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

"When my man came in with the steaming cup of tea, I rolled out of bed and said (in a marked manner), `Oh, I say!'": How Richard Stark is like P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves, like Richard Stark's Parker, goes by a single name. Jeeves, like Parker, manages heists that do not go as planned (think of the silver 18th-century cow creamer in The Code of the Woosters, for instance, and the rare coins in The Rare Coin Score). Jeeves' work, like Parker's, is often complicated by incompetent amateurs.

Setting is frequently a major plot point, the focus of all action, whether Cockaigne or Totleigh Towers.  Nocturnal break-ins abound in both the Jeeves stories and the Parker books, and Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster refers back to previous Jeeves and Bertie stories, just as Stark's Butcher's Moon is an all-star cast of characters from the Parker novels that had gone before.

More to come. In the meantime, in what other ways are Richard Stark and P.G. Wodehouse alike? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

The longue and the short of it

I recently sent a verbal high five to author Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) and narrator Joe Barrett for their correct spelling and pronunciation of chaise longue in Stark's novel Butcher's Moon and its audio book version. That's why I was surprised today to hear the term pronounced chaise lounge in the audio book of Stark's novel The Sour Lemon Score. Could Stark, that most literate of crime writers, have spelled it wrong?

Nope. I checked the novel, and Stark got it right. But the narrator, Stephen R. Thorne this time, pronounced longue as it were written lounge, the way the word is pronounced so often in America. OK, the sort of people who refer sneeringly to "language police" will blandly declare that "language changes," and they're right. But how do they explain Thorne's correct, French pronunciation of chaise?

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I've congratulated Marlon James and John Lawton for using the correct term, and I feel so strongly about the matter that I once wrote a story called "The Longue Goodbye."

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Richard Stark, or a discussion about a writer that touches on writing

I never cease to be amazed by how seldom discussions of writers turn to writing and by how frequently readers seem to equate overwriting with good writing. That's why I was so pleased by the response to my citation on Facebook of a simple, beautiful bit of description from Richard Stark's novel Deadly Edge.

Here's the passage:

"Keegan had thick dry brown hair and the outraged expression of a barroom arguer." 

Here's the discussion so far:

Sam Belacqua "barroom arguer" is a mouthful Unlike · Reply · 2 · 3 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky It's a beautiful, telling, concise bit of description, far better than bits of crime novels often cited as examples of fine writing. The opening of The Last Good Kiss comes to mind. Like · Reply · 4 · 3 hrs

Diane Williams Shaw lots of rrr's! Unlike · Reply · 1 · 3 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky R is the fourth most common consonant in English for a good reason! Like · Reply · 3 hrs 

Jack Getze "He looked like a high risk, the kind of guy who falls asleep smoking in bed." -- Elmore, the opening of Cat Chaser. Unlike · Reply · 4 · 3 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky That's terrific. I haven't liked Leonard as much as some readers do, but I may give Cat Chaser a try. One bad sign: A reviewer called it "quirky," but that's not Leonard's fault. Like · Reply · 1 · 3 hrs · Edited 

David Magayna I don't care for that simile, but then who am I to "argue" with Richard Stark? I might have used "barroom agitator". Unlike · Reply · 2 · 3 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky Your suggestion of "agitator" reinforces what a master stroke "arguer" is. The word is mildly jarring; no one would use it. That makes the reader sit up and take notice. A writer has to be pretty confident of his or her chops to try something like that. Like · Reply · 2 · 3 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky "Agitator" is also a bit elevated for what barroom loudmouths do, isn't it? That's another reason Westlake's choice works, I think. He is yet another crime writer upon whom reviewers, critics, and writers heap praise, without, however, highlighting the writer's prose style. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

David Magayna Well, I approached it from two different angles. One, it rolls off the tongue easier and sounds better, but, Two, the guy he seems to be describing (in my head) is someone who doesn't look to argue a point, but just run his mouth and take the opposite viewpoint of whatever might be discussed. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

David Magayna And I guess "arguer" could fill that bill, too. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky David Magayna Your guess describes the character perfectly, which is evidence that Stark made the right choice. To my mind, an agitator looks to start arguments, as opposed to an arguer, merely a peevish type who disagrees with everything. Stark knew what he wanted, and he knew the right word to get it. Like · Reply · 2 hrs · Edited 

