The Rap Sheet: Bullet Points: No AI Content Here Edition

 The Rap Sheet: Bullet Points: No AI Content Here Edition

SleuthSayers: Main Character Energy

SleuthSayers: Main Character Energy:  I have mentioned Not Always Right here before . It is a website where people anonymously report terrible encounters with customers.  I rec...

Barry Ergang's FFB Review: A JADE IN ARIES (1970) by Tucker Coe

 

From the archive... 

A JADE IN ARIES (1970) by Tucker Coe

 

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

 

 

When I was twelve years old I read my first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Vagabond Virgin, and I was hooked. I read a dozen more, one right after another, until I was over-saturated with Erle Stanley Gardner’s style and approach in this particular series. (He had a multitude of series, and his style varied accordingly, as I learned over time.) Many years went by before I picked up another Mason novel. As a result of that experience, I generally made it a point to avoid consecutive readings of works by a given author, lest I burn out on him or her. There were probably a few exceptions, but I never binged on anyone else to the extent I did with Gardner.

 

I mention this because I read the book under consideration here, which was written by Donald E. Westlake under his Tucker Coe pen name, immediately after finishing Drowned Hopes. The books are radically different in style and approach—A Jade in Aries is not remotely comical, whereas Drowned Hopes emphatically is—and each is, in turn, very different from the novels he wrote under his Richard Stark pen name.

 

A Jade in Aries is the fourth in a five-book series narrated by former NYPD detective Mitchell Tobin, a man disgraced and punishing himself for it by literally and figuratively both digging a hole to retreat into and walling himself off from society as much as possible. He does not have a private detective’s license, but has occasionally undertaken investigations to supplement the money his wife Kate earns from a part-time job.

 

This story begins when Tobin is approached on Wednesday, January 7^th, by a young gay man, Ronald Cornell, owner of a men’s boutique. He insists that his partner—personal and professional—Jamie Dearborn, was murdered, and that the police detective, Aldo Manzoni, won’t do anything about it, having written it off as what he calls a case of the “Changeable Sailor.” Disbelieving this, certain that Jamie’s killer is someone he and others in his circle know, Cornell is determined to identify him. He is seriously into astrology, and only needs Tobin’s help to find out the exact dates and times of birth of the six men he’s narrowed his list of suspects to. Tobin calls an old cop friend in Missing Persons, tells him what he needs, and then tells Cornell to call the friend directly the following Monday.

 

Over breakfast Tuesday morning, Kate Tobin reads a newspaper story she shares with her husband, he having told her about his meeting with Cornell. The story says Cornell is in the hospital after an attempted suicide. Based on the alleged method and what he observed about Cornell, Mitch Tobin refutes the story, sure that Cornell was assaulted, but refuses to get involved. When Kate subsequently—trying to wear down his resistance—tells her husband that she visited Cornell in the hospital, that he has made an extremely generous offer in exchange for Mitch’s help—and they can certainly use the money—that the bigoted, homophobic Detective Manzoni insists Cornell is emotionally unbalanced and should be institutionalized, Tobin caves in and undertakes the investigation. The result is an absorbing character-driven story as Tobin deals with a variety of personalities, including the oppositional Manzoni, from the Cornell/Dearborn social circle to solve Cornell’s assault and two murders.

 

Homophobes are unlikely to read A Jade in Aries. More enlightened readers will probably have to make, as I did, reactive adjustments concerning the context of the time in which it was written, specifically with regard to language and attitude. I was 23 when it was published and don’t recall gay being a synonym for homosexual back then. Thus, homosexual is the term used throughout, unless someone disparagingly says queer or faggot, as some characters do. One who uses faggot a couple of times is Tobin himself, which I found somewhat disconcerting since he’s sympathetic to Cornell’s plight, and treats those in Cornell’s coterie the same way he’d treat heterosexuals: with respect or contempt based on how they comported themselves and responded to him.

 

In Chapter Eight, looking at his fifteen-year-old son, Tobin briefly wonders whether the boy might become homosexual, as if it were a matter of choice or upbringing: “I don’t know if I can be proved right or wrong, but I hold to the belief that homosexuality almost always shows a failure of some kind on the part of the parents. The failure of the father to be a man, or of the mother to be a woman, or of both to give their child security and love. Whatever the particular style of the failure, I think it almost always lies in the parents when the son emerges to adulthood as a homosexual.”

 

Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was strictly Tobin the fictional character speaking, or if it was Westlake the author using Tobin as a conduit for his own beliefs. If the latter, I wonder if Westlake’s attitude changed during the decades prior to his death as more became known about human sexuality.

 

I found A Jade in Aries engrossing, compelling, and hard to put down, even though I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “great” mystery novel, and can recommend it to those who don’t object to a major aspect of its subject matter.

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4hHWruV 

 

  

Barry Ergang ©2015, 2025

  

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/ and he can be reached there for your editorial needs.

