The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  And it didn’t seem to me to be too much of a stretch for Hard Case. While Memory fits Otto Penzler’s definition of a mystery, in that a crime or the threat of a crime is an important element of its plot, it is far more an existential novel than a work of category fiction. The plot, I should tell you, concerns an actor in a road company who is surprised in flagrante delicto by a jealous husband, and who barely survives a vicious beating that leaves him with a devastating and ongoing case of amnesia. It is the hero’s desperate and doomed attempt to get his life back that is the story of Memory.

  A mystery? Perhaps not, but nevertheless a book that is quintessentially noir. And it not only takes place in the 1960s, but was written then—as were so many of the books Hard Case publishes so effectively. So, with Abby Westlake’s permission, I got in touch with Charles. At the very least, I figured I could euchre him into getting the book scanned.

  Charles loved the book, felt it was important it be published, and agreed that it could find a home in his list. The advance reviews have been outstanding, and that’s as much as I feel I need to say about the book, because you can go out and read it yourself. And I hope you do.

  And still, you know, it leaves me wondering. About a couple of things.

  First of all, I have to wonder how my old friend would feel about all this. You’ll recall that there was a time when he told his agent not to seek a publisher for Memory, that it was hopelessly out of date, and that he’d rather let it remain unpublished. If it was dated twenty or more years ago, is it less dated now?

  Arguably, it is. You could say that the extra time has worked to the book’s advantage, that two more decades have transformed it from passé to period.

  Still, it’s his book, and he made his decision and never had occasion to countermand it. I think he’d be pleased to see the book vindicated, and made available to the reading public, but I’m just guessing. And the whole question’s moot, isn’t it? If there’s an afterlife, I can’t imagine it’s one wherein the spirit spends a whole lot of energy caring what people are doing back on earth, and whether they’re reading one’s books.

  (And Memory’s publication is surely less likely to trouble Dan’s ghost than another posthumous publishing project. Back in the day—way way back in the day—Don and I collaborated on a trio of soft-core erotic novels, writing alternate chapters and having great fun. Subterranean Press will be bringing out those books later this year in a triple volume, to be called Hellcats & Honey Girls. Would Don be happy about that? Sheesh, I’m not even sure I’m happy about it.)

  What else do I wonder? Well, I once again find myself wondering what would have happened if Memory had been published at the time of its writing. I won’t try to guess what its reception might have been, whether it would have been in the running for a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, or would have had to be content with a small but respectable sale and positive but not earthshaking reviews. A succès d’estime, let us say.

  How would it have changed Don as a writer?

  It’s tempting to say it would have had no effect, that a writer with Don’s artistic integrity would write the books he’d been placed here to write, that success or failure along the way would not persuade him to write something that didn’t appeal to him, or forego writing something that did. And that’s largely true for many of us, at least on a conscious level.

  But so much of the real work of writing gets done well below the level of consciousness. Success engenders success, and encouragement breeds ideas. I’m sure Memory, by being published, would have led to more dark existential masterpieces. I know this not only because that’s pretty much how it works for everybody, but because one can see the pattern elsewhere in Don’s career.

  His enduring reputation, surely, is as a writer of comic mysteries. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the first Donald E. Westlake novels were uncompromisingly hardboiled works, and that he published five of them (and five Parker books as well, as Richard Stark) before his first comic mystery, The Fugitive Pigeon.

  Pigeon outsold his earlier books, and got more attention from reviewers. And the next book, The Busy Body, was another comic mystery, and it not only sold well but became the basis for a film. And, just like that, Don was a writer of comic mysteries. He still wrote hardboiled books, along with books that resist categorization, but The Fugitive Pigeon pointed his career in a direction it would never abandon.

  Would he have written comic works no matter what? Well, probably. Like more than a few of us, he had both a light and a dark side, and could best fulfill himself by expressing both sides in his work. Still, the success of those early comic mysteries encouraged that source within to come up with funny ideas, and it never ceased to do so.

  That’s one example. Here’s another, on the opposite side. In the mid-’60s, Don wrote three or four contemporary short stories. They didn’t have a crime or mystery element, and in fact were stories about modern relationships. (I haven’t read them in ages, and suspect they’ve vanished from the earth, so I don’t remember anything much about them, but they were about couples blundering through romance, as I recall, and the characters were bright and sympathetic, and the stories were fun.)

  He wrote them not because he thought there was any particular point in writing short stories. There wasn’t, any more than there is today. He wrote them because the ideas came along and engaged him, and a short story takes days out of your life, not months, so why not write them?

  So he did, and nothing came of it. A couple of magazine editors liked them, but not enough to buy them. And that was the end of that.

  “They were fun to write,” Don told me at the time. “And I’d write more, if I got an idea for another. But nobody bought the ones I’d written, and whatever part of me was coming up with the ideas just said the hell with it.”

  There’s not much point, really, in trying to guess what Don might have written under other circumstances. For my part, I’m happy enough with what he did write—and happier still that Memory will finally see the light of day.

