Le Trou, Donald Westlake, and everything: Atmosphere in noir and elsewhere

"`Don't you see? There's a plan there, but you have to convert it to the real world, to the people you've got and the places you'll be, and all the rest of it. You'd be the auteur."

-- May to Dortmunder in Jimmy the Kid, by Donald Westlake

Photos by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders.

That photo at right is the closest thing to a noir photo I shot in New York Saturday, and that's only because it's black and white and has some dark shadows. OK, maybe the lack of natural light and the photo's underground setting have something to do with it. Oh, and the walkway in question runs under Times Square, but you might not know that unless I told you or unless you knew New York fairly well. But the point is that noir isn't just a literary form or a fatalistic view of life; it's also atmosphere.

It's Jeanne Moreau wandering through the streets of Paris in the rain looking for her lover in Elevator to the Gallows. It's Alain Delon smoking a cigarette in just about anything; Le Samourai will do for a start. Atmosphere of a different kind was at work in Le Trou, one of two movies that brought me to New York and the Film Forum.

Le Trou ("The Hole") is a 1960 French prison-break drama directed by Jacques Becker, and I suspect that many Americans will find that it doesn't feel like a prison movie. The five (!) prisoners crammed into a small cell at Paris' La Santé Prison don't fight or rape each other. Instead, they share the contents of packages they receive from the outside, and they cooperate on an escape plan.  The atmosphere, that is, is one of teamwork rather than confrontation. And Becker fills the movie with the five men digging and reconnoitering and planning without, however, gimmicky attention boosters and false drama and wrong turns and screeching music to tell viewers how they ought to feel. (J. Hoberman's New York Times article touches on some of these questions, with a hat tip to Suzanne Solomon for putting the article in my way.)
 
I included the Westlake snippet above because the coincidence of coming to a discussion of auteur theory just when I was preparing a post about a French movie from 1960 was too good to pass up. But Le Trou may remind viewers of Westlake's comic Dortmunder novels and the Parker heist dramas he wrote as Richard Stark. Parker is a planner and Dortmunder is a planner, and so are Roland and Manu, two of the cellmates who plan the escape in Le Trou. The other three are something like the Kelps and Murches and Grofields and Deverses who fill out the teams that execute Parker's and Dortmunder's plans.

I had some quibbles with Le Trou's ending; see the movie, and we'll talk about it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Westlake, Kalteis, Frankson, Morganti and me, plus a question for readers

Dietrich Kalteis and Martin J, Frankson are back with another Off the Cuff discussion, this time with Canadian novelist Charlotte Morganti, hashing out a matter dear to my heart: setting as character in crime fiction. Once again, Dietrich illustrates the discussion with one of my nourish photos (left), whose setting is right here in South Philadelphia.

Elsewhere, here's Donald Westlake, interviewed by Al Nussbaum in 1974, from the Westlake nonfiction collection The Getaway Car:

"I have felt for some time, with growing conviction. that there weren't any stories around to be written. I haven't been able to do a Richard Stark novel in a year and a half, the comedy caper is dead, story lines are drying up like African cattle.  Storylines reflect, refer to and attempt to deal with their period of history, and that's why they become old and obsolete and used up. Another reason is that the same story gets done and done and done and done, and suddenly one day nobody wants to read or hear that story again."

1974 marked the beginning of Westlake's 23-year hiatus from the Parker novels he wrote under the name Richard Stark. It was also the year of Jimmy the Kid, the worst of his comic caper Dortmunder books, Westlake's writing of which began to grow more sporadic around the same time. Instead, he concentrated on standalone novels for the next few years, though he eventually returned to both Parker and Dortmunder. So 1974 obviously marked a kind of crisis for Westlake. Now here's your question: Was Westlake's crisis merely personally, or was 1974 indeed a crisis year for crime fiction? Was his gloomy pronouncement accurate?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

How Donald Westlake was funny

The same box that brought Ross Thomas' Missionary Stew also contained an old paperback of The Hot Rock, Donald Westlake's first Dortmunder novel. That was one hell of a USPS flat-rate package.

