The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  For twelve years, from 1962 to 1974, Stark did a whole bunch of that, being sixteen novels about a coldblooded thief named Parker and four novels about an associate of Parker’s named Grofield. By the late sixties, Stark was better known and better paid than Westlake, which felt a little odd. But after all, we were both me, so there was no reason for jealousy. In 1967 the first Stark novel was made into one of the seminal American movies, Point Blank, with Lee Marvin (remade recently as Payback with Mel Gibson), and half a dozen other Stark novels were also filmed, including one in France directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

  But then, in 1974, Richard Stark just up and disappeared. He did a fade. Periodically, in the ensuing years, I tried to summon that persona, to write like him, to be him for just a while, but every single time I failed. What appeared on the paper was stiff, full of lumps, a poor imitation, a pastiche. Though successful, though well liked and well paid, Richard Stark had simply downed tools. For, I thought, ever.

  It seems strange to say that for those years I could no longer write like myself, since Richard Stark had always been, naturally, me. But he was gone, and when I say he was gone, I mean his voice was gone, erased clean out of my head.

  Which leads to the question I am most frequently asked about Richard Stark when I’m at a book signing or on an author panel somewhere. Are you, people want to know, a different person, with different attitudes and character traits, when you’re writing as Richard Stark? Are you sometimes Dr. Jekyll, sometimes Mr. Hyde? (My wife is asked this question about me, too, and her answer is to roll her eyes.)

  The real answer, of course, is no. I’m not schizophrenic, I know who’s sitting at that desk. But the other answer is, if we really want to get down to it, well, yes.

  In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who’s sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer’s attitude toward the particular story he’s decided to tell. But more than that, language is a part of the creation of the characters in the story, in the setting and in the sense of movement. Stark and Westlake use language very differently. To some extent they’re mirror images. Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo. Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.

  In Flashfire, the Richard Stark novel just recently published, he writes, “Parker looked at the money, and it wasn’t enough.” In one of his own novels a few years ago, Donald Westlake wrote, “John Dortmunder and a failed enterprise always recognized one another.” Dortmunder, Westlake’s recurring character, proposes a Christmas toast this way, “God help us, every one.” Parker answers the phone, “Yes.”

  For years, it was enjoyable and productive to go back and forth between the two voices. Letting the one guy sleep while the other guy stretched helped me avoid staleness, sameness, the rut of the familiar, kept me from being both bored and, I hope, boring.

  I missed Stark during his truancy. But finally after fifteen years I did come to the reluctant conclusion that he was as gone as last year’s snow. Then an odd thing happened.

  I had taken the job of writing the film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Grifters, and the director, Stephen Frears, insisted he wanted Richard Stark to write—and sign—the screenplay. He didn’t want Westlake, with his grins and winks, his peering around corners. He wanted Stark, blunt-fingered and dogged and with no taste for romantic claptrap.

  I demurred, saying I was perfectly capable of writing the screenplay myself, and in any case Stark didn’t seem to exist anymore. But it remained a bone of contention between us until I finally pointed out that Richard Stark wasn’t a member of the Writer’s Guild, and I wasn’t about to let him scab. In that case, although Stephen might grumble, he was prepared to accept the second-best, so I went ahead and wrote the script.

  Or did I? Thompson was very much more like Stark than like Westlake, and so was the script. And it was immediately after The Grifters that I began to think about and noodle with a new story about Parker. I didn’t believe in it, but I went to it anyway, went away from it, went back to it, and all at once there it was. Richard Stark was back.

  I sensibly enough called that book Comeback, and it was followed by Backflash and now Flashfire. (The Stark book he and I just completed, to be published next year, is called Firebreak. A subtle pattern begins to emerge.)

  So was Stephen Frears right after all? Did that screenwriting job wake Stark from his slumbers? Did he actually write that script, with me merely as the union-card-carrying front? I don’t really know how I could answer that, one way or the other, for absolutely sure.

  Such confusion is rare, however. For instance, this piece is clearly, uh, written by, uh . . .

  THREE

  SO TELL ME ABOUT THIS JOB WE’RE GONNA PULL

  On Genre

  THE HARDBOILED DICKS

  This essay was first delivered as a talk at the Smithsonian Institution on May 13, 1982.—Ed.

  The hardboiled dicks. The term hardboiled, to mean an unsentimental person, began as World War I slang, and its first reference was to the tough drill sergeants who pounded all those citizens into citizen-soldiers. Wartime slang tends to follow the citizen-soldier home when the battle is done. Somebody who was hardboiled then became any person who wasn’t sympathetic to your problem.

  The term dick, in this context—and I shall consider no other context—is a little older. It came from Canada, it came from the underworld, and it’s merely an arbitrary shortening of the word detective. A French-Canadian slurring of an English word is possible, but by no means sure. Anyway, dick came across the border from Canada with the cases of hooch when Prohibition started in 1919. So here we have these two words, but they haven’t yet been put together.