SleuthSayers: They Done Parker Dirty

SleuthSayers: They Done Parker Dirty: One of the pleasures of mystery fiction is finding those series characters you love--the ones you can't get enough of, the ones whose ad...

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: DIRTY MONEY

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: DIRTY MONEY: Dirty Money  by "Richard Stark" (Donald E. Westlake)  (2008) The is the final novel that Westlake wrote about master criminal Park...

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: BABY, WOULD I LIE?

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: BABY, WOULD I LIE?:   Baby, Would I Lie?   by Donald E. Westlake  (1994} This one is subtitled "A Romance of the Ozarks," which is a bit of a misnomer...

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: A GIRL CALLED HONEY

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: A GIRL CALLED HONEY:   A Girl Called Honey  by "Sheldon Lord" (Lawrence Block) & "Alan Marshall" (Donald E. Westlake)  (first published i...

Barry Ergang's FFB Review: THE JUGGER (1965) by Richard Stark

 

The late Donald E. Westlake was a versatile writer whose output ranged over a number of fields. But it is crime fiction for which he is most famous, for which he was deservedly acknowledged by the Mystery Writers of America as a Grand Master, and in which he wrote under his own name and under a variety of pseudonyms. Under his own name he will always be remembered as one of the greatest exponents of the comic crime novel with titles that include The Hot Rock, God Save the Mark, I Gave at the Office, What's the Worst That Could Happen?, and Two Much.

 

As Richard Stark, probably his best-known pseudonym, he produced a very successful series of ultra-hardboiled novels, several of which were filmed—see The Thrilling Detective website for more information. The books starred Parker, a professional thief: "Once or twice a year, Parker was in on an institutional robbery...It wasn't out of humanity that he limited himself to organizations, it was just that organizations had more money than individuals....

 

"Parker wasn't a single-o. He always worked with a pickup group gathered for that single specific job. Every man was a specialist, and Parker's specialties were two; planning and violence. Other men were specialists in opening safes or scaling walls or making up blueprints from nothing more than observation, but Parker was a specialist at planning an operation so it run smoothly, and at stopping any outsider who might be thinking of lousing things up."

 

The premise of The Jugger, the sixth book in a series which does not necessarily have to be read in order, is fairly simple. Joe Sheer is a jugger, a safecracker, living in the small town of Sagamore, Nebraska under the name Joseph Shardin. Now retired, he sometimes acts as an intermediary between Parker and others in his particular line of work. He writes to Parker who, when not pulling heists, lives in Miami under the name Charles Willis, an identity he has painstakingly constructed over a period of years. Sheer's first letter indicates that he's in some kind of trouble, that he'll handle it, but that Parker shouldn't try to contact him until the matter is settled. A month later a second letter arrives, this one asking for Parker's help. Parker packs a bag and, as Charles Willis, goes to Sagamore. He does so not out of loyalty or friendship toward Sheer—there is nothing noble about him; he does so for the sake of self-preservation. "Joe Sheer could crucify Parker, he could nail him to the wall with a hundred nails...He knew him by his old face...He knew Parker's cover name, he knew twenty or twenty-five jobs Parker had been connected with, he knew enough about Parker to skin him alive."

 

Simple premise, right? All Parker has to do is find out what kind of jam Sheer is in and either help him out of it or kill him to protect himself. But not long after he arrives in Sagamore, things quickly become complicated. Sheer is dead, but nobody will level with Parker about how he died. A man named Tiftus, who "claimed to be a lock man" whom "Parker had never worked with...because he was too unreliable" shows up at Parker's hotel room, wanting to partner to find something valuable he's certain Sheer had hidden somewhere.

 

Parker goes to Sheer's house to look around for himself and is knocked unconscious by someone wearing a burlap bag for a mask. Not long afterward, Tiftus is found dead—in Parker's hotel room. Now Parker must deal with the corrupt Captain Younger, local head of the police department, and the honest, earnest state police investigator Regan—while trying to tie up loose ends, absolve himself of a connection to Tiftus's murder, find the actual killer, and ditch an unwanted new associate. 

 

 

To say anything more would be to spoil the excitement in this taut short novel. The Jugger is as hardboiled as anything Mickey Spillane ever wrote, but without the posturing. Parker is cold, efficient, and ruthless, the complete anti-hero. He lets nothing and no one stand in his way when he's trying to accomplish something. Even readers who think they're inured to fictional criminal activities might be surprised by  some of Parker's. Although he's repellent to anyone with moral sensibilities, he's so intriguing that readers who go for noir fiction will want to follow his adventures, a testament to Westlake's authorial skill.

 

As the quoted passages demonstrate, the author doesn't waste words, doesn't indulge in the kind of verbal pyrotechnics that can dilute and obstruct a narrative. Thus, the story's relentless pace infuses it with a raw power. The no-nonsense style reflects Parker's no-nonsense approach. A further testament to the author's skill is his ability to portray breathing, individualized characters—this despite the fact that the reader is given background information only about Parker and Captain Younger.

