The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  The field can’t support us. It can’t support even the big boys, the established names, and it sure as hell can’t support anybody new. But what’s worse, it can’t even interest us.

  It’s time for credentials, before going into this thing any deeper. If I’m going to talk as a professional writer who isn’t doing anything in science fiction and who claims that he might have done something worthwhile if it were worth his while to do so, I ought to show my identity card. Therefore:

  Science Fiction. I have sold thirteen stories, two of which have not yet been published and none of which are any damn good. I have sold to Universe, Original, Future, Super, Analog, Amazing, If, and Galaxy. A fourteenth story was sold to Fantastic Universe, which proceeded to drop dead before they could publish it. Both John Campbell and Cele Goldsmith have asked me to write sequels to novelettes of mine they had bought (I haven’t written either, and won’t). In a desk drawer I have twenty-odd thousand words of a science fiction novel, which is good, but which I’m not going to finish because it isn’t worth my while.

  Avalon pays three hundred and fifty dollars for a book, and I wouldn’t support such piracy either by writing for them or buying their wares. John Campbell isn’t the hero, so it can’t be serialized in Analog. If finished, it would run a lot longer than forty-five thousand words, so that leaves out Ace. There’s no gratuitous sex, so that excludes Galaxy/Beacon (or would if they were still being published). It isn’t a silly satire about a world controlled by advertising agencies or insurance companies or the A&P, so it can’t be serialized in Galaxy Magazine. It’s in sensible English, so Amazing is out. It isn’t about the horrors of Atomic War, so no mainstream hardcover house would look twice at it. I’d like to write it anyway for my own amusement (you know, like a real writer-type), but unpublished manuscripts unfortunately have a low enjoyment quota, at least for me. So the hell with it.

  I have three other stories sitting around the house and all I have to do is rewrite them the way the various editors want, and they are sold. To hell with them too.

  Mystery. I have sold twenty-five short stories, a couple of which are pretty good. They’ve appeared in Manhunt, Mystery Digest, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Guilty, Tightrope, 77 Sunset Strip (a one-shot, though they didn’t mean it that way), Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, and The Saint. One was reprinted in Best Detective Stories of 1959, four more are shortly to be anthologized here and there, and one is maybe (at the time of this writing, I’m not sure yet) going to be bought for television.

  I have sold three mystery novels to Random House, a fourth (aimed paperback) is currently being considered by Dell, and the fifth is in the writing. The first, The Mercenaries, won a second-place Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel of the year. Anthony Boucher called the second, in the Times, “a considerable novel,” giving it a very long and very pleasant review.

  I am not sitting around bragging. I’m simply trying to make something clear: I can write. I can write well. I am capable of first-class work. But the only thing I’ve ever written in science fiction that I am at all proud of is a novel I’ll never finish because there is economically, stylistically, and philosophically no place for it.

  Do you know what I’m talking about? I cannot sell good science fiction. All right, the field can’t support me, so what? I don’t spend all my time writing mysteries. I could still, it would be financially feasible for me to, write an occasional science fiction story, five or six a year, or maybe cut the budget a little and write a novel. But it doesn’t interest me, the requirements of the field are such that I couldn’t write anything that would interest me, so how could I presume to interest you? All the ex–science fiction writers could still write in the field part-time, but they don’t. I guess it doesn’t interest them either.

  In Xero 4 a letter-writer bitched about the deus ex psionica ending of Out Like a Light, the second Kenneth Malone serial by Randy Garrett and Larry Harris, in Analog. I know Randy and Larry, so let me tell you something: They had a relatively good ending for that story, one that would have satisfied your letter-writer’s conditions for believability. John Campbell made them rewrite the ending, to make Kenneth Malone a psuperman, a John Campbell hero. Sixty thousand words at three cents a word is eighteen hundred dollars. Plus the virtually inevitable “An Lab” bonus (serial chapters always place first or second, or almost always) of three to six hundred dollars.

