Donald Westlake – Drowned Hopes
This is the first novel of his I’ve read since his death on New Year’s Eve, aged 75. I’ve read around half of his 100+ books under lots of pseudonyms (Wiki lists eleven).
This is a reasonably representative Westlake novel – it’s one of his stories of John Dortmunder, a criminal planner of considerable flair and not much luck. In this case, a psycho old cellmate is released after three decades in jail to find his large stash of stolen money is now under a reservoir. He comes to John with the plan to blow up the dam and recover his cash, not giving a damn about killing hundreds in the process. That isn’t John’s kind of crime, so he feels compelled to come up with another plan – or, as it transpires, other plans, as he doesn’t get much success. Westlake adds various tricky complications and outside factors in what I think is his longest Dortmunder novel. We get the traditional riffs: the crew’s driver explaining every route he takes, idiot drunks in the bar where the team meet, and so on. It’s very entertaining, and tense because of the ongoing threat of extreme violence from the motor of the story, both in that blowing up the dam is always his fallback and in that we know that if they do get that money, he will try to betray them.
Westlake is always hugely entertaining, a genuinely funny writer and a very clever plotter. My favourite Dortmunder is probably Bank Shot, which starts with John telling his regular crew that he wants to steal a bank. His most regular pseudonym was Richard Stark, under which he wrote a series of novels about a character in a similar profession, except these are not comedy but ultrahardboiled crime thrillers – you may know the films Point Blank and The Outfit, based on these novels. Some of them are very exciting books. The one other pseudonym I’ve sampled is the PI novels published as by Tucker Coe – these are kind of routine, but still worth reading.
Really I just wrote this to say rest in peace for a writer who has given me more pleasure than almost any other.
Martin Skidmore in FT • 98 views
I’ve read a few and always enjoyed his work as Westlake, where his relaxed sense of humour took the fore. Dortmunder is a wonderful character, who fits in the classic British sit-com style as a clever man (though not quite as clever as he thinks) surrounded by idiots. I did Jimmy The Kid as a longish book report for my GCSE so I will always have a soft spot for that (not so much the Gary Coleman movie of it – though apparently there is also a German adaptation). The Hot Rock had Robert Redford as Dortmunder, far too clean cut for my mind.
This page has a list of Dortmunder books and film adaptations, who knew that lousy Martin Lawrence film “What’s The Worst That Can Happen” was a Westlake.
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/dortmunder.html
I’m not sure any of the Westlake adaptations are much good, to be honest, whereas the two Stark ones I mentioned above are. Don’t know why this should be.
I guess the comedy in them comes from Dortmunder’s exasperation often in how the perfect plans are ballsed up by his crew etc. In the films (I’ve only seen the lousy Jimmy The Kid and Redford’s Hot Rock) this turns into a freewheeling caper film where everyone has to be taken down a notch of intelligence to make it funny.
I guess the Stark ones are just pretty tough, less hard to much up. Also, if talking adaptations, the seemingly endless Spenser: For Hire series with Robert Urich is another Stark.
The only book I know by DEW is ‘I gave at the office’ which I read as a teenager as a random selection from my local library. I enjoyed it enough to remember the name of the author – if nothing else, but what looms largest in my memory is a dodgy looking stain across one of the more steamy passages in the book.
I introduced my wife to the Dortmunder series, all of which we own except the most recent ‘What’s So Funny?’. I gather his last book was a Dortmunder, to be published in April – a sad thing to look forward to. I first discovered Westlake in my local library in the mid-70s, several novels I’ve not seen since. This included ‘I have at the office’, but my favourite Westlake is the first I read, ‘Adios Scheherezade’, a bizarre, funny, painful story which utilises his experiences as a young writer writing cheap soft porn novels under someone else’s pseudonym. I acquired a copy through eBay, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.