Lanny Larcinese Peter Rozovsky re your point "arguer" as master stroke: I agree, and such word selection is critical to authorial voice. It makes me crazy when others purport that words "that make the reader sit up and take notice" pull them "out of the story." When I see unique (not including torrents of weird) language I want to keep reading. Vanilla may work for intensely plot-driven, but when it comes to character, give me rich. I'm down with "arguer." See More Unlike · Reply · 1 · 1 hr 

David Biemann How about, barroom goad? Too agitatorish? :) Like · Reply · 1 hr · Edited 

Peter Rozovsky Hey, everybody: I'm enjoying this discussion. Do any of you mind if I turn it into a blog post? Like · Reply · 2 · 2 hrs 

David Magayna Fine by me. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky David: Thanks. I love discussions like this. I never cease to be shocked by how infrequently discussions of writers deal with writing. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

David Biemann ...and the outraged expression of a man four drinks into a five drink barroom argument (?) Barroom too much like broom (?) arguer - agree with the too many r's. Still works... just gives pause (?) Like · Reply · 2 hrs · Edited 

Peter Rozovsky David Biemann Those are not bad, but Westlake's choice was better. He chose well when he chose the pen name Stark for the Parker novels. Like · Reply · 2 hrs David Biemann Less is better. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky David Biemann I'm similarly predisposed. But the question is not less (or more) is better, but rather of creating a tone appropriate to the story and of sticking to that tone. Westlake did that, and, for all the deserved praise he gets, that aspect of his work is rarely recognized. I suspect this is because people don't know how to talk about writing. Like · Reply · 1 · 2 hrs 

David Biemann True. Lines out of context are hard to judge on their merits in general but when you're creating context with them, it's a different story. Unlike · Reply · 1 · 2 hrs 

David Biemann Did you see Erin Mitchell's, if you could ask any living author question? I wish Westlake were still around to join this conversation. Like · Reply · 2 hrs 

Peter Rozovsky I'd have been happy to schmooze with Westlake, but he was good enough that his work can speak for him. Like · Reply · 1 · 2 hrs 

Linda L. Richards It seems a bit self-conscious to me. Like he had to work a bit too hard to get there. Also it puts me in mind of The Rural Juror: a bit too much of a mouthful. Unlike · Reply · 1 · 1 hr 

Peter Rozovsky I think the word shows signs of being a deliberate choice, so I understand your observation that it seems self-conscious. But that self-consciousness only accentuates how well chosen the word is, Like · Reply · 1 hr · Edited 

Linda L. Richards To my mind, a metaphor should evoke something effortlessly. You read it and just get it in your gut or heart or wherever good metaphors are digested. To me, this type is heavy handed. Klunk. It lacks delicacy and/or subtlety and makes me think about it too much. Unlike · Reply · 1 · 41 mins 

Peter Rozovsky I got it in my gut with a brief stopover in my brain. I've seen debates over whether style ought or ought not to be noticeable. It probably ought to be invisible most of the time except im rare instances where it calls the reader's attention to new possibilities. This example does that for me. Like · Reply · 24 mins 

Steven Parker I go for "brawler", obvious I suppose, but it goes with being an arguer... Like · Reply · 1 hr 

Peter Rozovsky Brawler is several steps beyond arguer and not at all what Stark wants to convey about the character. Like · Reply · 1 hr 

Steven Parker I must admit I was visualizing Trump in that role: "“Trump had straw like hair and the outraged expression of a barroom brawler.” It's the eternal outraged expression that gets me... :-) Unlike · Reply · 1 · 24 mins 

Steven Parker Besides, having run a few rock clubs while in my youth, in my experience the difference between an "outraged arguer" vs. "outraged brawler" is rougly 2 seconds! ;-) Unlike · Reply · 1 · 22 mins · Edited 

Darren Shupe Perhaps not quite the same as resembling a blond Satan, but hey. ;) Unlike · Reply · 1 · 5 mins 

Peter Rozovsky Though the image of Humphrey Bogart has driven the blond Satan description from most people's minds. My favorite part of the description is the Hammett says Spade looked "rather pleasantly" like a blond satan, which shows that in the hands of a deft enough writer, adverbs can do wonders. Like · Reply · Just now 

Thanks to everyone who has weighed in. And here's a blog post in which I suggest that "reviewers and other people are uncomfortable talking about writing at best or wouldn't know good writing if they saw it at worst."

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

The Longue Goodbye

In honor of author Richard Stark, reader Joe Barrett, and their correct rendering of chaise longue in the audiobook version of Stark's novel Butcher's Moon, here's a story I wrote a few years back.
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Rick Ollerman enjoys a
moment of nail-biting
suspense. Photos by
Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond
Borders.

