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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CRIME STORIES
THE “DORTMUNDER” STORIES
ASK A SILLY QUESTION
HORSE LAUGH
TOO MANY COOKS
A MIDSUMMER DAYDREAM
THE DORTMUNDER WORKOUT
PARTY ANIMAL
GIVE TILL IT HURTS
JUMBLE SALE
NOW WHAT?
ART AND CRAFT
FUGUE FOR FELONS
THE SWEETEST MAN IN THE WORLD
SCI-FI STORIES
THEY ALSO SERVE
A POINT OF INTEREST
THE RISK PROFESSION
THE “STARSHIP HOPE” STORIES
DON’T YOU KNOW
INTERSTELLAR PIGEON
HEAVEN
THE WORLD'S A STAGE
HITCH YOUR SPACESHIP
HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
____________________
Donald E. Westlake was born on July 12, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA.
Westlake, a former US Air Force pilot and one time actor, has become the writer most associated with tales of organised crime. Indeed, in story after story, he has demonstrated his particular belief that crime is actually not very different from any other type of business enterprise-and the intelligent criminal is just, one more example of ‘Organisation Man’.
In Westlake’s early novels like ‘Killing Time’ (1961), about the running of a corrupt upstate New York town, he dealt with organised crime from the inside with great objectivity; but over the years elements of humour and the absurd have crept into his work in the shape of bungled robberies and inept confidence tricks.
In 1962, by way of contrast, he adopted the pen name Richard Stark and started a series of novels about Parker, a cold-blooded professional thief, who was later transferred to the screen in ‘Point Blank’ featuring Lee Marvin (1967).
Not content with this, Westlake invented a second major character, Mitch Tobin, a guilt-ridden former New York cop turned private eye, whose adventures appear under the name Tucker Coe.
More recently still, he has begun writing a number of capers about a group of inept thieves led by criminal manqué John Archibald Dortmunder.
For this remarkable display of virtuosity, Donald Westlake has won numerous awards, including three Edgars and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of Jim Thompson’s ‘The Grifters’. In ‘The Sweetest Man in the World’, written in 1967, he mixes his deadpan humour and fascination with organised crime in the tale of a clever fraud... and it’s even cleverer denouement.
Donald E. Westlake died of a heart attack on Wednesday, December 31, 2008. He was 75.
CRIME STORIES
THE “DORTMUNDER” STORIES
When John Dortmunder and I first teamed up, in 1967, neither of us had any idea what we were letting ourselves in for. In fact, at first, it didn’t look as though the partnership would get off the ground.
It all began when my regular guy stood me up. I have been, intermittently, a writer known as Richard Stark, who chronicles the incidents in the life of a character called only Parker. In 1967, Parker refused the role I’d planned for him in what was supposed to have been his next book; he thought it was beneath his dignity. So that’s when I first turned, just as a substitute, a temp, a one–time hire, to John Archibald Dortmunder. And all I asked him to do was steal the same emerald six times–piece of cake.
John was willing at first, but after three heists he turned surly and wouldn’t play any more, so I put that failed project away and turned to something else, thinking Dortmunder and I were merely a blind date that hadn’t panned out. Then, two years later, I came across the partial manuscript in a closet, found Dortmunder in a more accommodating frame of mind now that he’d spent two years in the dark, and together we finished the book. It was called The Hot Rock, and it was published in 1970.
After The Hot Rock and its ensuing movie, in which I was astonished to learn that Dortmunder was Robert Redford, I thought we were quit of each other. I’m sure neither of us ever expected to cross paths again, or to collaborate on what has become as of this writing a total of eleven novels, and we certainly never expected to find ourselves mixed up with short stories.
I’m not quite sure how that latter development came about. Ten years had gone by since I’d finished that first Dortmunder novel, with three more added along the way, when into my head came fragments of an elusive conversation between “an elegant man” and John. It didn’t seem to be part of a novel, but then, what was it?
Ask a silly question. No, I mean “Ask a Silly Question”, the first John Dortmunder short story, containing the elegant man and his class–ridden attitudes, which Playboy published in February 1981. Unlike in the novels, Dortmunder worked single in the short story, except for a phone–in from his friend Andy Kelp. Anyway, it looked to me like a one–off. I wasn’t writing short stories that decade, or at least hardly ever, and Dortmunder was clearly more comfortable in a setting where he could have his gang around him. So that was it.
Except.
Except it kept happening, one way and another. For instance, I was thinking one day about things John might purloin, and I thought of a horse, and I got a picture in my mind of John Dortmunder and a horse gazing deep into each other’s eyes, and I loved it. But I couldn’t do it. I haven’t met enough horses to be able to write an entire novel about a horse. But, come to think of it, I could write a short story. And did.
More time went by, and then, as occasionally happens (my one link to Joan of Arc), another fragment of conversation wafted through my brain one day in 1988 — “What’s that noise?” “Maybe it’s the wind.” “What wind? We’re in a tunnel.” — and that became “Too Many Crooks,” mainly because I wanted to know what those two were doing in a tunnel.