  * * *

  One of the happier publishing phenomena of recent years has been the republication by University of Chicago Press of the entire run of novels Don wrote as Richard Stark. There were 28, 24 about a criminal named Parker, four about a colleague of Parker’s named Grofield. I was invited to write a joint foreword to three of the books, but I found myself with enough to say about the books and their author that I wound up writing individual forewords for each of the books:

  Butcher’s Moon

  One night around the end of 1960 or the beginning of 1961, I was in a second-floor flat in Canarsie, an unglamorous part of Brooklyn, located at the very end of the Canarsie Line, a part of the subway system which ran east across Fourteenth Street from Eighth Avenue, then crossed the river, and wound up running on elevated tracks all the way to Rockaway Parkway. (The train was subsequently designated the LL, until years later they took one of its letters away and it became the L. No one knows why, but I’ve always figured it was a cost-cutting move. Of such small economies are great savings made.)

  I lived in Manhattan at the time, on Central Park West at 104th Street, so I had to take two subway trains and walk several blocks to get to that flat, but I did it often and without complaint because that’s where Don Westlake lived. We’d been best friends since we met in our mutual agent’s office in July of 1959, where we introduced ourselves before walking a few blocks to his flat in Hell’s Kitchen. We sat around there and had a few beers and talked and talked and talked, and that was the pattern that prevailed over the months. I moved home to Buffalo, met somebody, got married. Don and his then-wife moved from an unsafe neighborhood to an inaccessible one. My then-wife and I set up housekeeping in New York, first on West 69th Street, then on Central Park West. And Don and I got together often, and had a few beers, and talked and talked and talked.

  And that’s what we were doing that night I was telling you about, out in Canarsie. We were young writers together�
�he was five years my senior, but had spent time in the Air Force—and we talked a lot about what we were doing, and sometimes showed our work to each other. “I started something new,” Don said, and handed me ten or fifteen pages of typescript, featuring a fellow named Parker who’s walking across the George Washington Bridge, into Manhattan. In the first sentence, a passing motorist offers Parker a lift, and Parker tells him to go to hell.

  I thought the chapter was good, and said so, and asked its author if he knew where it was going.

  “Sort of,” he said. “I’ll just keep writing and see where it goes.”

  Which is how we both worked, more often than not. Don called it the Narrative Push method, and it has a couple of virtues. For one, you can just sit down and start writing, as there’s no need to work everything out in your mind ahead of time. And, as Theodore Sturgeon famously observed, if the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, he needn’t worry that the reader will know what’s going to happen next.

  “I like the character,” Don said. “I don’t think I’ll have trouble finding things for him to do.”

  Indeed.

  One thing Don found for Parker to do, at the book’s end, was die.

  And that would have made this the shortest series in the annals of crime fiction, but for an editor at Pocket Books with the splendid name of Bucklin Moon. Moon may or may not have been the first editor to read The Hunter, but he was certainly the first who wanted to buy it. But he had a request. Did Parker have to die? Could he get away at the end, and go on to star in a whole series of books? Two more at a minimum, say, because Moon was prepared to offer a three-book contract.

  Don had already established that he liked Parker, and that he could find plenty of things for him to do. And he confided that he’d only killed Parker off at the book’s end because he thought that’s what you were supposed to do with that sort of antihero. So he agreed, and revised the ending, and wrote The Man With the Getaway Face and The Outfit, and Moon sat down and drew up another three-book contract. Parker, and Richard Stark, were off and running.

  Ah, yes. Richard Stark.

  The conventional wisdom these days is that Don created the Richard Stark pen name to distinguish the uncompromisingly hardboiled Parker novels from the bubbly frothy Westlakean comic mysteries.

  Not exactly. The Parker series had six titles in print at Pocket Books by the time Random House published The Fugitive Pigeon, Don’s first comedic effort. (Don’s earlier Random House novels, starting with The Mercenaries, owe more to Hammett than to Wodehouse; they’re about as light and bubbly as bathtub gin.)

  And Richard Stark first saw print two or three years before The Hunter. His was no separate persona, no marketing ploy; on several occasions Don had more than one story slotted in a single issue of a magazine, and was asked to use a pen name on one of them. Thus Richard Stark.

  I don’t know if he originally intended to hang Richard Stark on The Hunter. He might have, simply because it was to be a paperback original and he’d been busy establishing his own name at Random House. But if Parker was to start in a multi-volume series, then of course he’d need a pen name.

  As noted, off and running.

  Let’s flash forward a few years, shall we? To 1974, and Butcher’s Moon, the book to which I am privileged to be writing an introduction, and of which you, Dear Reader, are fortunate to have a copy.

  Fortunate, I should say, for a couple of reasons. For one, copies rank somewhere between hen’s teeth and the Holy Grail in elusiveness. The book, published in hardcover by Random House, does not seem ever to have been reprinted. When copies come up for sale, the price is high.