Here are more photos from Sunday's Noir at the Bar in New York along with the other story I read there. I've included a face from earlier in the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would not have been out of place at the reading. (See if you can spot the interloper.)  See my other story and the first batch of photos on the previous post here at Detectives Beyond Borders.)

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The Longue Goodbye

Nick Kolakowski, Suzanne Solomon.

I pushed open the door to the pool deck and inhaled chlorine and death. Fen slumped in the chase lounge. He looked smaller and sicker than he had when I'd seen him three days before.

Hellenistic dramatic mask

Spit and blood caked around his broken mouth, and for a moment I thought he was dead. "Got anything to tell me, Fen?" I knelt by the chair.

Jeff Markowitz

His lips cracked when he tried to talk, and I knew Fen was more than halfway to where he was going. I leaned closer.

"It's chaise longue, not chase lounge, you illiterate fuck," he said. "It means long chair."

Jen Conley

He died happy.

— Peter Rozovsky

Albert Tucher, Jen Conley, Suzanne Solomon, Terrence McCauley

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Lionel White and definitely established mathematical odds: A classic heist novel revisited

Sixteen months after I made this post about the wince-making first scene of Lionel White's novel Clean Break (filmed by Stanley Kubrick as The Killing), I went back and read the whole novel; it's a hell of a novel. Rick Ollerman was right to invoke Richard Stark's Parker books in his comment below. The Killing (1955), and also White's The Big Caper, from the same year, are like Parker novels such as The Score, with their emphasis on the build-up to a heist and the ever present danger of interpersonal complications. White's story stays closer to film noir's roots in melodrama than Stark does, and the narrative pace is faster, but if you like one, you're liable to like the other. White appears to have published at least four novels in 1955. Perhaps the haste of publication deprived the book of the editorial scrutiny that would have remedied to faults I highlight in the post. \

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 The occasional lapses in prose style in paperback original novels get me thinking about the conditions under which their authors wrote. I remind myself that the verbal lapses may be due to those conditions rather than to lack of talent. But here's the opening of Lionel White's 1955 novel The Clean Break, which Stanley Kubrick filmed as The Killing (the novel, not just its opening):

"The aggressive determination on his long, bony face was in sharp contrast to the short, small-boned body which he used as a wedge to shoulder his way slowly through the hurrying crowd of stragglers rushing through the wide doors to the grandstand.

"Marvin Unger was only vaguely aware of the emotionally pitched voice coming over the public address system. He was very alert to everything taking place around him, but he didn’t need to hear that voice to know what was happening. The sudden roar of the thousands out there in the hot, yellow, afternoon sunlight made it quite clear. They were off in the fourth race.

"Unconsciously his right hand tightened around the thick packet of tickets he had buried in the side pocket of his linen jacket. The tension was purely automatic. Of the hundred thousand and more persons at the track that afternoon, he alone felt no thrill as the twelve thoroughbreds left the post for the big race of the day.

"Turning into the abruptly deserted lobby of the clubhouse, his tight mouth relaxed in a wry smile. He would, in any case, cash a winning ticket. He had a ten dollar win bet on every horse in the race.

"In the course of his thirty-seven years, Unger had been at a track less than half a dozen times. He was totally disinterested in horse racing; in fact, had never gambled at all. He had a neat, orderly mind, a very clear sense of logic and an inbred aversion to all `sporting events.' He considered gambling not only stupid, but strictly a losing proposition. Fifteen years as a court stenographer had given him frequent opportunity to see what usually happened when men place their faith in luck in opposition to definitely established mathematical odds."

I'll give White "aggressive determination," though I think the phrase weak, bordering on repetitive. But every other word or string of words I highlighted crosses that border or is at best unnecessary and at worst grammatically ludicrous.  "Emotionally pitched"? What does that mean? Did the announcer sound as if he were about to break into tears? Why "everything taking place around him" rather than just "everything around him"? Why slow a sentence down by beginning it with an adverb ("unconsciously"), especially when White repeats himself in the next sentence, telling us the tension was "purely automatic"? And why "purely automatic" rather than "automatic"?

