see what he could do with a form he wasn’t experienced in; thinking maybe they’d score a nice payday in Tinseltown before the western movie’s last great decadent era came to a close.   It would be different, at least.

But at the same time he’d be thinking he was too far out of his element–collaborating on a novel, something he’d only done a few times before, never producing results that were much to his liking–said book being set not only in a place he didn’t know well, but in a different time–a period piece.   Westlake wrote in the moment–very rarely does he ever tell a story that isn’t set in the exact time it was composed in.  He seemed to need that sense of immediacy to spur him on to greatness.

And I often seem to need to devote even more set-up time to the books I’m not that wild about.   Weird, huh?  Let’s try a very brief synopsis here, before this thing gets out of control.

Gabe Beauchamps, a French-American tough from Manhattan’s notorious Hell’s Kitchen district (where I lived for a time, and it lived down to its rep), is sourly gazing at the California landscape from the train.  His former employer, a crooked political boss named Patrick Twill (Tweed was already taken) has kicked him out of New York for life, because of one minor screw-up (he muscled a pushcart vendor related to a local bigwig).  He’s been given a choice of San Francisco or death.  He’s reluctantly chosen the former.

(Sidebar: Why is Gabe French-American?  We’re told Twill, more of a political boss than a crimelord–the implication being that the difference was largely academic at the time–needed a Frenchman to keep the locals in line.  Either Westlake or Garfield had apparently read somewhere that Hell’s Kitchen used to be a French nabe.  Maybe it was once.  But it’s 1874, about two decades since the famine-stricken Irish came pouring off the ships into New York; there were certainly many powerful Irish street gangs in Hell’s Kitchen by then, so I don’t buy it.  I can’t find any reference to a strong French presence in Hell’s Kitchen at all–there’s a few good French restaurants there, but they don’t go back that far.

Westlake would have been in charge of the New York stuff, and he probably skimped a bit on the research, as he sometimes did–found some obscure reference to French people in Hell’s Kitchen that appealed to him, and ran with it.  Gabe doesn’t even seem to speak any French.  His temperament seems more Gaelic than Gallic to me–but he does like to cherchez la femme.   I suspect Westlake just wanted to remind us that New York’s ethnic make-up is always changing–he’d probably heard the Irish in Hell’s Kitchen bars, complaining about those damn Puerto Ricans.  And the beat goes on.)

Gabe has an endearing and rather Nephew-esque little quirk–he gets seasick–doesn’t have to be on the actual sea–being on any kind of a boat on any kind of water will turn the trick (this would be a good sight gag for a movie).  So he’s not happy when he finds out the railroad doesn’t go all the way to San Francisco yet, and he’s got to take a riverboat the rest of the way from Sacramento.   And he does have to, because Twill says he’s going to get whacked (or whatever term they used then) if he doesn’t turn up there on schedule.

So on the boat, Gabe meets the lovely Evangeline Kemp, 24 years of age to Gabe’s 28, blonde, petite, perky as all hell, and a talented pickpocket to boot.  That’s just one of her skills–she’s an extremely versatile petty thief in petticoats.  I think you can guess how they meet (you’ve seen this movie before).   Having gotten the preliminary jostling and jousting out of the way, they fall head over heels (well, Gabe is more like head over boat railing for a while there), and she being a native San Franciscan–the very first generation, in fact–and as bigotedly proud of her birthplace as Gabe is of Gotham (he’d never even left Manhattan before now, because water), there’s lots of bi-coastal bickering going on all through the book.

Gabe likes Vangie (as he insists on calling her) quite a lot, and intends to keep her–they bed down together in a purloined hotel room, shortly after getting off the boat (which would never happen to a true Westlake nephew).  But Vangie’s undeniable charms aside, Gabe sees San Francisco as  ‘a lumpy Newark.’   It is not, in fact, quite the urbane laid-back little burg it reputedly is today (I’ve never had the pleasure), but rather a rough-hewn rollicking good-time town, that’s already burned to the ground twice, and maintains a very efficient fire department that keeps nearly running the protagonists down on the street.