  Randy and Larry disliked Campbell’s ending, but couldn’t talk him out of it. Had they decided not to prostitute themselves on a bed of gold (the letter-writer’s phrase), they would have been throwing away not only the time they’d spent on the serial, but also nine to twelve hundred dollars in real money for each of them. At that point, I’d have rewritten the damn thing, too, and the hell with integrity. But I’m not ever going to get to that point; I’m not writing the stuff anymore.

  Now let me tell you a very sad and very funny story. A while back, Randy Garrett was staying at my place. We worked in the same room, and we were both writing stories aimed at Analog. Enjoying ourselves in the process, we both included private jokes for the other guy’s benefit, and one thing I did was make a minor character, an Air Force Colonel who showed up in the last three pages of the story, the spitting image of John Campbell, betting Randy that Campbell would never notice it. I described the guy as looking like Campbell, talking like Campbell, and thinking like Campbell.

  We brought our respective stories in at the same time, handed them to the great man, and both went back the next week because he wanted revisions on both stories. I forget what he wanted Randy to change in his story, but I’ll never in the world forget what he wanted done with mine: He wanted me to make the Colonel the lead character. I did it. Eighteen thousand words. Four hundred and fifty dollars.

  (P.S. That’s the story he wanted a sequel to. He really liked that Colonel.)

  (P.P.S. It was a better story the first time, when it was only fourteen thousand words. If I was going to rewrite, I wanted more money, so I padded four thousand unnecessary words into it. It makes for duller reading, but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.)

  More recently, when Frederik Pohl took over Galaxy, my agent suggested that I aim a story at him, as he was in a mood to build an inventory of his own. So I researched. I read the introductions to all the Pohl-edited Star Fiction series, and I reread the first and last sentence of every Frederik Pohl story I had around the house (which was a lot, since I have all but six issues of Galaxy up till this year, when I stopped buying it), and then I wrote a Frederik Pohl story, “The Spy in the Elevator.”

  A Pohl title and a Pohl story, and a very silly insipid story it was, but by that time I was getting cynical. Pohl bought it. It was my next-to-last science fiction story. It would have been the last, but a few months later my agent got me an assignment from Cele Goldsmith to do a cover story for Amazing. I’d never tried to match a story to a pre-drawn cover before, so I took the assignment, figuring I ought to get some enjoyment out of the thing. And there I stopped. So far as I can see now, I’ll never write another word of science fiction again. (After this article, assuming the editors at least have sense enough to read the fanzines for the temper of the readership, which judging from their competence otherwise isn’t necessarily true, I don’t suppose anything of mine would be too welcome on their desks anyway. I’ve never burned a bridge with more joy.)

  Campbell is an egomaniac. [Robert P.] Mills of F&SF is a journeyman incompetent. Cele Goldsmith is a third-grade teacher and I think she wonders what in the world she’s doing over at Amazing. (Know I do.) As for Pohl, who can tell? Galaxy is still heavily laden with [H. L.] Gold’s inventory, and when Pohl edited Star he had the advantages of no deadline and a better pay rate than anybody else in the field, so it’s difficult to say what Galaxy will look like next year, except that Kingsley Amis will probably like it.

  I will not end with a panacea. I have none. A lot of professional science fiction writers have moved
on to other fields in the last few years, and a lot more haven’t bothered to take their place. You may have wondered why, and since I’m one of them I thought I’d tell you, speaking only for myself. I don’t know whether I speak for any of the others or not, but I suspect so. (The guy who beat me out for the first-place Edgar, by the way, was Jack Vance, another escapee.)

  I don’t know why science fiction is so lousy. I suspect there are a lot of reasons. But I can at least hint at one reason which has special reference to you. At the ESFA meeting I mentioned earlier, Sam Moskowitz mentioned a story from Weird Tales, some time in the thirties. All the members had read it, and remembered it. A little later, Randy Garrett mentioned a story from the previous month’s Analog. Two members present had read it.