Here are some favorite bits of The Hot Rock, along with the reasons I chose them:

Photo by your humble blogkeeper/
photographer, Peter Rozovsky

"They passed over Newark Bay and Jersey City and Upper Bay and then Murch figured out how to steer and he turned left a little and they followed the Hudson north, Manhattan on their right like stalagmites with cavities, New Jersey on their left like uncollected garbage."

*

"`Take him,' Dortmunder said over his shoulder and turned the other way, where a stout cop with a ham and cheese sandwich on rye in his hand was trying to close another door. ... The cop looked at Dortmunder. He stopped and put his hands up in the air. One slice of rye dangles over his knuckles like the floppy ear of a dog."

Do you like those passages? Tell me why, and then I'll tell you if we like them for the same reasons.. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Westlake is international!!!

"The hall was full of Scotsmen. Hundreds of them gamboled in the aisles and thronged the lobby, with more arriving every minute."

***

"Stately, plump Joe Mulligan paused in the privacy of the hallway to pull his uniform trousers out of the crease of his backside, then turned to see Fenton watching him.`Mp,' he said, then nodded at Fenton, saying, `Everything okay down here.' "Fenton, the senior man on this detail, made a stern face and said, `Joe, you don't want any of them princes and princesses see you walking around with your fingers up your ass.' ... A bit of a martinet and a stickler for regulations, he liked the boys to call him Chief, but none of them ever did."

— Donald Westlake, Nobody's Perfect

***

Here's an interview about Westlake with his friend, the author and screenwriter Brian Garfield. The interview appears in the University of Chicago Press blog in conjunction with the reprint of Butcher's Moon. I link to it here because Garfield explores the roots of a trait I've always loved in Westlake's work: his inventiveness:

"I remember Don's fascination with the way Ira Levin had cleverly concealed the identity of the killer in A Kiss Before Dying, and we all admired the way Mickey Spillane solved the mystery in Vengeance is Mine in the final word of the novel. I don't know that it's ever been done that way before."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More Westlake

Last week I started rereading a Donald Westlake novel looking for the answer to a contest question. I found the answer and entered the contest. Then I finished that book (The Handle), and I've read four more by Westlake since, each at least for the second time. Here are some of the highlights:

• The guards in the bank that gets stolen in Bank Shot (that right: stolen, not robbed) work for the Continental Detective Agency, a tribute to the crime writer Westlake acknowledged as his first and virtually only early influence. One of the guards in particular is content to be a guard with the company. He has no aspirations to be a Continental Op.

• A belligerent driver who threatens to make trouble for Dortmunder and Kelp in the same book backs off when our heroes persuade him that police would be very interested in the piles of soft-core porn books in the back of his car. The books are titles Westlake wrote himself under his Alan/Allan Marshall aliases.

• Another Westlake book is on the way, even though Westlake died in 2008. It's a "weird little SF mystery" called The Risk Profession that first appeared in a science-fiction magazine in the early '60s, and it stars "an investigator for an interplanetary insurance company, ferreting out the truth behind suspicious ... insurance claims."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Great minds ...

(Misleading Italian poster for Big Deal on Madonna Street, right)

I was excited when Donald Westlake called the 1958 Italian heist movie Big Deal on Madonna Street a post-graduate workshop for comedy writers and lamented that future Americans might miss similar opportunities to absorb and learn from foreign influences. "New writers' brains are not being mulched in this way," Westlake said. "What will be produced by people who think a good time is Spiderman?"

Among other things, Big Deal...'s absurd caper gone wrong, its odd anti-climax, and its affection for its gang of robbers may have inspired Westlake's own Dortmunder novels. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when I found the following exchange in Harvey Pekar's Our Movie Year (you'll have to imagine the drawings):

Joyce: How's this Big Deal on Madonna Street?