  More to the point, Butcher’s Moon would be special even if it were not hard to come by. For over twenty years it looked to be the last book in the series, and while that would have been regrettable, at least Parker’s saga would have ended on a high note. Because in addition to being, to my mind, the strongest book in a strong series, Butcher’s Moon brings Parker’s story to completion if not to an end. In its pages, the author manages to tell a gripping and satisfying story while at the same time summing up and resolving the fifteen Parker books that preceded it.

  He does so by having Parker confront the book’s central problem by bringing in characters from other books, subordinate criminals who’ve been his partners in other heists dating back to the early days of the series. (I read this book first as an Advance Reading Copy, and as I recall it was annotated; every time there was a reference to an earlier caper, a footnote referred the reader to the book in which the incident was described. I remember thinking that was a nice touch, but evidently someone somewhere along the line thought it was intrusive, and perhaps it was. In any event, the copy I own now is a first edition, and there aren’t any footnotes.)

  It is strong testimony to the quality of the Parker books that, even decades after encountering them, the supporting cast members remain so sharply etched in memory that one recalls them at once. It is often said in the theater that there are no small parts, only small actors, and one could easily adapt the remark to the field of prose fiction. There are no minor characters, only minor writers, and the extent to which Parker’s cast members are always memorable and always wholly human demonstrates that there is nothing minor about them or their creator.

  And that, if it’s all the same to you, is all I’m going to say about Butcher’s Moon. You’ve got the book in your hands, and I can’t see why you’d want me to explain it to you. Westlake, in any of his work and under any of his names, is very nearly as accessible as Dr. Seuss. You don’t need a study guide, or someone like me to point things out to you.

  The one thing I can suggest to improve your experience of reading Butcher’s Moon is that you set it aside and read the foregoing fifteen books first, in the order they were written. If you’ve never read them before, or if you missed a few titles along the way, you’ve got a treat in store for you; if you read them years ago and your memory’s a bit tentative, you’ll find them a treat a second time around. And it’s easy to do this, as all of the earlier titles are back in print in handsome new trade paperback editions uniform with this one.

  If you can’t wait, well, go ahead and read Butcher’s Moon. Why not? What the hell, you can always read it again.

  Comeback

  Back in 1991 I got a phone call from Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, wanting to know if I’d be interested in reviewing Perchance to Dream, Robert B. Parker’s sequel to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. I’d long been a great fan of both writers, but you might not have known that from my response. I said, “Review it? I don’t even want to read it.”

  “I know what you mean,” Kenny said.

  “I don’t think I could say anything good about it,” I said, “and I don’t want to say anything bad about anybody’s work, which is why I’ve pretty much stopped doing reviews.”

  Well, he said, how about writing about something I already knew I liked? An appreciation of an old favorite, for a new feature they’d started? Could I think of something I’d like to praise in print?

  I didn’t have to think. “Don Westlake’s Parker books,” I said.

  “Oh, perfect,” Kenny said. “I love those books.”

  Me too.

  I was on a book tour when we spoke, and when I got home I went to work on the assignment. It took me a long time. Not to write the piece, that was easy enough and the work of a couple of hours. But first I felt the need to refresh my memory—by sitting down with the complete sixteen-book series and reading them all in order.

  Was this necessary? No, of course not. I could have written the article without opening a single one of the books, let alone reading all of them word for word. But the main reason I accepted the assignment was that it gave me excuse to revisit the books. That, really, was the payoff; the couple of bucks the paper paid me was sort of a bonus.

  Writing the piece was pleasant enough, but rereading the books was a genuine treat. I knew go
ing in that it wouldn’t be disappointing, because I’d already read several of the books more than once. They were, as I’d already established to my satisfaction, eminently rereadable.

  And what makes a book work a second time around? It helps, of course, if it’s of excellent quality—but that in and of itself is no guarantee that it’ll be enjoyable more than once. Suspense, whether of the nail-biting-edge-of-the-chair sort or the less urgent page-turning lure of What Happens Next, can wear thin once you’ve established that things do in fact work out, that the hero survives, that the bad guy gets what’s coming to him, and that they all live happily ever after. The Parker books are as suspenseful as one could possibly want, but that’s not enough to recommend them for repeat readings.

  I think that it’s similar to what makes series fiction work. Shakespeare, you’ll recall, wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor because Queen Elizabeth wanted to see another play with Sir John Falstaff in it. She wanted to meet the character again, which is to say that she desired to repeat the happy experience she had with Henry IV, parts one and two—but in a sense by having that experience again for the first time.

  We make our way through a series of books because we want to enjoy the company of a favorite character in a new situation. And we reread a book because we so enjoy that character and his world that they remain fresh to us. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” said Enobarbus of Cleopatra, and so it is with the handful of fictional characters of whom we can read more than once.

  I don’t suppose anyone would mistake Parker for Cleopatra, or Falstaff either. But I sat down and read sixteen books in a row about him, all of which I’d read at least once before. And my enthusiasm for the enterprise never flagged.