 

The Jugger will not appeal to readers who only like stories about heroes with noble codes of honor and conduct, nor will it appeal to readers who dislike onstage violence. Fans of rapid-fire hardboiled fiction will greatly enjoy and possibly even love it. To them I highly recommend it.

 

 

Barry Ergang ©2012, 2023

 

Derringer Award winner Barry Ergang’s own fiction can be found at Amazon and Smashwords.

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: COMFORT STATION

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: COMFORT STATION:   Comfort Station by "J. Morgan Cunningham"  (Donald E. Westlake), 1973 For thousand of years, the wisestof us have poindered the ...

Barry Ergang's FFB Review: BANK SHOT (1972) by Donald E. Westlake

From the massively magnificent archive… 

“A man had to stay alive somehow while waiting for a big score to develop, and there was nothing better for that than an encyclopedia con. In the spring and fall, that is; winter was too cold for house-to-house work and summer was too hot. But given the right time of year, the old encyclopedia scam was unbeatable.”

 

Or so the hapless Dortmunder thinks until, after his prospect leaves the room, he hears 9-1-1 being dialed followed by sirens, and makes a fast exit from her home. 

One of his criminous colleagues, Kelp, has a score in view: “I swear and I have the goods. This time I have a guaranteed winner.” Although Dortmunder is skeptical, Kelp persuades him to listen to the proposed caper, a bank robbery his nephew Victor has concocted. Victor was formerly with the FBI, which fact instantly puts Dortmunder on his guard. 

The target is the temporary headquarters—a converted mobile home/trailer—across the street from the original building of Capitalists & Immigrants Trusts. The old building is being torn down and rebuilt. The plan is to steal the bank. No, not just the money within—a standard robbery effort would be far too risky—but instead to steal the trailer, transport it to a remote location that would give the robbers time to loot the safe, and then depart unseen. 

Besides the aforementioned Kelp and Victor, Dortmunder’s crew consists of his chain-smoking girlfriend May, a lockman (safecracker) who goes by the name Herman X, driver Stan Murch, and Murch’s mother, who has been resentfully wearing, when necessary, a neck brace to scam an insurance policy. 

Bank Shot recounts a Dortmunder caper, folks, so you know things won’t go smoothly. Its author being Donald Westlake, you’ll likely anticipate a lot of laughs, as I did. Unfortunately, they weren’t forthcoming. The book is entertaining, to be sure, but unlike some of the other Dortmunder titles I’ve read, I found this one sorely lacking in chuckle- or guffaw-out-loud moments. In fact, it wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through or so that I came upon moments that had me smiling even a little. Consequently, although I can recommend it as a fast, pleasant read, it’s a disappointment in terms of the wonderful wackiness found in other Dortmunder and standalone comic novels by mystery Grand Master Westlake.

 

 

Barry Ergang ©2019, 2023 

Among his other works, Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s locked-room novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, can be found in eBook formats at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Two Country Music Mysteries

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Two Country Music Mysteries: In this post I am covering two humorous mystery novels set in the country music world.  The first book was Fender Benders by Bill Fitzhugh,...

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: BAD NEWS

Jerry's House of Everything: FORGOTTEN BOOK: BAD NEWS:   Bad News  by Donald E. Westlake  (2001) Dortmunder. That's it.  That's my entire review.  You really don't need anything else ...

FFB Review: GOD SAVE THE MARK (1967) by Donald E. Westlake Reviewed by Barry Ergang

 

From the massive archive…

 

Fred Fitch is a con artist's wet dream. He seems to radiate an aura of gullibility that any and every grifter can see or sense: "Con men take one look at me, streamline their pitches, and soon go gaily off to steak dinners while poor Fred Fitch sits at home and once again dines on gnawed fingernail." It has been this way for him since his childhood in Montana "when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they'd been traded to some classmate, but I couldn't remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn't already belonged to me when I'd left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found."

         

Now thirty-one and living in an apartment in New York City, fleeceable Fred works as a freelance researcher. Because he's been conned so many times, he's become a good friend of Bunco Squad detective Jack Reilly. Thus, when he receives a letter from a lawyer named Goodkind that says he's inherited half a million dollars (three hundred seventeen thousand after taxes) from his Uncle Matt, Fred immediately assumes that Goodkind is another scammer working an angle and calls Reilly to let him know about it.  

 

As it turns out, however, Goodkind is legitimate, and so is Fred's inheritance. He calls his mother and learns that he really did have an Uncle Matthew Grierson, a man who was the black sheep of the family. Jack Reilly tells him that Uncle Matt was a con artist who was known by the monicker Matt "Short Sheet" Gray. After the irony of the situation leaves Fred a little hysterical, Reilly voices concern about what will become of the money if Fred actually gets possession of it because he's afraid it won't remain in his possession for long.

 

Then he tells Fred that although Uncle Matt had cancer, it wasn't what killed him. A blunt instrument did.   