Harvey: Oh, that's great. It's got Vittorio Gassman an' Marcello Mastroianni in it ... it's one of the best comedies I've ever seen.

Joyce: You've seen it before?

Harvey: Yeah, but it's been a long time. Take it out. I'll enjoy it again.

Among the many pleasures of Pekar's comics are that the man takes art seriously, and he has impeccable taste. These days, the former is even more important than the latter, I'd say.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

More new and old stuff

If you live in a big city, you've seen graffiti tags. The overwhelming majority are ugly, boring and derivative; some small proportion are colorful and attractive. You see the stuff every day, and you probably describe it in terms no more precise or imaginative than I've just used.

But have you ever stopped to ask yourself what these tags really look like? Donald Westlake did, in an aside near the beginning of Get Real. The passage is yet one more example of the good things that can happen when an alert, experienced mind considers features of modern life from a period usually thought of as later than its own:

"Ah. The right third of the building, at street level, was a gray metal overhead garage door, graffiti-smeared in a language that hadn't been seen on Earth since the glory days of the Maya."

I also read a story this weekend that muses upon the declining power of the mainstream media and the ability of one person to blow a non-event into a news story of worldwide proportions. John Buchan published the story in 1928.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Unreal!

A few months ago, one Pat Miller alerted me to a passage from Michael Connelly's novel The Overlook:

"[Harry] Bosch was not adept in a digital world and readily acknowledged this. He had mastered his own cell phone but it was a basic model that made and received calls, stored numbers in a directory, and did nothing else — as far as he knew."

Elsewhere, Bosch is bemused by a BlackBerry.

Donald Westlake was also puzzled by a phenomenon of modern life: reality TV. His latest and, sadly, last Dortmunder novel, Get Real, involves Dortmunder and his gang with a producer who wants to make a show about the gang planning and executing a burglary. Westlake being Westlake, he mixes fun with the puzzlement:

"`Where do you want to do this, your office?'

"`No. We've got a rehearsal space downtown, we— '

"`Wait a minute,' Stan said. `You got a rehearsal space for reality shows?'"

I like Connelly's attitude, and I like Westlake's. Each is a happy medium between uncritical surrender and curmudgeonly rejection. A more bitterly funny Westlake comes through as well, the Westlake who wrote The Ax and who, despite being beloved of some conservative pundits, was given to profound sympathy with American workers. Here's the reality show's producer explaining to his assistant why she (the assistant) is not a writer even though she scripts "suggestions" for the reality show's stars:

"Because The Stand is a reality show, and reality shows do not have actors and writers because they do not need actors and writers. We are a very low-budget show because we do not need actors and writers. If you were a writer, Marcy, you would have to be in the union, and you would cost us a whole lot more because of health insurance and a pension plan, which would make you too expensive for our budget, and we would very reluctantly have to let you go and replace you with another twenty-two-year-old fresh out of college. You're young and healthy. You don't want all those encumbrances, health insurance and pension plans."

==========

BlackBerries, cell phones and reality TV. What other aspects of pop culture do your favorite crime writers make fun of or scratch their heads over?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A bit more about Donald Westlake

Can I say just one more thing about the man? Or three or four?

Here's a post I made a year ago about Westlake's occasional tendency to jump the boundaries between series. Here's one delicious way he solved the problem of sustaining interest in a long-running series. Here's a bit about the fine Australian author Garry Disher and his fascination with Parker.

And here's just a touch of Dortmunder sneaking into a Parker book, Dirty Money:

"`You kill a lawman,' [Parker] said, `you're in another zone. McWhitney and I are gonna have to work this out.'

"`But not on the phone.'

"Parker yawned. `Nothing on the phone ever,' he said. `Except pizza.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Donald Westlake dies

Donald Westlake, one of the world's liveliest, funniest and most prolific crime writers, died New Year's Eve. He was 75.

Westlake wrote around 100 novels, virtually inventing the comic caper with his Dortmunder series and the amoral, professional thief/killer in twenty-seven novels featuring Parker, written under the pen name Richard Stark.