"Turning into the abruptly deserted lobby of the clubhouse, his tight mouth relaxed" is not only a dangling participle, it's wordy. Why tell us that the stragglers were rushing if you've just told us they're hurrying? And "the course of," "very," "in fact," and "at all" are throat-clearing. White should have cut each in his second draft or his editor on a first pass. As to "definitely established mathematical odds," all odds are mathematical, and "definitely established" is doubly redundant, each word with respect to the other, and the two when set against "mathematical."

OK, these guys churned it out, and their work probably did not get the care most novels got at hardback houses or that one associates with novels today, when authors will turn out maybe a book a year rather than a book a month. If  he'd had more time, Harry Whittington might occasionally have substituted another word for sickness in A Night for Screaming. Charles Williams might have found other ways to say "thoughtfully" in All The Way (also known as The Concrete Flamingo).  But those guys saved the repetition for later in their books, and it's easy to imagine them so caught up in the stories they were telling that verbal polish fell by the wayside. They didn't bog things down on the very first page, never a good idea, particularly not in thrillers or suspense novels.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The Parker project: Re-readng Richard Stark

I’m 10 books into the idea I stole from Heath Lowrance of rereading all the Parker novels Donald Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark alias. In order, I’ve reread Breakout, The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, The Outfit, Butcher’s Moon, The Sour Lemon Score, Plunder Squad, The Seventh, The Mourner, and Deadly Edge.

The experience offers an impressive answer to a question I pose occasionally at Detectives Beyond Borders: How does an author keep a long-running series fresh? Stark did it by radically reconceiving the series repeatedly. The lone-avenger plot of the first three books bleeds gradually into stories of heists gone wrong, the seed of the latter sown as early as Book Two, The Man With the Getaway Face.

Once he began writing the heist books, Stark stayed constantly ahead of what his fans expected of them. Parker, the unemotional user of women? Stark got good mileage out of that motif before introducing Claire in The Rare Coin Score (1967), then making her a part of Parker's life and a driver of the plot in Deadly Edge four years later. Claire was no calculated, pro-forma addition, either. Her interaction with Parker and the hapless heist planner Billy Lebatard shows that Stark had assimilated every lesson postwar novels of nervous American masculinity and sexual jealousy had to teach. And Deadly Edge shows Stark doing a creditable job with the frightened-woman-alone-in-a-house motif even as he makes sure readers know why she so strongly loves the house and refuses to leave it.

Parker the silent? Stark laid that one to rest, giving Parker pages of nonstop dialogue in The Black Ice Score. That is easily the weakest of the Parker novels, but I respect Westlake for doing something different. And anyone who scorns the idea that Stark had a sense of humor needs to read The Score or The Seventh. The latter book especially uses humor like the minor-key variation on the main theme in an opera. The book is grim and violent, which makes the humorous touches stand out all the more.

Think of any shorthand tag by which readers and commentators refer to Parker, and the chances are that it's accurate, but also that Stark went way beyond it.

(Read all about Parker at the Violent World of Parker Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Kansas City Confidential: Good, evil, and Donald Westlake

Kansas City Confidential (1952), a movie about an innocent man caught up in a heist who must then fight to clear his name, has to be an interesting case study in the conflicting pressures American movie makers faced in the 1950s.

On the one hand, its plot is as noir as noir gets: Innocent man with a blot on his past gets caught up in a heist, is arrested, is brutalized by police, loses his job, and must fight to restore his reputation. John Payne does decent work as the innocent man, fairly believable when he has to get tough. (And the movie's punch-up scenes are more convincingly tough than corresponding scenes in other movies of the time.)

On the other, the movie's love interest and redemption-soaked ending are so thoroughly unconvincing, so obviously at odds with everything else, that it's easy to disregard them and to enjoy the good stuff.   The gulf between the redemption and the evil got me thinking about, and appreciating, the balance that moviemakers of the time must have had to strike between getting their dark visions on the screen, and making them morally acceptable in a conservative age.

Neville Brand

Maybe the era's social pressure to clearly delineate good and bad is responsible for the movie's splendid trio of heisters, played by Neville Brand, Jack Elam, and a young Lee Van Cleef. These guys are like crowd figures in a Northern Renaissance Crucifixion painting. You know they're evil just by looking at them.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about Kansas City Confidential for crime fiction readers is spotting the bits that Donald Westlake had to have picked up from the movie: The discord among criminals. The getaway car that drives up inside a tractor-trailer after a heist.  The caper masterminded by a disgraced former high-ranking police officer, a device Westlake used to great effect in The Score.   The movie's narrative arc is also similar to those of many of the Parker novels Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark name: We see a robbery being planned, but the real action happens after the heist. I wouldn't call Kansas City Confidential a heist film, though, because the pre-heist planning part of the story is given little attention.