 

Things begin to happen rapidly and wildly after that, as Fred encounters an array of offbeat characters, among them lovely Karen Smith, who accosts him in the street and asks him to kiss her; Gertie Divine, the Body Secular, a stripper who was Uncle Matt's nurse and companion; Grant and Wilkins, the other two tenants in Fred's building; Homicide cops Steve and Ralph, who come across like comic vaudevillians but who, Gertie says, aren't candidates for sainthood; the elusive Professor Kilroy, Uncle's Matt's former partner; Dr. Osbertson, who goes to a wacky extreme to avoid talking to Fred; Gus Ricovic, who's always willing to trade information for cash; the menacing Coppo brothers, whose father Uncle Matt swindled during the years he lived in Brazil; and former senator Earl Dunbar, who began the Citizens Against Crime Organization.

 

Fred may be gullible, but he's not stupid. He realizes that he's suddenly become Mr. Sought-After now that he has money. When someone trails and then takes some potshots at him, and after he discovers another murder victim, he questions whether he can trust anyone, even the police, as he tries to decide what to do with the money, how to avoid being murdered himself, and how to determine who is behind all of the chaos.

 

Written relatively early in a long and illustrious career, God Save the Mark is a fine example of why Donald E. Westlake is generally acknowledged as the all-time-greatest writer of comical crime stories. A well-plotted tale, its situations develop primarily from its delightful cast of idiosyncratic characters. I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy a brief and breezy page-turner that will keep them smiling and sometimes chuckling aloud.     

            

Barry Ergang ©2012, 2019, 2022 

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Patti Abbott: FFB: THE JUGGER, Donald E. Westlake

 Patti Abbott: FFB: THE JUGGER, Donald E. Westlake

FFB Review: A JADE IN ARIES (1970) by Tucker Coe Reviewed by Barry Ergang

For this Friday in August, I am running Barry Ergang’s 2015 review of A Jade In Aries by Tucker Cole. After you read the review, make sure you head over to Patti Abbott’s blog and see what she recommends as well as Happiness Is A Warm Book where Aubrey Nye Hamilton has her own selection.Don’t let the news of the world make you crazy and enjoy your weekend.

A JADE IN ARIES (1970) by Tucker Coe

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

When I was twelve years old I read my first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Vagabond Virgin, and I was hooked. I read a dozen more, one right after another, until I was over-saturated with Erle Stanley Gardner’s style and approach in this particular series. (He had a multitude of series, and his style varied accordingly, as I learned over time.) Many years went by before I picked up another Mason novel. As a result of that experience, I generally made it a point to avoid consecutive readings of works by a given author, lest I burn out on him or her. There were probably a few exceptions, but I never binged on anyone else to the extent I did with Gardner.

I mention this because I read the book under consideration here, which was written by Donald E. Westlake under his Tucker Coe pen name, immediately after finishing Drowned Hopes. The books are radically different in style and approach—A Jade in Aries is not remotely comical, whereas Drowned Hopes emphatically is—and each is, in turn, very different from the novels he wrote under his Richard Stark pen name.

A Jade in Aries is the fourth in a five-book series narrated by former NYPD detective Mitchell Tobin, a man disgraced and punishing himself for it by literally and figuratively both digging a hole to retreat into and walling himself off from society as much as possible. He does not have a private detective’s license, but has occasionally undertaken investigations to supplement the money his wife Kate earns from a part-time job.

This story begins when Tobin is approached on Wednesday, January 7^th, by a young gay man, Ronald Cornell, owner of a men’s boutique. He insists that his partner—personal and professional—Jamie Dearborn, was murdered, and that the police detective, Aldo Manzoni, won’t do anything about it, having written it off as what he calls a case of the “Changeable Sailor.” Disbelieving this, certain that Jamie’s killer is someone he and others in his circle know, Cornell is determined to identify him. He is seriously into astrology, and only needs Tobin’s help to find out the exact dates and times of birth of the six men he’s narrowed his list of suspects to. Tobin calls an old cop friend in Missing Persons, tells him what he needs, and then tells Cornell to call the friend directly the following Monday.

Over breakfast Tuesday morning, Kate Tobin reads a newspaper story she shares with her husband, he having told her about his meeting with Cornell. The story says Cornell is in the hospital after an attempted suicide. Based on the alleged method and what he observed about Cornell, Mitch Tobin refutes the story, sure that Cornell was assaulted, but refuses to get involved. When Kate subsequently—trying to wear down his resistance—tells her husband that she visited Cornell in the hospital, that he has made an extremely generous offer in exchange for Mitch’s help—and they can certainly use the money—that the bigoted, homophobic Detective Manzoni insists Cornell is emotionally unbalanced and should be institutionalized, Tobin caves in and undertakes the investigation. The result is an absorbing character-driven story as Tobin deals with a variety of personalities, including the oppositional Manzoni, from the Cornell/Dearborn social circle to solve Cornell’s assault and two murders.