I’d say that’s the real pleasure of the book–the way we’re shown San Francisco in embryo, and the authors keep showing us hints of the city it is inexorably becoming–just as you might look at old photos of someone as a child, and see hints of the adult.  And of course some things about a city remain constant from the start–

They moved into a narrow street, getting jostled.  Something like grey smoke began to drift down off the rooftops, obscuring their view of things. “What’s going on?  Something on fire?”

“Shh!”  Vangie clapped a finger to Gabe’s mouth.  “Don’t say fire around here.  Ever.  Unless you mean it.”

“But that stuff–”

“That’s just the fog coming in.”

It was coming in mighty fast.  He could hardly see the end of the street, only a block away.  “This happen often?”

Defensively she said, “From time to time.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well,” she said reluctantly, “Maybe once or twice a day.”

“A day?”

“We don’t mind it.”

“Every day?”

“You get used to it.”

“All year round?”

She said desperately, “We like the fog.”

“All right then, tell me this.  Does it ever get any warmer around here?”

“Once in a while.  From time to time.”

“You mean once or twice a day?”

“Well, maybe once or twice a year.”  She added quickly, “But it never gets much colder than this either.”

“I don’t see how it hardly could.”  He shook his head.  “And you call this a city.”

Just the same at least there was life teeming around them.  The narrow street was overflowing with toughs, brassy girls, and drunken sailors.  Among the buildings Gabe could see, two out of three were Melodeons and Saloons.  The rest were whorehouses, opium dens, Cheap John clothing stores, ship-chandlers, and the kind of boardinghouses where you kept your boots on when you went to bed to make sure nobody stole them.  It was a neighborhood not altogether unlike Hell’s Kitchen; even if it was a pretty limp imitation, it did show some promise.

One very big hint of San Francisco’s future comes when the newly minted couple meet an old friend of Gabe’s from the old neighborhood, one Francis Calhoun.  Who is gay.  And is not once referred to as such, partly because Westlake never uses that term to refer to same-sex oriented persons, for reasons nobody seems to have ever inquired of him (I think the language maven in him resented a very old multi-purpose word being made useless for any purpose save one).

But absolutely nobody, Francis included, would be using the word ‘gay’ that way in 1874–Westlake is perhaps taking a certain satisfaction in not needing any term at all for Francis, because it’s over fifteen years until the dawn of the ‘Gay 90’s’–to the extent the word has any sexual connotation at all at this time, it’s heterosexual–nobody will be using ‘gay’ to refer to men like Francis for at least another half century or so.  They had lots of very impolite terms for homosexuals back then, but not one of them gets employed here.  Okay, one sailor insinuates that Francis is ‘fruity’, but Francis retorts by bringing up certain well-known habits of sailors, and that shuts him up good.

Francis corresponds pretty neatly to the usual fictional (and sometimes actual) tropes regarding gay men, but can it be a true stereotype if it’s just in its formative period?  He’s got a knack for decorating, he works in the theater (if you call music halls theater), is rather good-tempered, a bid timid, loyal to a fault.  Gabe was one of the few neighborhood boys who didn’t treat him badly back in the day, so he sees Gabe as a friend–and understands him pretty well.  He’s clearly leading a fairly active social life, and let’s just say he’s not alone out there, but he is, in his own decidedly un-rugged way, a pioneer.

Vangie, unlike the oblivious Gabe (can’t even grasp the concept of not liking girls) sizes Francis up at a glance, and treats him a mite frostily at first, but then realizes a man who knows about fashion and can be your friend without wanting to fuck you isn’t such a bad thing after all–well, that meme had to start somewhere, didn’t it?

Also in the mix is Ittzy Herz, who is a either a good luck charm or a jinx, depending on your interpretation–bad things never happen to him, but they frequently happen to people who try to do him harm, or just happen to be standing in the wrong place when he passes–he’s not consciously making anything happen, it just does.  Like a guy fires a gun at him point blank, and the guy’s friend, who was standing over to one side, falls down wounded, and the shooter gets dragged off to jail for attempted murder.   Gabe quickly decides that Ittzy will be useful to his plan.

