Funny Westlake Is Missing

Or, Donald Westlake, R.I.P.

Death is the common currency of popular mystery fiction. So we shouldn’t be so shocked when the major practitioners of the form happen to die. At least they weren't murdered.

Still, the death of Donald Westlake feels like a mortal blow to the entire mystery genre. He was an exemplary chronicler of witty, breezy, American bank heists or other escapist capers for half a century.

Westlake wasn’t a household name like Gregory MacDonald (the former Boston Globe columnist who created the Fletch and Flynn series) or Hartford's Hillary Waugh (credited with pioneering the modern police procedural), both of whom died last year. He certainly wasn’t on the level of longtime Weston, Conn., resident Ed McBain, who was still churning out a book or three a year right up to his death in 2005 at age 78. (Actually, the real household name among mystery writers would have to be Geoffrey Household, the British thriller author, but I digress.)

But to those who wallow constantly in the genre, Westlake was as inescapable as a locked-room conundrum. He operated at both ends of the spectrum, cheap and classy. His bibliography exceeds a hundred titles. He further labored under several pseudonyms, Richard Stark being the most notable. But despite his steady success as a novelist, he continued to publish short stories in seemingly any fiction magazine that would have him. The quality level of the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines were assured by the regularity of Westlake’s contributions to them.

One of the last mystery authors old enough to have experienced the post-war transformation of the mystery novel into a pop culture phenomenon, thanks to innovations in paperback printing, Westlake filled the public trough. But his work was fine enough to catch the attention of filmic interpreters of the level of Costa Gavras (The Couperet, from Westlake’s The Ax), Jean-Luc Godard (Made in the USA, from Westlake’s The Jugger) and such A-list stars as Lee Marvin (Point Blank), Mel Gibson (Payback) and Robert Redford (Cops and Robbers). Westlake’s own screenplay for The Grifters, which he adapted from the Jim Thompson novel, was nominated for an Academy Award and lifted the careers of John Cusack and Annette Bening.

Westlake’s weakest books are as enlightening for involved readers as are his best. At his worst, he was simply guilty of getting too stuck to a format and filling in gaps with too much idle chatter and silly jokes. There is, nonetheless, artistry in that. At his best, he bent the rules for linear mystery storytelling, creating characters which were more interesting than the contrived situations they were thrust into. His talent was more for humor than humanity, but his desire to flesh out stereotypical cop and robber characters with amusing quirks and idiosyncracies set him apart. Part of an eager breed of prolific paperback writers who ruled late-20th-century pop fiction and who at times seemed interchangeable, Westlake was also a unique voice, furthering the mystery craft by never taking it too seriously.

Harold Robbins’ The Looters

By Junius Podrug (Forge, 2007)

Harold Robbins' name is still selling books. Unfortunately, he died in 1997 and his name is all he has left to offer. With the blessing of the Robbins estate, the novelist's friend Junius Podrug has now written four Robbins novels. On the shiny covers of these poor substitutes, Podrug's name is dwarfed by Robbins's. The idea of continuing a successful franchise isn't deplorable (some of those Flowers in the Attic sequels are pretty good), but Podrug's complete lack of understanding about what made Robbins's novels great is a true literary crime.

In The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, or Memories of Another Day or The Raiders or any of a dozen other titles from what I consider his most fertile period--in the 1970s and 1980s, after he'd moved on from his derivative-of-John O'Hara melodramatic page-turners--Robbins created a new class of upper-class hero. His characters were conflicted and engaged in savage confrontations for their entire lives, however cushily they were raised. Their sex drives were as strong as their lusts for power and money. They were always on the verge of being blackmailed or unmasked for closeted sins that ranged from homosexuality to impotence to, in several different novels, closeted Jewish upbringings. (Robbins himself was the Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, though he disguised that heritage--he put out that he was a Jew who'd lost his parents and had been raised in a Catholic boy's school. This and many other self-made myths were debunked by Andrew Wilson in his respectful, well-researched, and culturally contextualized biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, published last fall.)

Robbins was able to pin the needles on all possible megalomaniac meters and make his characters both shameful and pitiable: "Joni sucked on John's penis and wept at the same time. 'We'll never -- why couldn't you have just gone to Harvard?'" (In that passage, from Tycoon, it's worth noting that Joni and John are brother and sister.) Podrug, on the other hand, writes quaint adventure tales grounded in nothing approaching reality. The Looters involves a museum curator searching for the death mask of a legendary Babylonian queen. Worse, he jettisons Robbins' essential omniscient-narrator style for a clunky first-person: "We finally reached the larger boat and I went aboard to meet the band of pirates, smugglers and thieves."

There are many who wrongly considered Harold Robbins, despite his being one of the five biggest-selling novelists in history, to be the dregs of popular fiction. All those naysayers have to do to be proved outrageously wrong is to read his chosen successor.

Christopher Arnott is the managing editor of the New Haven Advocate.