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
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