A year later, I myself had occasion to wonder what I was doing in Italy, where, in fact, I was on vacation. The trouble is, I don’t know how to go on vacation. From what? I don’t have a job, I don’t have a boss, and if I have a schedule, it’s self–imposed and mostly ignored. So there we were, my wife Abby and I, in a rented house in Tuscany for the month of August, and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.
When at a loss, write. The only writing materials around were pen and paper — pen and postcard to begin with, but we upgraded — and so I wound up doing, in longhand, “A Midsummer Daydream,” in which John Dortmunder finds himself at loose ends outside New York City, not knowing what to do in this strange locale. I typed it when I got home, since my handwriting looks like a ball of string a kitten has played with, and Playboy took that one, too, like the others.
Then there came an anomaly. The Sunday edition of the New York Times doesn’t weigh enough all by itself to satisfy its editors, so they add special sections now and again, and sometimes this special section is a Health supplement to the Magazine. An editor from there phoned me, one day in 1989, wondering if John Dortmunder had any thoughts about health, and I had to admit I didn’t know but I’d ask. I did, and when “The Dortmunder Workout” was published, in the Health supplement to the New York Times Magazine, in the spring of 1990, John was the only guy in the issue without a sweatband around his brow. The editor told me afterward that the staffers who already knew Dortmunder thought it was a nice piece, but those who hadn’t previously met my boy were baffled. Well, that seems fair.
After “The Dortmunder Workout” and its preceding four sho
rt stories during the ‘80s, I expected the two of us would really be content from now on to stay forever in the land of long–form, but no. A thought came to me, in the early ‘90s, that a person being chased, wanting to hide, coming across a party, might hide in that milieu not by pretending to be a partygoer — won’t the other partygoers realize they don’t know him? — but by becoming a member of the caterer’s crew, moving among the revelers with little trays of finger food. The other waiters, being temps themselves, won’t be surprised to see an unfamiliar face within their group, so maybe the pursued person could blend into this party tapestry until the baying of hounds has receded into the distance. For John and me, it seemed worth the try.
“Party Animal,” for thus it came to be called, did not begin life as a Christmas story, but merely as a party story. However, Playboy had a hole in its holiday issue that year, and what better thing do these people have to celebrate than Christmas? So there we have it.
But then, just to complicate things, the next story John and I embarked on was supposed from the very beginning to be about Christmas. I, who can go years without writing a word about Christmas, and John Dortmunder, who dislikes all holidays indiscriminately because everybody’s home, combined to make two Christmas stories in a row.
What happened, I got a call from Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press and owner–operator of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. He explained that his store had a large mailorder business, that the Christmas season was a potent part of that business, and that he’d thought it would be a nice thing to give his regular customers a bonus, a Christmas present of a short story just for them, once every year, each time out with a different writer they might have heard of. Would I like to write the first one?
I consulted with John, and it turned out he’d always wanted to attend the occasional poker game in which Otto and I and a few others are regulars (it’s the game itself, sans scheduled time slot or location, that’s irregular), and which is sometimes played in the library behind Otto’s shop. So John dropped in, played the hand he was dealt, and “Give Till It Hurts” was the result.
Until this point, all these briefer travails had involved John either by himself or in company with Andy Kelp, but no one else from his extended unfamily had ever shown up. But there was one particular character who’d appeared in a few of the novels — a fence with a heart of tin, a sourpuss named Arnie Albright — and in thinking about him one day I saw a little something he could do that didn’t lend itself to novel treatment, but which could certainly be the basis for a short story.
It was, but it wasn’t right for Playboy. I thought, however, it might be right for The Armchair Detective, a very good magazine devoted to the mystery genre, and to my delight they thought so, too, so that’s where “Jumble Sale” was published.
That story, set in Arnie Albright’s charming apartment, was written in the fall of 1993, twelve years after John and I had first entered the lists of the ten–yard dash. In that time, we’d combined for seven short stories and one workout, and until then I’d had no particular goal in mind beyond each event, assuming every time that this story was the last, that John and I had longer fish to fry. But now it occurred to me that if we combined on just two or three additional mini–sagas, we’d have enough for a collection. So all I had to do was think of two or three more stories.
I don’t know how it is with anybody else, but I can never think about what I’m supposed to think about. Dortmunder short stories had come along and come along, never anticipated and never particularly needed, but as soon as I decided I should do another Dortmunder short story, I couldn’t think of one. Here I was, most of the way across the stream, with only two flat stones to touch to reach the other bank, and not a flat stone could I find anywhere inside my head (which is usually full of them).