Homophobes are unlikely to read A Jade in Aries. More enlightened readers will probably have to make, as I did, reactive adjustments concerning the context of the time in which it was written, specifically with regard to language and attitude. I was 23 when it was published and don’t recall gay being a synonym for homosexual back then. Thus, homosexual is the term used throughout, unless someone disparagingly says queer or faggot, as some characters do. One who uses faggot a couple of times is Tobin himself, which I found somewhat disconcerting since he’s sympathetic to Cornell’s plight, and treats those in Cornell’s coterie the same way he’d treat heterosexuals: with respect or contempt based on how they comported themselves and responded to him.

In Chapter Eight, looking at his fifteen-year-old son, Tobin briefly wonders whether the boy might become homosexual, as if it were a matter of choice or upbringing: “I don’t know if I can be proved right or wrong, but I hold to the belief that homosexuality almost always shows a failure of some kind on the part of the parents. The failure of the father to be a man, or of the mother to be a woman, or of both to give their child security and love. Whatever the particular style of the failure, I think it almost always lies in the parents when the son emerges to adulthood as a homosexual.”

Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was strictly Tobin the fictional character speaking, or if it was Westlake the author using Tobin as a conduit for his own beliefs. If the latter, I wonder if Westlake’s attitude changed during the decades prior to his death as more became known about human sexuality.

I found A Jade in Aries engrossing, compelling, and hard to put down, even though I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “great” mystery novel, and can recommend it to those who don’t object to a major aspect of its subject matter.

© 2015 Barry Ergang

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/ and he can be reached there for your editorial needs.

FFB Review: BANK SHOT (1972) by Donald E. Westlake Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Barry Ergang is back on the blog today with an all new review for FFB. For the full list of reading suggestions, check out Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog.

BANK SHOT (1972) by Donald E. Westlake

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

“A man had to stay alive somehow while waiting for a big score to develop, and there was nothing better for that than an encyclopedia con. In the spring and fall, that is; winter was too cold for house-to-house work and summer was too hot. But given the right time of year, the old encyclopedia scam was unbeatable.”

Or so the hapless Dortmunder thinks until, after his prospect leaves the room, he hears 9-1-1 being dialed followed by sirens, and makes a fast exit from her home.

One of his criminous colleagues, Kelp, has a score in view: “I swear and I have the goods. This time I have a guaranteed winner.” Although Dortmunder is skeptical, Kelp persuades him to listen to the proposed caper, a bank robbery his nephew Victor has concocted. Victor was formerly with the FBI, which fact instantly puts Dortmunder on his guard.

The target is the temporary headquarters—a converted mobile home/trailer—across the street from the original building of Capitalists & Immigrants Trusts. The old building is being torn down and rebuilt. The plan is to steal the bank. No, not just the money within—a standard robbery effort would be far too risky—but instead to steal the trailer, transport it to a remote location that would give the robbers time to loot the safe, and then depart unseen.

Besides the aforementioned Kelp and Victor, Dortmunder’s crew consists of his chain-smoking girlfriend May, a lockman (safecracker) who goes by the name Herman X, driver Stan Murch, and Murch’s mother, who has been resentfully wearing, when necessary, a neck brace to scam an insurance policy.

Bank Shot recounts a Dortmunder caper, folks, so you know things won’t go smoothly. Its author being Donald Westlake, you’ll likely anticipate a lot of laughs, as I did. Unfortunately, they weren’t forthcoming. The book is entertaining, to be sure, but unlike some of the other Dortmunder titles I’ve read, I found this one sorely lacking in chuckle- or guffaw-out-loud moments. In fact, it wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through or so that I came upon moments that had me smiling even a little. Consequently, although I can recommend it as a fast, pleasant read, it’s a disappointment in terms of the wonderful wackiness found in other Dortmunder and standalone comic novels by mystery Grand Master Westlake.

© 2019 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

FFB Review: DROWNED HOPES (1990) by Donald E. Westlake Reviewed by Barry Ergang

We roll into May 2019 with another classic review from Barry. Make sure you check out the full list over at Todd Mason’s blog.

DROWNED HOPES (1990) by Donald E. Westlake

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Hardback

Using the pseudonym Richard Stark, the late Donald E. Westlake wrote a superb series of hardboiled novels which starred the completely amoral and uncompromising thief named Parker. A number of films adapted from Parker titles have been made, but the best, in my opinion, remains the 1967 “Point Blank” based on The Hunter, the first book in the series, and which starred Lee Marvin, renamed Walker for whatever nebulous reason the screenwriters decided made sense to them.

In 1970’s The Hot Rock, a novel published under his own name, Westlake introduced John Archibald Dortmunder, a (usually) hapless and frequently inept professional thief—Parker’s polar opposite—and his idiosyncratic crew of cronies. It was the first in a series of comic crime novels about Dortmunder of which Drowned Hopes is the seventh.