Oh did I forget to mention the plan? Gabe intends to rob the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, the existence of which he did not learn about until he got there.  It does not seem he has any experience at this kind of thing–he was basically a ward heeler for Boss Twill, an enforcer; tough and resourceful and more than willing to break a few laws, or a few heads, but not a guy who robs banks or payrolls, and as we’ve seen, his sex drive isn’t cyclical.  He’s no Parker.   He’s a bit more like Dortmunder (maybe the way Dortmunder was before he’d spent a few years in prison), but he’s an amateur at this, a beginner–with the corresponding beginner’s luck, that Vangie keeps warning him is going to run out.

And as a non-pro, he refuses to process that this job is too damn risky, the mint being less of a bank than an impregnable fortress, bristling with armed guards.  Never mind all that.  He needs the gold to go back to New York in style, replace Boss Twill, and rule over his rightful kingdom in splendor forevermore (with Vangie at his side, though she’s not too enthused about leaving San Fran).  He needs the gold, therefore there must be a way to get at it, and then get away clean.  He just needs to figure out what that is.   Call him a proto-heister.

Vangie is opposed to the whole insane venture–she just wants Gabe to settle down with her in ‘the Paris of the West’ as she calls it (Gabe retorts that New York is the New York of the world).  She keeps thinking he’ll realize it’s a dumb idea, so she waits around for light to dawn.  He’s not what you’d call handsome, she’s actually supporting him by plying her various larcenous trades, and he keeps telling her the city she adores is a fog-covered collection of shacks compared to his majestic Manhattan, the only place any civilized being would ever want to live.  And she just keeps trudging loyally at his side, only pausing occasionally for a bout of lovemaking.

They haven’t even known each other a week.  This is the part of the story that’s hardest to understand.  But then love always is.  I’ve seen more unlikely couples on the streets of New York.  Not a lot more unlikely, mind you.

Gabe decides they need a ship to transport the gold, once they’ve swiped it, and Francis directs them to a rather woebegone sea captain name of Flagway.  He has a sad story to tell of having been shanghaied many years before, taken from his father and their apothecary shop in Baltimore as a boy, and no matter how many times he tried to get a ship back home, it always ended up going somewhere else.  He finally ended up as captain of a ship that technically belongs to the Paraguayan navy (yes, Paraguay is a landlocked country–it would take too long to explain).  But with no crew, and no money, he’s just sitting on the dock of the bay.  Watchin’ the tide roll away.  Hey, catchy!

Captain Flagway is no thief, but Gabe explains to him that the money in the mint is the property of all U.S. citizens, and they’re merely distributing it.   The captain, who has witnessed many horrible acts during his time at sea, makes it clear to Gabe that he wants to play no part in any violence.

“No, no,” Gabe said.  “you wouldn’t have to.”

“Not hold a gun,” the captain went on, “or stab anybody.”

Francis and Vangie both looked a trifle green.  Gabe, patting the air in a calming manner said, “No no, not at all.  Definitely not.”

“I couldn’t strangle anybody with my bare hands,” the captain explained earnestly.  “Or cut them apart with an ax, or bury them in wet cement, or drown them in the sewer, or—-”

Francis and Vangie kept learning farther and farther away, out of the conversation.  Gabe too was looking green by now, and his voice was somewhat loud and shrill when he said, “Nothing like that.  I promise you, Captain.  You don’t have to go on; I understand the kind of thing you’re talking about.  It won’t be anything like that at all.”

“Well, that’s good, the captain said.

Ittzy said “We just want your boat.”

“That’s fine,” the captain said.  He felt great relief.  “Then I wouldn’t have to throttle anybody or—-“

Garfield may, for all I know, have written some heist stories before this.  Maybe some western bank hold-ups or like that.  Nothing like this, I bet.  Westlake was the specialist in this area, though at the time he and Garfield were writing this, he was still learning how to make a heist funny and believable at the same time.

And he hasn’t quite figured out how to do that yet, not reliably, anyhow.  Without going into detail, I can tell you that Gabe’s hastily worked-out, extremely contrived, and inexplicably successful (Vangie is dumbfounded) theft of all the gold from the San Francisco mint, which ends with them settling down in San Francisco and selling the gold back to the government, a few ingots at a time is–well–a mite hard to swallow.  You aren’t really supposed to believe it, just go with it.  It was going to be a Hollywood comedy western, remember.  Those are not, by their nature, supposed to be realistic.