  It has been said that, in Europe and America, the First World War utterly changed the social fabric, and that in some ways we’re all still living through the aftershocks. Certainly the prewar assurance, the belief that everyone was in his appropriate place in the smoothly running machine of society, came to an end. Doubt, alienation, and then what I’m going to call atomation took place. The idea that a person is not locked into a specific place and role in the stately dance of civilization, but that we are all loose, unjoined atoms. In America, there were only four months between the end of the war and the beginning of Prohibition, which I think has to be listed as the most stupid social experiment since the Children’s Crusade. In addition to organizing crime, in addition to giving criminal gangs a vast new source of wealth, in addition to making the corruption of policemen and politicians and other authority figures absolutely inevitable, Prohibition did something even worse. It put us all over on the criminal’s side, doing business with him, agreeing with his rejection of the law, and encouraging him to remain rich and unrepentant.

  The detective story started as a puzzle. Poe and all that. In France in the later nineteenth century, Émile Gaboriau invented the detective called Monsieur Lecoq and used his detective and the puzzles to comment on and describe the aftershocks of his century’s great trauma, the French Revolution and the dispersal of the aristocracy. He had a knack, by the way, for absolutely wonderful titles. Other People’s Money. The Widow LeRouge. Within an Inch of His Life.

  In England a little later, Conan Doyle used the puzzle for its own sake, as Poe had, and as many other practitioners did, and as they could do because there were no large puzzles. In the orderly, self-confident, measured prewar world, the only possible enigmas were small ones.

  Since the First World War and Prohibition combined to create the atmosphere in which the puzzle would be transmogrified into something new that would reflect the new reality, I think it’s nice that the phrase for that new thing should itself combine words from the war and the bo
otleggers. Hardboiled dicks. Tough guys who were interested in a very rough kind of immediate justice having to do with this particular case at this particular moment, because there are no reliable long-term social truths or social contracts. The determination to turn the puzzle story on its head shows very clearly in its changed treatment of class, of persons in different social strata. In the previous form—previous in origin but by no means dead, then or now, very much still with us—the detectives and the victims alike tend to be from the upper classes, or at least not below the professional middle class—I mean, no tradesmen—while the murderer could be of any class at all. Frequently, however, he would turn out to be jumped-up, to belong actually to a less exalted class than the one to which he’d been pretending. I mention only Lord Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance. The puzzles tended to be rather more like crossword puzzles, in that the solution might hinge on esoteric knowledge, of bell-ringing or Chinese vases or Turkish cigarette ash.

  But on come the hardboiled dicks, and everything goes out the window. Puzzle solutions require knowledge no more esoteric than that people are sometimes greedy, people are sometimes jealous, people are sometimes afraid. The hardboiled dick himself was middle-class at best, more probably working-class in his background, never claiming much more than a high school education, and the only thing he will ever offer as special knowledge is that he knows where the bodies are buried. He’s an insider, in other words, in this new doubt-ridden, topsy-turvy, unsentimental world. As for the upper classes, who are popularly thought of as having caused the war and profited from it—much of which turned out to be true, by the way—they don’t even come off well in these stories. When they appear at all, they are made fun of and despised, they are gullible patsies for con men and professional gamblers, their daughters are dumb enough to run away to Mexico with ex-cons. They are even, at times, the murderer, and their motivations are as human and messy as anybody’s.

  The social viewpoint that had created this new genre was very strong within the stories. The first writers tended to be veterans of the recent war, middle-class men themselves with some physical labor in their background, and they weren’t the sort of people who would think Prohibition was a good idea. They had known some violence, they were a bit alienated from normal society—as any writer who makes his living with his pen inevitably is—and they had formed social opinions. All of that is in the stories. Gangsters can be trusted up to a point. The upper classes are silly fops. Politicians are crooked and hate the hero, except for that rare honest politico who likes the hero but worries about him. Women and Ford cars are nice to have, but things can suddenly go wrong with both. Intuitive street-smart brains are good, but brains and a gun are better.

  The new genre, the detective stories about the hardboiled dicks, began in magazines, in the pulps, initially with a magazine called Black Mask. Starting his life in short stories, the hardboiled dick had one more quality in addition to his social and historic qualities: he was terse. It was not necessarily a new use of language—Mark Twain could be pretty terse, to name just one—but combining the elements of terseness and the puzzle and social attitudes and topical reality created something that had never been seen before.

  Black Mask was one of a bunch of magazines publishing the older sort of puzzle, but in which the new sort was uncertainly being born. The first hardboiled dick seems to have been—I’m weaseling out here, because the history of the early pulps is very uncertain—but anyway, he seems to have been a fellow named Race Williams, created by a writer named Carroll John Daly. Daly wasn’t a particularly good writer, and he did tend to apologize to the reader for his character’s uncouth behavior, but by his first appearance in Black Mask magazine he had the genre and the tone down pat. An opening sentence of a Race Williams story: “I dropped to one knee and fired twice.” Okay? Another opening sentence: “I didn’t like his face and I told him so.”