The novel opens when Dortmunder, disgruntled over a failed burglary, comes home to the New York City apartment he shares with his girlfriend May Bellamy and discovers that an old cellmate, Tom Jimson, has shown up at their door and awaited his return. Jimson is not and never was a friend. He is, in fact, as cold, untrustworthy, and ruthless a specimen as any who has ever trod earth, and who should be and would be still in prison—he’s an admitted lifer—if governmental budget cuts hadn’t resulted in the release of a multitude of inmates. He has sought out Dortmunder to enlist his help in recovering money he stole in an armored car robbery (with a pair of partners he betrayed) in upstate New York many years earlier: seven hundred thousand dollars, to be exact. Ditching said partners, he went to a town called Putkin’s Corners, obtained a casket into which he put the money, and buried the casket behind the town library, intending to recover it after the heat died down. Unluckily for him, a state decision made while he was in prison resulted in the building of a dam to flood the valley and create a reservoir, thus submerging Putkin’s Corners and his treasure.

Paperback 

Seventy years old now, Jimson intends to dynamite the dam to uncover the ground and dig up the stolen loot so he can spend the remainder of his life living lavishly in Mexico, and wants Dortmunder’s help in effecting the project. He claims to be willing to split the money evenly, with Dortmunder using his half to pay off whoever he must for their assistance. The problem? Dynamiting the dam would result in a flood that would drown the hundreds of people who live in the areas adjacent to the reservoir, and Dortmunder isn’t about to be a party to mass murder. Consequently, he must devise a method by which they can recover the money without hurting anyone. If he doesn’t, Jimson assures him he’ll use dynamite and, if necessary, find another partner or partners to aid in the scheme.

Of course, nothing goes as planned and situations become progressively more complicated, resulting in considerable frustration for Dortmunder and company, and considerable hilarity for the reader.

Dortmunder’s crew is a quirky bunch: Stan Murch, the driver; Tiny Bulcher, the strongman; and Andy Kelp, who is fond of “borrowing” for jobs cars with MD license plates. Brought into this particular caper for their expertise are young computer nerd Wally Knurr and pretty-boy scuba-diving instructor Doug Berry. The cast also includes several people who have connections, not necessarily of the amicable sort, to Tom Jimson. And then there’s Murch’s Mom, cab-driving Gladys who misses swearing at New York City drivers while she’s out in the placid countryside.

Drowned Hopes contains more than a few laugh-out-loud moments, the author being a master at tickling risibilities. On several occasions, I had to wipe tears out of my eyes from laughing hard so I could continue reading. With the sole caveat that there are some instances of raw street language some readers might find objectionable, this is a fast, funny, cleverly-plotted crime novel loaded with memorable moments I can and do unhesitatingly recommend.

© 2015, 2019  Barry Ergang

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

FFB Review: GOD SAVE THE MARK (1967) by Donald E. Westlake Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Just over seven years ago this review by Barry Ergang first appeared on the blog as part of FFB. Seemed like a good time to again draw your attention to it. Especially these days when humor is in short supply. For this final Friday of February 2019 make sure you head over to Todd’s blog for more reading suggestions.

GOD SAVE THE MARK (1967) by Donald E. Westlake

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

  

Hardback

Fred Fitch is a con artist's wet dream. He seems to radiate an aura of gullibility that any and every grifter can see or sense: "Con men take one look at me, streamline their pitches, and soon go gaily off to steak dinners while poor Fred Fitch sits at home and once again dines on gnawed fingernail." It has been this way for him since his childhood in Montana "when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they'd been traded to some classmate, but I couldn't remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn't already belonged to me when I'd left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found."

           

Now thirty-one and living in an apartment in New York City, fleeceable Fred works as a freelance researcher. Because he's been conned so many times, he's become a good friend of Bunco Squad detective Jack Reilly. Thus, when he receives a letter from a lawyer named Goodkind that says he's inherited half a million dollars (three hundred seventeen thousand after taxes) from his Uncle Matt, Fred immediately assumes that Goodkind is another scammer working an angle and calls Reilly to let him know about it.  

As it turns out, however, Goodkind is legitimate, and so is Fred's inheritance. He calls his mother and learns that he really did have an Uncle Matthew Grierson, a man who was the black sheep of the family. Jack Reilly tells him that Uncle Matt was a con artist who was known by the monicker Matt "Short Sheet" Gray. After the irony of the situation leaves Fred a little hysterical, Reilly voices concern about what will become of the money if Fred actually gets possession of it because he's afraid it won't remain in his possession for long.

 

Mass Market Paperback

Then he tells Fred that although Uncle Matt had cancer, it wasn't what killed him. A blunt instrument did.   