  The letters page in issue 8 of Xero was filled with impassioned responses—including one from Frederik Pohl and another from Avram Davidson, who would go on to be recognized as one of the genre’s late masters. Westlake replied in issue 9.—Ed.

  Sorry to have taken so long to answer. Frankly, I wasn’t sure whether I should answer or not. My agent advised me to stop, and since he has done more for me in my writing career than almost anyone else I can think of, and since he is a knowledgeable man in this business, his advice carried a lot of weight. On the other hand, you people had been kind enough to send along Xero 8, which did contain comments and questions which shouldn’t be left up in the air. So this letter will be the last chapter on the subject and I’ll try to make it inoffensive. The people I offend, it seems, don’t tell me about it; they call my agent.

  Point number one: I have never tried to imitate anyone’s writing style, Frederik Pohl’s or anybody else’s, and I hardly think I could even if I tried. I have tried, however, to aim at editorial interests. In Mr. Pohl’s case, I had to go on the stories he had written rather than the stories he had bought, for obvious reasons. (By the time he wrote the letter which appeared in Xero 8, he still had two stories in inventory that Gold had bought.) If the implication that I was doing a pastiche was contained in my article, it was unintentional. The point of my “phoney inside stuff” was that I was aiming at the market and nothing more. In other words, the story I had written had no merits other than as an example of aiming at a particular market. And so, a lousy story.

  Which brings me to Avram Davidson’s suggestion that I’m not a science fiction writer at all, but wandered into the field by accident. This idea had never occurred to me before, but now that it has been suggested, I must admit it might be true. I gave up Perry Mason for science fiction when I was fourteen, and read science fiction voluminously for the next six years, before the Air Force took me at twenty. In 1958, when I started the drive to become a self-supporting writer, it was to science fiction that I returned, compiling a library of about five hundred magazines, being Galaxy and F&SF complete, Astounding back to 1948, and a batch of secondary magazines, and it was only after having waded through all this that I decided to branch out into the mystery field and see what I could do there. My first sale, in 1953, when I was nineteen, was to Universe Science Fiction. My sales in 1958 and 1959 were about half and half, mystery and science fiction. All of this might sound like the beginnings of a career as a science fiction writer, but obviously the appearances are deceiving.

  Let’s pursue Avram Davidson’s idea. The first stories I sold in both the mystery and science fiction fields were nothing spectacular—the mysteries to Hitchcock were the drab droll dreck used as ballast in that magazine, the science fiction was summed up by Mr. Pohl’s comments on “Spy”—but gradually I think I improved. In mysteries anyway. As my “slanting for the market” became less conscious and worrisome, I could concentrate more on the story itself, and so the stories began to have more meat on their bones. I imagine that this is normal development of a writer in any field; first conscious agitating, “aiming” at the market, gradual mastery of the conventions and taboos and interests and typings in that market, and so gradual freeing of the concentration for the story itself.

  This process happened to me in the mystery field, but it didn’t happen in science fiction. I never got beyond stage one. When the chance came to send a story to Galaxy with guaranteed sympathetic attention, I honestly didn’t know what to do with it. If I muffed it, I come close to closing a market. I was still in stage one; slant the story. That was in 1961, and I still hadn’t found a firm footing in the field.

  On those few occasions when I thought I’d taken a small step forward, I was immediately returned to Start, either by a No Sale or a slant-oriented revision. The Campbell story about the Colonel is a fine instance. (It was in the May issue of Analog, to answer the questions.) In the original the Colonel showed up at the end of the story. There was no secret organization of psupermen in the Air Force. The point of view never deviated from Jeremy. It was a story about a person. God knows it was no masterpiece, but it was a story. (In this connection, Harry Warner Jr.’s idea that the Colonel was a “real, living characterization” just ain’t so. Analog is full of Secret Societies with Strange Powers, and the Colonel under one name or another, runs them all. You will find this same character in spy stories. He’s the chief of Counter-Intelligence, the hero phones him in Washington every once in a while, and his name is Mac.) At any rate, I for one am more interested in a person, who suddenly and shatteringly learns he is a teleport, who doesn’t want to be a teleport, and who more than half suspects he’s lost his mind, who struggles through the problems thus created—aggravated by the fact that he can neither control nor repeat the initial teleportation—and works things out to some sort of solution or compromise with the world, than I am in all the Secret Societies and Mystical Powers in the Orient. But the writing and rewriting of the story kept me vigorously marching in place, back there at stage one.