(Westlake was a sharp observer of and commentator on popular culture. I don't know if he wrote about Kansas City Confidential, but I do know that the first place I'd look is The Getaway Car,  that recent collection of Westlake's nonfiction from the University of Chicago Press.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Don't tinker with Parker unless you're Richard Stark

Here's an old post about a problematic movie adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker instead of the new post I wanted to write about one of the Parker novels. What's the connection? One of my complaints about Parker, the 2013 Jason Statham movie based on Stark's 2000 novel Flashfire, is the filmmakers' efforts to make Parker more sympathetic. Stark made occasional such efforts when he brought Parker back to life in 1998 after a 24-year hiatus. One of the most notable is the final chapters of Breakout, which, however, are harrowing and wistful in the manner of a lonesome country ballad, rather than cheap, in the manner of a shitty romantic comedy.

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I don't know the politics of Hollywood movie making, but it sure looks to me as if Parker, based on Richard Stark's novel Flashfire, was designed less to render Stark faithfully on screen than it was to show off Jennifer Lopez's character (and her ass).

There's nothing wrong with that justifiably celebrated rear end. But those lower-body close-ups screamed not so much "Sexism!" as they did  "Look at me! No matter what part of me! I'm  a star!"

It's Lopez's presence in the movie, I'm convinced, that accounts for most of the unconvincing light-comic, cheap humanizing, and romantic elements. They're designed to show Lopez off: the reaction shots, the freak outs, the teary bits. She's not terrible, but she can't carry a movie, especially not one whose focus should be elsewhere. Similarly, the movie's not terrible, but it's a lot more a conventional action movie, complete with pro-forma efforts to show that the tough-guy hero is a good guy at heart, than Stark/Westlake/Parker fans probably hoped for. Read the books instead.

(For a scathing review of Parker, complete with links to dissenting opinions, view the excellent Violent World of Parker Web site. Even the positive reviews make exceptions for some of the elements I singled out here: Lopez and the cheap efforts to make Parker more sympathetic.)  

© Peter Rozovsky 2013, 2015

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

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: Max Allan Collins just wants to have fun

Max Allan Collins will discuss other writers during a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 next month, but his own work is worth reading as well. His three most recent Quarry novels, the latest in a series that began in the 1970s, suggest that Collins shared the savvy professionalism of the pulp and paperback-original writers who will be the panel's main subject.

The three books—Quarry in the Middle, Quarry's Ex, and The Wrong Quarry, each published by Hard Case Crime—begin with the hitman/entrepreneur protagonist, Quarry, embarking on a job. (Collins sets the books in the Reagan era and has just enough fun with the period's social, political, and, most of all, musical trappings to remind readers of the setting without getting in the story's way.)

Quarry became a hitman after military service in Vietnam, where he learned to kill; killed his boss after the boss cheated him; then created and exploited a niche in the murder market: He uses his boss' old files to track the contract killers long enough to figure out who their targets are, then goes to the targets and offers to kill the killers for a handsome fee—which he does in due course, about a third of the way through each book. And that's where the real fun starts, and Quarry is forced to turn detective and figure out who the bad guys really are.

This format lets Collins exploit any number of crime and adventure conventions. Quarry is a disillusioned Vietnam vet, though without the psychological baggage. He's a tough-guy ass-kicker with a bit of the wise-cracking self-awareness of the Saint. He's a mildly self-effacing babe magnet, with an amiable susceptibility to women, a Shell Scott with more sex and fewer extravagant anatomical similes. And, when compelled to figure out who's really who, and who wants what and why, he makes a more than credible detective.

Along the way, the books' (possible) crime-fiction references include Richard Stark's Parker: Quarry in the Middle has one character apprehensive that Quarry plans to rob a casino, a la The Handle. But Quarry laughs and reassures his nervous interlocutor that he, Quarry, is part of no plunder squad. (One of Collins' other series pays amusing tribute to crime and espionage classics in such titles as A Shroud for Aquarius and The Baby Blue Rip-Off.)

I don't know how the Quarry series has changed over the years, whether the earlier novels are more straightforward hitman tales than these later ones. Nor do I know whether those early books partake as freely of the crime-fiction smorgasbord. But Quarry in the Middle, Quarry's Ex, and The Wrong Quarry take a '50s-style tough guy, give him a '60-style back story, and set the results in the 1970s. Pastiche? Maybe, but by God, Collins pulls it off, and has lots of fun doing it.