Things begin to happen rapidly and wildly after that, as Fred encounters an array of offbeat characters, among them lovely Karen Smith, who accosts him in the street and asks him to kiss her; Gertie Divine, the Body Secular, a stripper who was Uncle Matt's nurse and companion; Grant and Wilkins, the other two tenants in Fred's building; Homicide cops Steve and Ralph, who come across like comic vaudevillians but who, Gertie says, aren't candidates for sainthood; the elusive Professor Kilroy, Uncle's Matt's former partner; Dr. Osbertson, who goes to a wacky extreme to avoid talking to Fred; Gus Ricovic, who's always willing to trade information for cash; the menacing Coppo brothers, whose father Uncle Matt swindled during the years he lived in Brazil; and former senator Earl Dunbar, who began the Citizens Against Crime Organization.

Fred may be gullible, but he's not stupid. He realizes that he's suddenly become Mr. Sought-After now that he has money. When someone trails and then takes some potshots at him, and after he discovers another murder victim, he questions whether he can trust anyone, even the police, as he tries to decide what to do with the money, how to avoid being murdered himself, and how to determine who is behind all of the chaos.

Written relatively early in a long and illustrious career, God Save the Mark is a fine  example of why Donald E. Westlake is generally acknowledged as the all-time-greatest writer of comical crime stories. A well-plotted tale, its situations develop primarily from its  delightful cast of idiosyncratic characters. I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy a brief and breezy page-turner that will keep them smiling and sometimes chuckling aloud.                          

Barry Ergang ©2012, 2019

Formerly the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award for the best flash fiction story of 2006, his written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, and fiction available for e-readers, see Barry’s webpages.

Beneath the Stains of Time: Murder Among Children (1967) by Donald E. Westlake...

Beneath the Stains of Time: Murder Among Children (1967) by Donald E. Westlake...: Donald E. Westlake 's Murder Among Children (1967) originally appeared under the name "Tucker Coe" and is the second of on...

FFB Review: THIEVES’ DOZEN (2004) by Donald E. Westlake (Reviewed by Barry Ergang)

It has been awhile, but Barry Ergang is back today with an all new review for Friday’s Forgotten Books. The timing is also nice as short stories are highlighted during the International Short Story Month celebrated each May. Make sure you check out the rest of the reading suggestions this week over at Patti Abbott’s fine blog. She has a new book out as well so check that out too. 

THIEVES’ DOZEN (2004) by Donald E. Westlake

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

In “Dortmunder and Me, In Short,” his introduction to Thieves’ Dozen, a collection of stories starring John Dortmunder, “a guy who just keeps slipping the mind of Lady Luck,” and who made his debut in the comic crime novel The Hot Rock, Donald Westlake explains Dortmunder’s genesis along with the genesis of the stories themselves, many of which originally appeared in Playboy.

In “Ask a Silly Question,” Dortmunder is forcibly escorted by two plug-uglies to the lavish Manhattan town house of a “60ish, white-haired, white-mustached elegant man” in urgent need of a burglary consultant. When they divorced, the elegant man’s wife thought one of the items she got was a bronze sculpture by Rodin. In fact, she did not. She received a copy her ex-husband had made and was none the wiser. Recent tax problems have compelled her to make a gift of the bronze to the Museum of Modern Art. To prevent the museum’s appraiser from discovering the truth, the elegant man must find a way to steal the extremely heavy sculpture from his ex’s town house. How to do so—and profit from it—becomes Dortmunder’s problem.

Andy Kelp is Dortmunder’s best friend as well as criminous colleague, and it is he who has lured Dortmunder to a ranch in the “darkest wilds of New Jersey” after meeting the “old coot” Hiram Rangle and learning of a potentially profitable scheme. The problem? It involves stealing a race horse named Dire Straits from its rightful owner to cash in on the enormously profitable scheme Rangle’s unscrupulous boss has in mind for himself. Dortmunder is less than sanguine at the entire prospect but allows Kelp to rope him in. Humor is a subjective matter, so there’s no telling whether other readers will grin or even occasionally get a “Horse Laugh” from this one as I did.

The next story finds Dortmunder and Andy Kelp tunneling from the basement of a defunct shoe store to the wall of a bank, on the other side of which is the vault they hope to deplete of funds. They succeed in breaching the wall, only to discover the vault is crowded with bank employees and customers. Learning they’ve been herded there by five ski-masked, Uzi-toting men, Dortmunder claims that he and Kelp are cops who’ve come to rescue the captives. But before they can get them into the tunnel, three of the robbers enter the vault, the apparent ringleader announcing, “Gotta have somebody to stand out front, see can the cops be trusted.” Predictably he seizes on Dortmunder as the go-between. It’s a case of “Too Many Crooks,” albeit one fraught with comical bedlam.   

“A Midsummer Daydream” finds Dortmunder and Kelp in West Urbino, New York, having left New York City temporarily because of “just a little misunderstanding down there…a little question about the value of contents of trucks that had been taken…when their regular drivers were asleep in bed. It would straighten itself out eventually, but a couple of the people involved were a little jumpy and emotional in their responses, and Dortmunder didn’t want to be the cause of their having performed actions they would later regret.” So he and Kelp are staying in the country with Kelp’s cousin, a man named Jesse Bohker who is heavily involved in his town’s summer theater program. The theater is currently performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first half of which Dortmunder has endured. He chooses to pass on the second half, so while Kelp rejoins the audience in the converted barn, Dortmunder meanders around outside. He is subsequently accused by Bohker of having stolen over two thousand dollars’ worth of paid theater admissions, and must thus figure out who actually stole the money.

