The many faces of Donald E. Westlake

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Titles: Somebody Owes Me Money, The Hunter, The Ax
Author: Donald E. Westlake, Donald E. Westlake as Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake
Publication Years: 2008 (1969 reissue), 2008 (1962 reissue), 1997
Genre: Mystery, Crime Fiction
Counts for Year: 17, 18, 19

How I discovered

A month or two (or maybe three, I’m not sure how long it’s been) my brother-in-law Warren loaned me a pile of books, including these three. I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I’d be that interested in them. Suddenly, this past week, I picked up one (yep, the middle one, you got me) and was hooked.

The setups

Cab driver Chet Conway was hoping for a good tip from his latest fare, the sort he could spend. But what he got was a tip on a horse race. Which might have turned out okay, excpet that when he went to collect his winnings. Chet found his bookie lying dead on the living room floor.

Chet knows he had nothing to do with it– but just try explaining that to the cops, to the two rival criminal gangs who each think Chet’s working for the other, and to the dead man’s beautiful sister, who has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother’s murder…

– from the back of the book Somebody Owes Me Money

She shot him just above the belt and left him for dead. Then they torched the house, with Parker in it, and took the money he had helped them steal. It all went down just the way they’d planned, except for one thing. Parker didn’t die.

In The Hunter, the first volume in the Parker series, our ruthless antihero roars into New York City, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him and on the man who took his money, stealing and scamming his way to redemption. The volume that kick-started Parker’s forty-plus-year career of larceny- and inspired the motion picture Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Marvin – The Hunter is back, ready to thrill a new generation of noir fans.

– from the back of the book The Hunter

Burke Devore is a paper company manager, a man who can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about bleaching processes and the edible wood pulp they put in ice cream. For twenty-five years Burke has provided for his family and played by the rules. Until now. Now Devore is slipping away: from his wife, his family, and from all norms of civilized behavior. Burke Devore wants his life back. And he will do anything to get it.

– from the jacket of The Ax

How I never have read a Donald E. Westlake novel in my 40 years of existence is beyond me but I haven’t — and I wish I had discovered him earlier than this. Westlake, in short, is a consummate master of crime and noir fiction.

In the first book I read, Somebody Owes Me Money, I already was won over from the first chapter, but then when I got to the following section in Chapter 6 where Chet is taken to see a mob boss, I knew I would be reading all three of these novels:

I went up the stairs. Our six feet made complicated echoing dull rhythms on the rungs, and I thought of Robert Mitchum. What would Robert Mitchum do now, what would he do in a situation like this?

No question of it. Robert Mitchum with the suddenness of a snake, would abruptly whirl, kick the nearest hood in the jaw, and vault over the railing and down to the garage floor. Meantime, the kicked hood would have fallen backward into the other one, and the two of them would go tumbling down the steps, out of the play long enough for Mitchum either to (a) make it to the door and out of the building and thus successfully make his escape or (b) get into the hood’s car, in which the keys would have been left, back it at top seed through the the closed garage door, and take off with a grand grinding of gears, thus successfully making his escape and getting their car in the bargain.

But what if I spun around like that, and the guy with the gun was Robert Mitchum? What would he do then? Easy. He’d duck the kick and shoot me in the head.

I plodded up the stairs.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending of the first novel. However, the way Westlake carried the story throughout the novel won me over and so I continued on to The Hunter.

Whoa! Wait a minute! In this one, Westlake (Stark) presented a completely different character from Chet Conway in Parker (no first name).  Unlike Conway, Parker is…to put it bluntly, a bastard, which after reading the story with Conway was a bit unsettling. Conway wasn’t perfect, but you didn’t get the feeling that he’d dump his wife’s body in a park after she committed suicide either — in Parker’s defense, it was his wife that shot him, betrayed him and left him for dead, but still…he’s brutal.

In Westlake’s defense, he doesn’t present Parker as anything but cruel right from the start:

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. The guy said, “Screw you, buddy,” yanked his Chevy back into the stream of traffic, and roared on down to the tollbooths. Parker spat in the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked across the George Washington Bridge.

But his cruelness fits him like the suit that Orson Welles wore as the character of Captain Hank Quinlan in one of my favorite noir movies, Touch of Evil. Parker’s dark, Parker’s gritty, but he has to be with the people and circumstances with which he’s dealing — even if he put himself in those circumstances.

Westlake’s writing shines in this one with a novel that reads like a movie script. It’s not a surprise to me that this was the inspiration for a movie starring Lee Marvin. I could see him in this character.

The character of Parker was just a setup for me for the character of Burke Devore in The Ax, whose brutality was even more pronounced than Parker’s from the first chapter as Devore shoots a man with a Luger, all part of a plan to get a job.

The plan, of course, involves killing a number of people to get there. Yet within a simple construct, Westlake weaves a compelling story of a man caught in corporate downsizing, a story that you can’t put down — at least, I couldn’t.

Westlake brilliantly sets up each of Devore’s victims with a resume from each, including Devore’s own resume to contrast what he is up against. However, it isn’t just the way Westlakes constructs the story, it is his telling of it too, interspersing history to provide depth to the story and the character:

When I was a boy, I was for a while a science fiction fan. A lot of us were, until Sputnik. I was twelve when Sputnik flew. All the science fiction magazines I’d read before then, and the movies and TV shows I saw, assumed that outer space belonged by natural right to Americans. Explorers and settlers and daredevils of space were all Americans, in story after story. And then, out of nowhere, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first space vehicle. The Russians!

We all stopped reading science fiction, then, and I turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows. I don’t know about anybody else, but, as I remember it, I turned my interest after that  to the western. In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.

The question is will Devore win his battle, which means giving the ax to his competition (just as he was given it) to get his job? I won’t tell you, but I will tell you that the story along the way keeps you wanting to know what happens with Devore.

My ratings: Somebody Owes Me Money, 4; The Hunter, 5; and The Ax, 4.

My rating system:

5- Classic, must read
4- Worth owning a copy
3- Worth picking up at library
2- Worth skimming at the bookstore
1- Worth being a doorstop

For more on Westlake, visit his website.

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Filed under Authors U-Z, Book reviews, Books, Fiction, Titles A-E, Titles F-J, Titles P-T

Tags: book reviews, Books, crime fiction, Donald E. Westlake, mystery, Richard Stark