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Max Allan Collins will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday, Nov. 14, 3 p.m. at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Block on Westlake and his (non) jokes (or, the comedy is finished)

Lawrence Block remembers his friend
Donald Weslake during a celebration
at Mysterious Bookshop. Photo by Peter
Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper.

In addition to enjoying Donald Westlake's novels, I always found his remarks on movies, popular culture, and other subjects stimulating. So I was pleased when I learned that the University of Chicago Press, the same folks who are rereleasing all the Parker novels Westlake wrote as Richard Stark, has put together a collection of Westlake's nonfiction.

Now I'm pleased to find that some key people behind the book, titles The Getaway Car, think similarly about what made Westlake so good. "Don didn't write jokes," his longtime friend Lawrence Block said Monday at a celebration of the book. "He found amusing ways to say things."  Levi Stahl, the volume's editor, emphasized the point with a little game in which he had members of the audience read the opening lines of several of the Parker novels (and one featuring Alan Grofield).

Here are a few I liked and remembered fondly:

"When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away."

and

"When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed."

and

"Grofield opened his right eye, and there was a girl climbing in the window. He closed that eye, opened the left, and she was still there."

Do you see the fun Westlake has with a common speech pattern in that last example?  Lawrence Block was right. Westlake didn't just say funny things, he said things funny.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A first look at the new Donald Westlake non-fiction miscellany

I have long admired Donald Westlake's musings on his chosen genre of crime fiction, on memory, media, popular culture, and other subjects, but I had to glean the observations from interviews, articles, and citations in the work of others. Levi Stahl and the good people at the University of Chicago Press apparently agree that Westlake was an interesting guy, because they're bringing out a collection of  his non-fiction called The Getaway Car. Release is slated for October.

The book offers insight into Westlake's many alter egos (Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, et. al), a list of Westlake's favorite crime fiction, his reflections on his own work, letters, recollections, and May's famous tuna casserole recipe, among other things. Also included: an introduction by Stahl, a foreword by Westlake's friend Lawrence Block, and an epigraph from Westlake's widow, Abby: "No matter where he was headed, Don always drove like he was behind the wheel of the getaway car."

While I wait for a final copy of The Getaway Car, here's an old blog post that explains why I'm excited about the book. And here's a link to all Detectives Beyond Borders posts about Westlake.

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Donald Westlake, who died Dec. 31. 2008, at 75, was not just a prolific, creative, original and endlessly entertaining crime writer, he was also a thoughtful, intelligent observer of the world around him.

He once lamented the reduced distribution of foreign films in the U.S., calling the superb 1958 Italian heist movie Big Deal on Madonna Street a laboratory for comedy writers and mourning that future Americans might miss similar opportunities to absorb and learn from foreign influences.

He also noted mass media's tendency to telescope the past into a timeless present/past accessible to all. This meant, he remarked, that Americans could assess the accuracy of a movie scene set on a train even though most had never been on a train. I suspect he underestimated the number of Americans who had travelled by rail, but his point was valid, and it anticipated such phenomena as retro fashions, digital sampling/recycling of old pop songs, and the Beatles churning out new records long after they had broken up and begun to die off.

Those statements, one in an interview, the other in a preface to one of Westlake's books, if I recall correctly, rank among my favorite Westlake moments. They're right up there with Parker out of jail and walking across the George Washington Bridge in The Hunter or Joe Gores' D.K.A. gang meeting up with Dortmunder and his crew in Drowned Hopes or all of The Score or the stoic Parker finally losing patience with his lighthearted sidekick's antics and snapping, "Shut up, Grofield."

I always said Westlake differed from most authors in one respect: Most writers might come up with a wild story idea from time to time. Westlake turned his wild ideas into books. That's why even some of his less successful stories were always exciting and worth admiration for the man's gumption, imagination and industry.

Sarah Weinman's remarks include a library of Westlake links and a rolling list of Westlake tributes. Leap in. The man offers some terrific reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Why Icelandic sagas are like Richard Stark's Parker

The Icelandic sagas remind me a bit of Richard Stark's Parker. Their characters talk no more than they need to (except when reciting poetry),  they engage in minimal introspection, and their heroes know how to get the job done.  And Egil's Saga has its title character wreaking single-handed havoc on an opponent's stronghold in way that may remind readers of what Parker, Grofield, and company do to the island casino in The Handle.