“The Dortmunder Workout,” Westlake explains in the introduction, was commissioned by an editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine for its Health supplement issue in the spring of 1990. This brief vignette finds Dortmunder at his favorite hangout, the O.J. Bar & Grill, trying to get the attention of bartender Rollo while other regular customers discuss their ideas of various health regimens. Physicians and personal trainers, were they to hear some of this, would never be the same. But they’d definitely get a number of chuckles from it.

Having just looted a jewelry store and then traveled over rooftops to the building in which he now finds himself trapped in its fire escape, caught between cops above and below, Dortmunder is on the verge of giving himself over to the penal system when he notices an open window into someone’s apartment. It’s December and the apartment’s occupant has invited friends for Christmas festivities, so Dortmunder becomes a “Party Animal” until he can get safely away. While contending with the hostess, the caterer, and bickering couple, he becomes very worried when a trio of cops enters and begins eyeballing the attendees.

Having stolen some ancient Roman coins from a numismatists’ convention, most of whose attendees are Arabian, Dortmunder has adopted their indigenous garb—aba, keffiyeh, and akal—only to discover it’s quite ungainly when one is trying to make a hurried departure with the loot. The situation he gets himself into when trying to evade capture compels him to “Give Till It Hurts.”

Valuable coins also play a part in “Jumble Sale,” when Dortmunder has no choice but to seek out Arnie Albright because the regular buyer for this kind of merchandise has recently been re-incarcerated. Arnie is astonishingly self-aware about his many personality defects (as well as his unappealing aroma) and people’s reactions to them. He has barely had time to examine Dortmunder’s coins when his doorbell rings and he admits a couple who have been referred by one “Altoona Joe” and who have a truckload of televisions to dispose of. Dortmunder, claiming to be a visiting cousin, wants only hasty egress, especially when the police arrive, but Arnie is even more astute than Dortmunder could have imagined.   

After stealing a brooch which is purportedly worth $300,000, and which superstar actor Jer Crumbie had recently given to his spokesmodel fiancée Felicia Tarrant, Dortmunder is on the subway with the brooch concealed inside a ham sandwich, headed for Brooklyn to see a fence with a reputation for paying high dollar and asking few questions. Considering how many people on the subway are reading the Daily News about the theft, Dortmunder has serious misgivings about having stolen the thing in the first place. When the subway is abruptly brought to a stop just before arriving at the station at which he expects to detrain, his day of anxious aggravation is only beginning, and every subsequent event has him wondering “Now What?” in a very funny tale I don’t want to spoil with further details.    

Despite his sobriquet, Martin “Three Finger” Gillie is not bereft of any of his manual digits. He acquired the nickname in prison because of a particular skill. Now a free man, he contacts Dortmunder about a lucrative proposition. Gillie became an artist in prison and now has forty-three canvases on display and for sale in a Soho gallery. He has also gotten “ink”: i.e., an article about his work in the Sunday New York Times. The problem is, he’s only sold two of the forty-three paintings. He suggests a scheme that can get him valuable publicity and many more sales, while Dortmunder can collect money from the insurance company for the return of the stolen paintings. When he cases the gallery and the neighborhood, Dortmunder spots a fellow thief, Jim O’Hara, and learns that Gillie made the same proposition to him. Then O’Hara spots Pete, another Gillie recruit. Suddenly the whole scheme seems odoriferous—and not in a good way. But Dortmunder, O’Hara and Pete are professionals, so they exercise “Art and Craft” to provide Gillie with unexpected ink.

The collection ends with “Fugue for Felons” which, as Westlake alludes to in the book’s introduction and explains further in a prefatory note to the story itself, is and is not a Dortmunder story. Without elaborating on the why of that sentence lest you experience it yourself, I’ll say only that when Morry Calhoun is arrested for robbing the Flatbush branch of a bank, it’s after he has crashed his (stolen) car into the window of the Sunnyside branch of the same bank. Upon learning about this, John Rumsey, a kind of parallel universe Dortmunder, decides there might be something worthwhile “lying around.” So do several of his colleagues, all of whom are acting independently of one another. How the obstacles each encounters before their paths converge, after which more chaos ensues, makes for a very entertaining caper.

The late Donald E. Westlake was an admirable and versatile writer who could keep readers turning pages whether his stories, under his own name or pseudonyms, were hilarious or hardboiled, and many of which, like the aforementioned The Hot Rock, are modern classics. Readers who like their crimes leavened with laughs should seek out Thieves’ Dozens.

© 2018 Barry Ergang

While his website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/  some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.com