It wasn’t until more than four years later, when I’d given up on the idea of a Dortmunder collection or any more Dortmunder short stories for any reason at all, a time when I was supposed to be thinking about something else entirely, when here it came, and it couldn’t have been more simple. John would leave home on a little errand, that’s all. “Now What?” the story was called, and it was back to Dortmunder working solo, and all he was trying to do was get from point A to point B. Well, he got back to Playboy; he could settle for that. And we found the same home with the final story in this as semblage, “Art and Craft,” in which, I admit, John did poach on territory not normally his own. Maybe it’s that he’s been associated in bookstores and libraries with detective stories and their sleuths all these years — though, in his case, mostly in rebuttal — that led him at last to make, in “Art and Craft,” the kind of observation of tiny detail that’s usually the province of cerebral plainclothesmen and grandmas with cats. Still, his use of the technique remains peculiarly his own.
And I guess Dortmunder remains peculiarly mine, at whatever length. Originally, he was just passing through. He wasn’t expected to have legs, and yet here he is, still domitable but bowed, apprentice, it would appear, of both the extended romp and the quick hit, the perhaps–not–exactly–surgical strike.
Through these years of John Dortmunder’s brief encounters, there has remained one constant, and her name is Alice Turner. She was the fiction editor at Playboy, where seven of the stories herein first appeared, and through all these travails she continued to look upon John and me with bemused disbelief followed by stoical acceptance. (Acceptance is an important quality in a magazine editor.) Her suggestions have been not onerous and always to the point, and have definitely improved the product. She’s also a terrific person who, in her off–hours, wrote a history of Hell, so what’s not to like?
Speaking of which, some years ago, as a result of a contractual contretemps with a motion picture studio (the closest thing to evil incarnate left in this secular age), it looked for a while as though I might either have to stop writing about John entirely — a horrible thought — or change his name, which the harpies were claiming for themselves. A pseudonym for John seemed a possibility, since he’d been known to sail under colors other than his own once or twice already, but when I went to choose that new name, nothing worked. John Dortmunder was John Dortmunder, damn it, and nobody else.
After brooding for a month, I finally settled on the name Rumsey, which I had found on an exit sign on the Saw Mill River Parkway, north of New York City. Rumsey seemed to me closest in feeling, in philosophy, in Weltanschauung (not to mention weltschmerz) to Dortmunder.
I typed out the name a few times: John Rumsey. John Rumsey. John Rumsey. Hmmm. Fortunately, the evil empire’s shadow receded from my peaceful village, so Dortmunder could go on being Dortmunder after all, and once that happened, I could admit to myself that even Rumsey wasn’t a completely satisfying substitute. The problem is, John Rumsey is short. John Dortmunder is of average height, but John Rumsey is short. If the guys were to get together in the back room of the O.J. Bar & Grill to scope and scheme some new outrage, John Rumsey would be the shortest guy in the joint. Don’t ask me how I know; I know.
Hey, maybe this is really Rumsey, here in this collection. You think?
Donald E. Westlake
April, 2004
ASK A SILLY QUESTION
______________________
“Art theft, of course,” said the elegant man, “has been overdone. By now it’s thoroughly boring.”
Dortmunder didn’t say anything. His business was theft, of art or whatever else had value, and he’d never supposed it was meant to be exciting. Nor, while tiptoeing around darkened halls in guarded buildings with his pockets full of stolen goods, had he ever found boredom much of a problem.
The elegant man sighed. “What do people of your sort drink?” he asked.
“Bourbon,” Dortmunder said. “Water. Coca–Cola. Orange juice. Beer.”
“Bourbon,” the elegant man told one of the two plug–uglies who’d brought Dortmunder here. “And sherry for me.”
“Coffee,” Dortmunder went
on. “Sometimes Gallo Burgundy. Vodka. Seven–Up. Milk.”
“How do you prefer your bourbon?” the elegant man asked.
“With ice and water. People of my sort also drink Hi–C, Scotch, lemonade, Nyquil —”
“Do you drink Perrier?”
“No,” said Dortmunder.
“Ah,” said the elegant man, closing the subject with his preconceptions intact. “Now,” he said, “I suppose you’re wondering why we all gathered you here.”
“I got an appointment uptown,” Dortmunder answered. He was feeling mulish. When a simple walk to the subway turns into an incident with two plug–uglies, a gun in the back, a shoving into a limousine outfitted with liveried chauffeur beyond the closed glass partition, a run up the stocking of Manhattan to the East Sixties, a swallowing up into a town house with a garage with an electronically operated door, and an interview at gunpoint with a tall, slender, painfully well–dressed, 60ish, white–haired, white–mustached elegant man in a beautifully appointed and very masculine den imported intact from Bloomingdale’s, a person has a right to feel mulish. “I’m already late for my appointment,” Dortmunder pointed out.
“I’ll try to be brief,” the elegant man promised. “My father — who, by the way, was once Secretary of the Treasury of this great land, under Teddy Roosevelt — always impressed upon me the wisdom of obtaining expert advice before undertaking any project, of whatever size or scope. I have always followed that injunction.”
“Uh–huh,” said Dortmunder.
“The exigencies of life having made it necessary for me,” the elegant man continued, “to engage for once in the practice of grand larceny, in the form of burglary, I immediately sought out a professional in the field to advise me. You.”
Collected Stories Page 1