  Dashiell Hammett, a vet with tuberculosis—what they called in those unsentimental days a lunger—had also been a private detective with the Pinkertons. He started writing while recuperating from TB, and Black Mask was his natural home. He improved on Carroll John Daly in several ways: first, he didn’t try so hard to be a tough guy, and second, he didn’t apologize. He also added irony to the genre, which kept it nicely oiled; without irony, the hardboiled dick would be too brittle and unbending to survive. Here’s the opening sentence of a Hammett Black Mask story called “The Gatewood Caper,” in which the irony, the social and class attitudes, and the lack of sentiment all stand out in very nice relief:

  Harvey Gatewood had issued orders that I was to be admitted as soon as I arrived, so it took me only a little less than fifteen minutes to thread my way past the door-keepers, office boys, and secretaries who filled up most of the space between the Gatewood Lumber Corporation’s front door and the president’s private office.

  Compare this, complete with its class-consciousness, with a typical Race Williams entrance:

  I just lifted my foot and let the door have it. Then I walked into the hall. The butler was sailing ungracefully across the highly polished wood until he struck a small rug and continued on that. Rough? Of course it was rough. But if you’re going to force your way into a place, let it be determined. Let them be damned thankful that you didn’t shoot your way in.

  You can see that the toughness is a little forced, a little over-stated, and then apologized for. And the descriptions are minimal. All we know about the hall is that the floor is highly polished wood, with a small rug, and we only know those facts because they are part of the butler’s recession. If I knew just one unnecessary thing—the color or style or provenance of that small rug, for instance—I would believe Race Williams a little more than I do now.

  Race Williams wasn’t merely the first of the hardboiled dicks, he was also the original of a type that still continues in the genre. Here’s another example of Williams’s braggadocio:

  The papers are always either roasting me for shooting down some minor criminals or praising me for gunning out the big shots. But when you’re hunting the top guy, you have to kick aside—or shoot aside—the gunmen he hires. You can’t make hamburger without grinding up a little meat.

  The defensiveness, the awareness of publicity, the pride in being trigger-happy; could this be Mike Hammer’s father?

  But that takes us out of sequence. We’re in the middle twenties now, and a new kind of story is being formed, spontaneously generated by several different writers out of their common experiences of the last decade. And when Captain Joseph M. Shaw—he was a captain in the war, and he retained the title—when Captain Shaw took over the editorship of Black Mask, beginning with the November 1926 issue, he became the first editor anywhere to make this new genre the subject of a magazine. He himself was anything but terse and tough in his writing, but he recognized vitality when he saw it. In his words, written some twenty years later:

  We had recently returned from the five-year sojourn abroad during and following the First World War. Happening upon a sporting magazine, to which we had haphazardly contributed in years past, we were curious enough to investigate the remarkable change that had taken place in its format and appearance.

  You see the style. Skipping ahead, he says:

  In friendly conversation we were asked to edit another magazine in the same group: Black Mask, a detective story magazine. Before that, we had never seen a copy, had never even heard of the magazine.

  That didn’t stop him. I’m skipping ahead again:

  We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective story differing from that accredited to the Chaldeans and employed more recently by Gaboriau, Poe, Conan Doyle.

  I love that reference to the Chaldeans. Waltzing onward, Captain Shaw says he studied the work of the writers already contributing to the magazine and discovered Dashiell Hammett: “He told his stories with a new kind of compulsion and authenticity.” With Hammett leading the way, a whole corps of writers developed who were devoted to—and
quite good at—the hardboiled story.

  Most of those Hammett contemporaries are as forgotten now as Carroll John Daly, and in some cases that’s a pity. Lester Dent, for instance, was such a master of brevity, of delivering whole worlds of information in the unexpected word inside a sentence, that his work has an almost ballet-like simplicity and smoothness. Here’s the opening of a story called “Sail,” introducing his hardboiled hero, Oscar Sail,

  The fish shook its tail as the knife cut off its head. Red ran out of the two parts and the fluid spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had failed to hold to the dock edge.

  Oscar Sail wet the palm of his own left hand in the puddle.

  The small policeman kept coming out on the dock, tramping in the rear edge of glare from his flashlight.

  Sail split the fish belly, shook it over the edge of the yacht dock and there were some splashes below in the water. The stuff from the fish made the red stain in the water a little larger.

  There’s talent and cleverness in this writing, and something more. These people are working with a new toy, a brand-new toy. They’re having fun. A writer named Forrest Rosaire, in a Black Mask story called “The Devil Suit,” tried playing with the toy in the present tense. At a time when Damon Runyon had made the present tense his own—and had used it to create a kind of artificial smart-alecky chamber music, Rosaire had the nerve to make it colloquial and hardboiled and glib. The story begins:

  This is one night up in LA when Steve Parker and I are driving home after a little game with the boys. Out on Los Feliz Boulevard Steve sees the sign of Barr’s Cafe and pulls up to the curb, saying, “How’s for a steak?”

  A little later, there’s a brawl in front of the cafe, and the energy and enjoyment in the writing are like watching kids play basketball. Listen: