The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  I’ve seen this happen to friends, other writers, and it makes their lives very stressful. Not only are their incomes dependent upon their producing another egg like the last egg, but so are their reputations dependent upon that process, so are their business and social relationships, and so is their self-esteem. I have commiserated with my friends at those rare moments when the stress bursts forward into uncensored complaint, while at the same time I’ve hidden my glee that it was never going to happen to me.

  It has happened to me. The book I just finished, which would have been perfectly acceptable before The Ax—a minor entry in the canon, but not a disgrace—is now not acceptable.

  What is worse, for the first time since 1970 it has become inappropriate for me to write about John Dortmunder. It has always been appropriate for me to write about John Dortmunder. He has been my bastion and my relief, the easiest and most enjoyable part of my working life. I’ve even had to ration myself not to write too often about him. And now I’m not supposed to write about him at all.

  I have no idea what my next book will be. I don’t expect this to be the beginning of a long and echoing silence, since I think I don’t carry the gene for writer’s block, but just at this moment I’m bewildered. The lights have gone on. I’ve been noticed. The jig is up. I stand paralyzed, in all this light.

  HOOKED

  Like the preceding piece, I found this previously unpublished essay in type-script in Westlake’s files. It seems to have been written around 2000, possibly with an eye toward being included in a paperback edition of The Hook. The plot of The Hook concerns a writer who has written a great book but is having trouble selling it because of his declining sales record, as tracked by the publishers’ and bookstores’ computers. He convinces another writer to publish it under his own name . . . which doesn’t go smoothly. (Westlake later acknowledged that he got the idea from his friend Justin Scott, a thriller writer who once adopted a new pen name for that very reason.)—Ed.

  Visualize a football quarterback on his day off, at the supermarket. When he comes out, I imagine he automatically looks out over the parking lot and has in his mind exactly the force and angle required to heave the bag of groceries in his arm onto the hood of that red Toyota over there.

  All intense careers are like that. On your day off, you’re still involved in the skills and details of your craft, whether you want to be or not. It’s just there, it’s part of your day, it’s part of who you are.

  Following the quarterback out of the supermarket is a novelist, who immediately notices a woman in sunglasses in the back seat of that black Audi over there. Why is she just sitting in the car? Why in the back seat? Why isn’t she looking around, or reading, or doing something other than just sitting there behind her sunglasses? Halfway across the parking lot, the novelist has worked out a scenario for her that answers those questions. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the novelist won’t ever make use of that story, or even remember it five minutes later, but he merely automatically flexed the story muscles, there in the parking lot, just as the quarterback automatically flexed his tossing muscles.

  What happens to quarterbacks eventually is time; they change. What happens to popular novelists is public taste; it changes. The tools of the craft are still there, but the exercise is now only idle.

  Naturally I’ve brooded about this from time to time, and watched the careers of others in my racket, and wondered what it’s like to know you’re over the hill. A writer can go on writing, of course, so long as the story pieces keep floating in his or her head, but what if nobody anymore wants to publish any of it? Then what’s the point? We’re not hobbyists, goddam it, that isn’t a stamp collection on the shelf.

  To add to the normal destructive flow of time and taste in the novelist’s career, there has been over the last generation a steady contraction of publishing markets, and a weeding out, sometimes ruthless, of writers. And the introduction of the marketeer’s computer has removed the last shred of human emotion, human contact and human reasonableness from the world of publishing. Try to argue with a computer.

  Nobody can argue, but a few people have decided to escape, at least for a while, the computer’s gaze. They know they’re good, and they want this latest novel to be judged on its own terms, as a novel, as a read, but they also know that not one person who really matters at the publishing house will read the novel first, if at all. What is read is the sales figures from that writer’s previous novels. The self-fulfilling prophecy is the only business strategy known to these MBA geniuses, who were never fired for the novels they didn’t publish.

  What this desperate few has done to evade the computer is re-create the self, become a new guy, or a new gal, with no track record, nothing to read at all but the goddam book. This can be an effective strategy, if security is maintained, but for how long? B. Traven and Thomas Pynchon and a few others have managed to succeed while never showing up in person, but most careers require a public side.

  The catalyst for my writing The Hook was one such person. I know about this person because, a few years ago, we discussed the novel, then in its early planning stages, and when, a long time later, I asked, “What’s happening with the book?” I was sworn to secrecy and told the truth.

  Not everybody has the personality to live in deep cover, to live as it were as a spy without a country. I think my friend does, but I don’t know yet how successful the strategy will be, nor for how long.

  Like the quarterback hefting his groceries, I hefted this particular plot hook, being the little anomaly that gets a story going, until I thought about the fact that hefting plot hooks is what writers do. I’ve known novelists, for instance, who have treated serious dangerous extended hospital stays as research. It all becomes fiction, or at least material to become fiction.

  What happens when a couple of novelists try to take their skills out of the workplace and into the world? What happens when the quarterback throws a hand grenade? Can he be sure he’s got this game under control?

  LETTER TO HOWARD B. GOTLIEB, BOSTON UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

  In March of 1965, Westlake received a letter from Howard B. Gotlieb, chief of special collections at the Boston University Libraries, asking if he would be willing to donate his papers to the university’s library. Receiving no reply, Gotlieb followed with a letter on June 30; below is Westlake’s response.—Ed.

  July 16, 1965

  Dear Mr. Gotlieb:

  Please excuse my not having replied to your first letter in March, and accept this reply to your letter of June 30 in its stead. It was astonishment that kept me silent the first time, and it is astonishment that makes me break my silence now.

  In my own mind, I make a distinction between the words ‘writer’ and ‘author’ for which I have no dictionary justification, but which I find at times useful. Since this looks like such a time, let me pass my private definitions along to you as a lead-in to the explanation of my various astonishments. A writer, in my personal lexicon, is a commercial wordsmith, an active professional, a (if the word can be stripped of overtones) hack. An author, on the other hand, is an institution, a brand name, a reputation. John D. MacDonald is a writer. Saul Bellow began as a writer but has become an institution, an author. Arthur Miller has never been anything but an author. John Steinbeck, having resisted authordom, is a writer with an honorary author’s membership card.

  It has seemed to me a natural state of affairs that authors should be collected, annotated, and assembled, but that writers should be left to do their doodling on sand. (When Erle Stanley Gardner or some other such has himself ‘librarianized’—forgive the coinage, but this is ad lib—I always feel a little embarrassed for him. About the only non-author writer I can think of who wouldn’t look silly standing nobly in a niche is Georges Simenon.)

  When I got your first letter, I was so astonished I put the whole thing completely out of my mind. First, I’m a writer, with only the teeniest and most secret and ephemeral urgings toward authorhood. Second, I’
m barely known on my block and have absolutely no national reputation at all. (Nor a category reputation; I’ve had a few books published, to a smattering and a spectrum of reviews. In the area of my first several books, the ‘names’ in the field among current workers are Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams and a few others. My most recent books—one out, two more finished—are comedic mysteries, and there I have no reputation at all.) Third, all of the book-length writing I’ve done under my own name has been exclusively in a category of strictly entertainment writing, in which higher aspirations, even if they existed, are irrelevant.

  Please believe me that I am not subjecting you to an effusion of false modesty. I’m not just scuffing my foot in the sand, in hopes of being patted on the head and told, “Shucks, fella, you’re more important than you know.” I think I do know, and what I think I know collides head-on with the implications of your two letters to me.

  The first of these, as I said, astonished me to the extent that I simply didn’t think about it. But the second letter, re-emphasizing the first, makes me think you really mean it. So now I’m astonished all over again, since I’m sure my personal evaluation—of place, not potential—is at least close to accurate.

  Therefore, this response. Let’s simply accept that I’m generally correct in my self-evaluation, and now, with me being the me I know me to be, what is it you want of me?

  By the way, I hope it goes without saying that my astonishment both times was more than a little tinged with pleasure. You have made me a very happy kid.

  Sincerely (if confusedly),

  Donald Westlake

  That fall, Westlake demurred once more: “No matter how many books I write, how many are published, how many people I meet who have read something I’ve written, it has always been possible for me to avoid self-consciousness while actually writing the stuff, by simply believing there isn’t anybody out there at all. I do what I do because that’s what I do—and because I enjoy it—and nothing else is relevant. . . . What you offer, in essence, is a shot at immortality. Nowhere near a guarantee, of course, no one can off er that, but a shot at it. But at the moment I relish my innocence more.” Eventually, however, Westlake was convinced, and his papers are now held by the special collections department of the Boston University Libraries.—Ed.

  SIX

  LUNCH BREAK

  May’s Famous Tuna Casserole

  This recipe was Westlake’s contribution to a 1999 collection of recipes by mystery writers, A Taste of Murder. The University of Chicago Press has neither attempted to follow nor eaten the results of this recipe and thus disclaims any responsibility for the result should you attempt it. We’ve seen what happens when even the best-laid plans come into contact with John Dortmunder.—Ed.

  I have among my published novels a recidivist character named John Dortmunder, whose joys are few and travails many. Whenever life becomes more than usually difficult for John, his faithful companion, May, lightens his spirits by presenting him with his favorite dinner, May’s Famous Tuna Casserole. Over the years, the public demand for the recipe for May’s Famous Tuna Casserole has been scant and relenting, and so, some years ago, I felt compelled to offer it to the world at large in Lit a la Carte, compiled by Rex Beckham.

  Since then, the clamor has continued unheard, which makes me delighted to promulgate the recipe for May’s Famous Tuna Casserole (concocted, I must admit, with some exceedingly reluctant help—99 percent—from my wife, the writer and otherwise gourmet, Abby Adams) to an even wider audience.

  Just so you know, John’s other favorite meal is cornflakes with milk and sugar, in the proportion of 1:1:1.

  2 cups milk

  3 tablespoons butter

  2 tablespoons flour

  Salt

  Pepper

  Nutmeg

  Cayenne pepper

  12-ounce package egg noodles

  2 10-ounce packages frozen, chopped spinach

  2 large cans white tuna fish

  Grated Parmesan cheese

  Bread crumbs

  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

  White sauce: Warm the milk in a small saucepan (do not let boil). In a thick-bottomed saucepan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and stir in the flour. Cook, whisking continuously, for 4 minutes; add the warm milk gradually and cook while stirring until smooth and thick. Season to taste with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and a pinch of cayenne. Use the other tablespoon of butter to grease a 3-quart casserole.

  Meanwhile, cook the noodles until barely done in plenty of boiling water. Drain, and immediately toss in the buttered casserole with 2 tablespoons of the white sauce. Defrost the frozen spinach in boiling water; drain and spread on top of the noodles. Drain the tuna and break up chunks. Spread it on top of the spinach.

  Pour the remaining sauce over the top of the casserole. Sprinkle with grated cheese and bread crumbs. Bake for 25 minutes or until bubbling and brown.

  Serves 6 for lunch or supper.

  SEVEN

  THE OTHER GUYS IN THE STRING

  Peers, Favorites, and Influences

  LAWRENCE BLOCK: FIRST SIGHTING

  Westlake wrote this appreciation of one of his oldest friends for a special issue of Mystery Scene focused on Lawrence Block that was published in 1990.—Ed.

  I first saw Larry Block in November of 1958. I was working as a fee reader for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, reading amateur manuscripts for which the amateurs paid Scott, who paid me one-fifth. This was not the part of the agency that was mail fraud. Another part, even more legitimate than my fee reading, was the actual representation of actual professional writers, like Arthur C. Clarke and Evan Hunter and P. G. Wodehouse, and, a little later, Norman Mailer. One of this select, if eclectic, crew was Larry Block.

  In the six months while I was, in the words of the science fiction writer Damon Knight (who’d been in that job before me, as in fact so had Larry), “chained to an oar at a fee agency,” I saw a number of writers for the first time, all framed in the speakeasy-style window, the panel of which the English receptionist would slide open in response to an irritating buzz. One of those was Larry.

  That particular day, he had a beard. I’ve noticed over the intervening years that sometimes Larry has a beard and sometimes he has a moustache. Similarly, sometimes he has hair on his head and sometimes he does not. Sometimes he dresses respectably and sometimes he dresses like a biker and sometimes he dresses like a person who’s lost his luggage, but at no time, either haired, partially haired nor unhaired, however he may wish to dress, does he look reputable.

  So this disreputable person, at that moment bearded, appeared in the wall opening, greeted the receptionist, then, smiling, called over her head to Henry Morrison, at another desk in the room (it was a crowded room), “Is it too late to change the dedication on that book?”

  Henry, who worked exclusively with the professional writers and who looked upon us fee readers as though prepared to hear our confession, gave Larry an exasperated look and said, “Yes. Why?”

  “I’m not going with that girl anymore,” Larry said.

  “Well, it’s too late,” Henry said.

  Larry kept smiling. He shrugged, said, “Well . . .” and went away. The receptionist closed the panel on the echo of his smile.

  Think of the series of emotional batterings Larry had then just recently undergone, of which I had been present at the finale. He had met a girl. He had found himself so twinned with her that he had dedicated a book to her. Then he had lost this person who had so recently been of such importance to him. And now he had learned that it was too late to keep from having the entire arc of a once-tender relationship permanently recorded in a paperback to be published under a pen name. And yet, he went on smiling. (Over the years, mostly, he has continued to go on smiling.)

  I had been, around that time, feeling the need for one or more cheerful persons in my life. I better get to know that guy, I told myself.

  ON PETER RABE

  Letter t
o Peter Rabe

  The ellipsis in this letter indicates my excision of a section of detailed questions about Rabe’s work that were subsequently developed in the essay that follows the letter.—Ed.

  December 10, 1986

  Dear Mr. Rabe,

  I am a writer, under a number of names. Under one of them, Richard Stark, I wrote for a time books that were stylistically very influenced by your Gold Medal work between Stop This Man and The Box. I’ve acknowledged that influence in print or public several times, and now that chicken has come home to roost in an odd way.

  I have received a letter from an (presumably) academic named Jon L. Breen, who says that he and an indefatigable anthologist named Martin Greenberg are editing “a series of original essay collections on various aspects of mystery and detective fiction,” to be published by Scarecrow Press. He goes on to say, “This project is essentially a ‘labor of love’ and is not expected to prove financially lucrative for either editors or contributors.” As my agent, Knox Burger, who I think you knew in an earlier persona, told me, that’s the kind of offer I don’t seem able to refuse.

  Anyway, Breen goes on, “One of our collections will concern the great paperback original writers, and among the subjects we want to cover is Peter Rabe. I know . . . you’re a fan of his work . . .” and so on.

  So, I went upstairs and brought back down my Peter Rabe books, which include all Gold Medals from Stop This Man to Code Name Gadget, plus Anatomy of a Killer in both Abelard-Schuman and Berkeley, plus “Hard Case Redhead” from Mystery Tales. (Don’t worry; it just means you’re drowning.)

  However, God damn it, I must have loaned Kill the Boss Goodbye to somebody, that being my favorite of your books, and I can’t remember who. I’ve put in an order for another copy from Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press—no, Mysterious Bookshop, he has all these entities—but God knows if he’ll ever find one.