Westlake was also a screenwriter, and his screenplay for The Grifters earned an Academy Award nomination in 1991. He won three Edgar awards from the Mystery Writers of America, which named him a Grand Master in 1993

Westlake was one of the cleverest of crime novelists, engaging in such experiments as beginning two different novels with the same botched robbery in order to take the story in two different directions. He also liked to share chapters with authors whose work he enjoyed, a Westlake novel and a book by the cooperating author having a common chapter that features characters from both. He did this notably in the Dortmunder novel Drowned Hopes, which shares a chapter with Joe Gores' 32 Cadillacs, a delicious treat for anyone, doubly so for readers who know both writers.

The New York Times obituary of Westlake, by the way, is a shoddy piece of work, full of what the writer probably thought was delightful color ("who pounded out more than 100 books and five screenplays") but not mentioning Dortmunder, one of the author's two most influential and enduring creations. The obituary also makes the questionable assertion that Westlake's work translated well to the screen. The Dortmunder novels especially have been notoriously ill-served by screen adaptations.

(A knowledgeable observer of both crime fiction and journalism points out that the Times was likely caught unaware by Westlake's death. With a holiday schedule likely in effect, the Times had to draft a non-obituary writer and non-crime-fiction expert. But my correspondent also expressed surprise that the Times did not have an obituary ready in advance, as it should have and as newspapers traditionally do. Westlake was 75, he was extremely well known, especially in New York, and he had had health problems in recent years, though not apparently related to the heart attack that appears to have killed him. The Times dropped the ball on this one. )

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Converging series

And this has nothing to do with mathematics. Rather, it's something I've noticed from time to time in Donald Westlake's books the last few years. You may know that the man is prolific, author of at least four crime-fiction series and scores of standalones. His production, in fact, lies at the heart of this comment because a question like the one I'm about to pose could only apply to a writer whose production spans multiple series.

The question concerns motifs or situations from one series bleeding over into another. Comeback, Westlake's 1998 novel about the ultra-professional thief Parker (written, like the other Parker novels, under the name Richard Stark), opens with a heist at a religious rally. One of the robbers is disguised as an angel. He makes an especially nervous angel, and if you think that sounds like something out of Westlake's comic caper novels about John Dortmunder, you're not the only one, even though Comeback is Parker all the way – cool, taut and serious.

A later Parker novel, Ask the Parrot, has Parker teaming up with a man resentful because he has lost his job for being honest. The motif of good man forced to desperate measures because he lost his job echoes Westlake's standalone novel The Ax.

Can you think of other prolific, multifaceted authors who borrow from their own work the way Westlake does?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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How do authors keep interest alive in a long-running series?

How does a writer preserve continuity while avoiding stagnation?

Readers of Donald Westlake's comic Dortmunder novels know that Dortmunder and his gang begin planning each heist with a meeting at the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue. We know the impassive bartender Rollo and the bathroom doors marked "Pointers" and "Setters." We also recognize the addled cast of regulars who bellow hilariously garbled questions and answers at one another.

The thirteenth Dortmunder novel, What's So Funny?, preserves the traditional opening by eliminating it:

"When John Dortmunder, relieved, walked out of Pointers and back to the main sales floor of the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue a little after ten that Wednesday evening in November, the silence was unbelievable, particularly in contrast with the racket that had been going on when he'd left. But now, no. Not a word, not a peep, not a word. The regulars all hunched at the bar were clutching tight to their glasses as they practiced their thousand-yard stare ..."

That works for readers new to Dortmunder, who may wonder what the silence is all about, and it was delicious for me, letting me relive memories of previous trips to the O.J. Bar & Grill while jolting me with a delightful surprise.

This got me thinking of the things authors do to keep a long-running series new while preserving its best features. How do your favorite crime writers do this? Pick a series that's been around awhile, preferably for eight or more books, and tell me what the author does to keep it fresh.

(Click here and here for previous posts on how series change over time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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