I read Egil's Saga in a translation by the late Bernard Scudder, the much respected translator of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Arnaldur Indriðason, and the bracing informality of his version makes it lot more readable than one might suspect from the witty aura of airbrushed sword-and-sorcery fantasy balderdash that surrounds the idea of Vikings. Two favorite examples:

"As he grew up, it soon became clear he would turn out very ugly and resemble his father ... " (and that's the hero of the story.)

and

"Helga replied, ‘Even though you are so stupid that you cannot look after yourself, I will bring it about that this duel never takes place.’"

That's another thing about the sagas: the protagonists are men, but the women could inherit property, talk tough, and kick ass in a way I'm not sure was common in other 13th-century European literature.  Maybe that brisk directness is a feature of the original Old Norse, but if that's the case, Scudder wisely highlights it. No wifty swords and sorcery here.

And you want stories that cross borders? Egil's Saga is set in Iceland, Norway, England, Scotland, Lapland, Finland, around the Baltic Sea, and Eastern Europe, with additional mentions of journeys to France and Ireland (the Vikings founded Dublin and other Irish cities, after all.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Reed Farrel Coleman's reconciliation street, or, the ways authors end a series

Reed Farrel Coleman's The Hollow Girl is full of characters who turn out not quite as awful as the reader has been led to expect, and its protagonist, Moe Prager, achieves, if not redemption, then reconciliation with his past.

Fair enough; the novel comes billed as the last of the nine Prager books, and a number of its features, not least the novel's ending, point in that direction. I'll spoil little if I reveal that Prager spends good chunks of the book coming to terms with, and getting himself clear of, aspects of his old life.

That's how Coleman decided to end a series. How do other writers do it? How have your favorite crime writers brought series to an end?

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The Hollow Girl looks to Moe Prager's past with its plentiful references to Prager's previous cases. It reminded me in this respect of Richard Stark's Butcher's Moon, which brought back a number of character's from Stark previous Parker novels and looked for a while as if it were going to kill off one of the main supporting characters. Indeed, Butcher's Moon was the last Parker novel for 23 years.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

Dashiell Hammett, father to John le Carré?

Did Donald Westlake spend much time in Texas, in particular browsing the Dashiell Hammett archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin? (If the good folks at The Violent World of Parker know the answer, feel free to weigh in.)

I ask because a passage from "The Secret Emperor," a fragment included with e-book editions of the new Hunter and Other Stories by Hammett, contains a scene that reads just like a favorite bit from The Score, one of my favorite of the Parker novels — and Hammett wrote his fragment in 1925. Westlake has said of his own precursors that "For early influences we have to start, and almost end, with Hammett." Even if he never read "The Secret Emperor," I like to think Westlake would smile at the thought that he captured a bit of its style.

The Hunter and Other Stories contains twenty stories uncollected or unpublished during Hammett's lifetime, plus a tantalizing fragment of an uncompleted Sam Spade story. E-book editions include three additional pieces of what Hammett hoped would turn into political novels, according to Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and, with Hammett scholar Richard Layman, a co-editor of the new volume.  Rivett invokes The Maltese Falcon in discussing "The Secret Emperor," but I'm reminded of The Glass Key.

Like that novel, which appeared in 1931, "The Secret Emperor" feels like it could have been written decades later, even today.  Had he completed "The Secret Emperor," and if the result were as good as the opening chapters included here, it's entirely possible that, as well as a father of hard-boiled crime writing, Hammett would be considered an ancestor of modern political thrillers, including those of alienation and paranoia. As well as the progenitor of Raymond Chandler, Hammett might thus be regarded as a forerunner to John le Carré, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Alan Glynn, and all the 1970s paranoia thriller movies Glynn likes so much.

Yep, the man was that good.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Joe Gores' Interface and Donald Westlake. Hammett, too

Did Joe Gores borrow the cadence of the name of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark's Parker for his own Docker, an antagonist in Gores' 1974 novel Interface?

Docker is as ruthless as Parker, as dedicated to the proposition that work exists to be done, not fretted over. Further, a lengthy mid-novel scene in which Docker evades a string of pursuers at an airport, leaving them much worse off than when they started, reminded me of Parker in Slayground.

Finally, Gores and Westlake were friends who resorted to the delightful game of writing a chapter that included both authors' characters and using the resulting chapter in a novel by each author (Westlake's Drowned Hopes, Gores' 32 Cadillacs.)