  So you see, Mr. Davidson may be right. I had read more science fiction than mystery. I was more interested in science fiction, and had sold my first story to a science fiction magazine. But it was in the mystery field that I could adapt myself to the requirements of the market and then go on to stories—and books—that fulfilled for me more than the simple requirements of the market. In science fiction, once I had fulfilled the requirements of the market, I never had any elbow room left. Using that Colonel story again, once that man and his Secret Society took over the story, it became impossible to do anything with Jeremy, my teleportee. Instead of his taking his own risks, fighting his own way through to triumph and defeat, the story became a Mystical Inner Circle affair. Jeremy still struggled, but he was no longer his own man. His every move was planned and anticipated by the Secret Society, and the whole story became the recounting of an initiation into the club. All it lacked was a badge with a decoder on the back, for spelling out Ralston. Phooey.

  Could I have fulfilled the market requirements with that story, and still have written a story interesting to me? No. Is that a flaw in my writing ability? Maybe. I have not thought so, but maybe it is. If so, it’s a flaw that seems to bother me only in science fiction.

  Point number three: At a certain risk, I must point out that at least one sentence in Frederik Pohl’s letter is balderdash. This is the crack about “other markets” having “lower standards” than the science fiction magazines. He must be referring to those non–science fiction editors so obtuse as to buy stories and/or books from me. Among these editors are Lee Wright, a senior editor at Random House, generally accepted as being the top mystery editor in the United States, and possibly in the world. Bucklin Moon of Pocket Books, who is no slouch. The good people at T.V. Boardman in England, Gallimard in France, Mondadori in Italy, and so on and so on, who have bought various foreign rights to my books. Hans Stefan Santesson, William Manners, and Ed McBain, who have bought short stories from me in the mystery field. The people at Dell, who have bought reprint rights to my mystery novels. If in Frederik Pohl’s world these people have “lower standards” than the six science fiction magazines which have not yet joined their sisters in silence, then either Mr.
Pohl or myself is living in a parallel universe.

  Point number four (and last): My article, in twenty-five hundred ill-chosen words, attempted to say one thing: science fiction is neither an artistic nor a commercial field. Avram Davidson suggested I was in the wrong pew. L. Sprague de Camp objected to my cavalier ignoring of his non–science fiction output. Frederik Pohl complained about my “phoney inside stuff.” Though I’d stated that I’d never written a science fiction novel, Donald Wollheim wondered why he hadn’t seen anything submitted from me. The letter without a name thought I was too vindictive. John Baxter thought I was too petty. But until one of these people directly disagrees with this statement—science fiction is neither an artistic nor a commercial field—they haven’t said a damn thing.

  FOUR

  TEN MOST WANTED

  Ten Favorite Mystery Books

  Originally published in The Armchair Detective Book of Lists (1995), edited by Kate Stine, in the section titled “Famous Authors’ Favorites.” Careful readers will notice that Westlake only offers nine favorites—I trust the tenth is safe and sound in Andy Kelp’s apartment.—Ed.

  What you ask is, of course, impossible. I could give you my Top Three or my Top Twenty-five, but once you go past three there’s no way to stop at ten; partly because, in only doing ten, I wouldn’t feel right listing one author more than once (which is why A Coffin for Dimitrios isn’t here).

  So I’ve cheated; two of my selections are series, the complete series. And I’ve done the list in alphabetical order: my alphabetical order.

  The Hoke Mosely series by Charles Willeford