But then I think about it, and I realize that of course Hollywood didn’t buy this book–they get away with it.  They rob the U.S. mint, and nobody gets killed, and they all get rich, and live happily ever after.  Now you remember that Burt Reynolds movie I mentioned?  You know what happens in that one?  They take gold that was already stolen from the Denver mint by somebody else and put it back.   I can almost imagine Westlake’s disgusted expression as he sat in the theater, but that’s how the movies tend to do it.  You steal from bad people, or you get caught, or you get killed, or you fail to get the money, or you put the money back.  Those are the options.  That’s what Vangie (a movie heroine if ever there was one) keeps trying to tell Gabe, but Gabe somehow knows he’s in a different kind of story, and soldiers on.

And that isn’t the point, of course.  There have been two themes in the book–one is luck–good and bad.  Bad luck brought Gabe to San Francisco, but because Gabe was smart enough to get Ittzy involved, Ittzy’s weird mojo can be used to explain their remarkable Rube Goldberg-esque good fortune.  It’s a pretty threadbare explanation, but it’s there.  In future, with Dortmunder, Westlake will learn to balance good and bad luck, give with one hand and take with the other, so the karmic balance is maintained, and the story can continue.

But see, there’s another theme, and it’s the old one–identity.  Gabe saw himself as a New Yorker, born and bred, immutable in his resolve to remain a Gothamite forever.  All through the book, his only thought was to get back east.  But at the end, having come back to terra firma in a ship laden with treasure, approaching San Francisco from the west instead of the east, his attitude has changed.  He sees the potential now.  This is where the action is, so this is where Gabe Beauchamps must be.  The dude from the east is a true westerner now, heart and soul.   If they actually had a baseball team there, he’d root for them (and when that team finally showed up, guess which city they hailed from?).  His loyalties have changed.

And that’s as should be–identity has to adapt to changing circumstances.  It’s no good to think of yourself as a New Yorker if you’re not in New York.  When you can’t be in the place you love, love the place you’re in–particularly when it comes with a girl like Vangie into the bargain.   And this, of course, is the pioneer spirit, as well as the true immigrant experience.  This is the spirit that made America, and remade it, over and over again, and may it ever be so.  Home is where the heart is.

At the end, he’s looking across San Francisco Bay at Marin County, and saying he’s going to use his gold to buy land there.  They tell him he’s crazy, nobody wants that land, you can’t get to it.  He says they’ll build a bridge someday.  Vangie and Francis say it’s impossible.   They’re young–with a bit of luck, they’ll all be around another fifty-three years or so.

So that’s the book, and I like it well enough, but Garfield was right–it was too much work for the rather light-weight results they got.  I don’t know who deserves the credit for what works, or the blame for what doesn’t, but I do know both of them were capable of much better–doesn’t mean they wasted their time.  In fact, one of the scenes in this book reminds me a lot of a much better scene in Bank Shot–with much less happy results.

Garfield was right about something else he said in that interview– “It’s a mistake to write a book with one eye on the movies—you end up with a bad book that won’t get filmed.”  Or at least a book that could have been a whole lot better.   The two writers remained fast friends, but concentrated on writing their own books, some of which became good movies (Garfield was luckier in that regard), and next week I’m actually going to do a quickie review of one of Garfield’s novels (also published by M. Evans & Co), that was turned into a film I’ve long loved–published a few years after Gangway!, in 1975.

Next up in the Westlake queue is Butcher’s Moon, you see–that’s going to be a big one, and I need some time to prepare.  And having read this book of Garfield’s, just to familiarize myself with his style, I found to my surprise that I was reading the best Richard Stark novel I’d ever encountered that was not written by Richard Stark.   In fact, it might be better than at least a few of the books that were written by Stark (but not Butcher’s Moon).  Anyway, get out some chalk, draw some numbers on the pavement, and rehearse that old schoolyard chant–

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Schlemiel! Schlimazel!
Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!

Get it?

One of Friday’s Forgotten Books.