Docker's and Parker's dedication to their dark tasks may ultimately stem from Dashiell Hammett, whose Sam Spade and Continental Op did what they had to do. Gores was among the most dedicated and accomplished of Hammettians; his novels include a prequel to The Maltese Falcon (Spade & Archer) and Hammett, in which Hammett resumes his role as a real-life detective. And Westlake, speaking of the authors who shaped his work, once told an interviewer that "For early influences we have to start, and almost end, with Hammett."

I'll be back with more, on Interface's ending. For now, though, if you like Hammett and you like Westlake, you'll like Interface. And if don't like Hammett and Westlake, like the Monticello Man said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Johnny Shaw, all-American

I'm also quite enjoying my second piece of post-Bouchercon reading, Johnny Shaw's Big Maria. Shaw is the man behind "Blood and Tacos, featuring Chingón, the World's Deadliest Mexican," and anyone capable of coming up with that title, much less a story to go with it, is worth watching out for.

Big Maria is the story of a mammoth caper planned by three of the biggest screw-ups in all of crime fiction. The novel's first three sections have the outsize japery of "Blood and Tacos," but Shaw makes his misfit gang touchingly self-aware and endows them with optimism that is positively all-American.

And he does it all without losing the book's hard edge. When the characters get hurt, man, do they get hurt. When they get drunk, man, do they get drunk.  But somehow you'll wind up laughing.

I hope I'm not overanalyzing if I detect tributes to David Goodis in those early chapters as well as to Donald Westlake's Drowned Hopes and the Parker novels he wrote as Richard Stark. Overanalysis or not, the influence hunting is just a small part of the fun.

Now, back to my reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Meet Mike Knowles

Mike Knowles' Wilson is a bit like Richard Stark's Parker, and that's not a bad thing to be.

But the differences between the two one-named heist planners are more interesting than the similarities. Wilson is not nearly as distant a figure as Parker, for one thing, in large part because he's the novels' first-person narrator as well as their protagonist. And Knowles, through Wilson's eyes, explores supporting characters', er, character, more than Stark/Parker ever does.

My previous blog posts about Knowles have titles that include "More in Mike  Knowles' literary caffeine jolts" and "Darker than Parker," which may give you some idea of what you're in for.

Never Play Another Man's Game is the most recent of the four Wilson novels, preceded by Darwin's Nightmare, Grinder, and In Plain Sight. The latter three are available in an omnibus edition.

Read an excerpt from Another Man's Game.

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Speaking of Richard Stark (Donald Westlake), today would have been his seventy-ninth birthday. Here's a video tribute from friends and collaborators to the creator of Parker, Dortmunder, Grofield, and the screenplays of The Grifters and The Stepfather. And here are four posts I put up about Westlake after he died on New Year's Eve, 2008.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crimefest 2012 highlights

A gentle spring wind dissipates the gin fumes over College Green, and Bristol is an eerily quiet place now that Ali Karim has left town.

With Crimefest 2012's remaining stragglers marshaling their strength before the Sunday dinner, here are some highlights of my third Crimefest, one of the most enjoyable crime festivals I've been part of:

1) Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool wins the Last Laugh award, for best comic crime fiction published in the U.K., besting a field that included hacks and pikers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.

2) Your humble blogkeeper loses the Criminal Mastermind quiz to Peter Guttridge on the crime-fiction equivalent of penalty kicks. Guttridge and I each answered fifteen questions correctly in general crime-fiction knowledge and our specialty categories. (His was Richard Stark's Parker novels; mine was Dashiell Hammett.) Guttridge won the prize of Bristol blue glass and a free pass to next year's festival because he had passed on only five questions whose answers he did not know while I passed on seven. I think, however, that my showing may be the best ever by a North American, and proof to the Brits that there's more to America than bluff good humor, rustic colonial manners, and a flair for tall stories.

3) A post-dinner discussion with Gunnar Staalesen, who agreed with a Detectives Beyond Borders commenter's suggestion that the Anders Breivik case will halt fruitful, honest discussion of immigration and integration in Norway for a generation.

4) Finding a crime writer (William Ryan) for whom Isaac Babel (Odessa Tales, Red Cavalry) is both an inspiration and a character.

5) Reunions with the delightful floating cast of authors, organizers, critics and fans who spend their vacations criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean to attend every crime festival they can in England and America, and the addition of Alison Bruce, Laura Wilson and Stav Sherez to the cast. See you in Cleveland or Harrogate or Bristol or Albany or Long Beach or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2012