dirty money

I read Dirty Money, the follow-up novel to Nobody Runs Forever by Donald Westlake/Richard Stark. I might read more of these if only the characters had souls.

everybody kills somebody sometime

Sounds cheesy and it is. I was childishly delighted when Steve brought this home from the library


But it just wasn't very good. I won't bother with the others, even Luck Be a Lady, Don't Die.

westlake/stark books

I've read four of these so far:

As Donald Westlake:
The Hot Rock (the first Dortmunder book)
The Hook

As Richard Stark:
The Damsel (a Grofield book)
Nobody Runs Forever (a Parker book)

Each of these is different in tone. The Hot Rock is the lightest, most comic. Not quite my kind of humor but amusing; Westlake is a skillful writer. I'm not surprised this book was made into a film, though I wouldn't have imagined Robert Redford in any of the roles. But that's Hollywood.

The Damsel, which borrows a character (Grofield) from The Hot Rock, is more adventure/thriller, and the more compelling read for me. But still fairly light in tone. I could almost see Cary Grant playing the lead, though he was born too early for that, and has about a hundred times the charm quotient of Grofield (whose name isn't Grofield in this book, but I digress).

Nobody Runs Forever is one of Stark's Parker books. He's a cold-as-ice thief and killer. The story of their planned heist is not told from the victim's or the detective's point of view, but mainly from the criminals'. (This is true for all four of these books.) It reminds me in tone of an old Cagney or Bogart film. I'm not an expert on hard-boiled detectives a la Hammett or Chandler, but maybe Steve will give his opinion, since he's read lots of these. He rates Chandler at the top, I think.

The Hook was, for me, the most compelling and disturbing of the four by far. It's set not in the world of habitual or professional crooks but in a literary one. The main characters are novelists. More psychological than the other books. Not a pretty take on humanity.

Westlake is a masculine writer. Plot is king, and men (mostly) propel it forward. I know a book needs both, but I usually care more about characters than plot. Westlake's plots are so well done, though, that even I notice and enjoy them. The four books contain some women but I just don't find them as convincing as the men. That's not unusual and not a deal-breaker in this case.

Four books comprise a tiny sample of Westlake's output of over a hundred books. So I'll read some more, and try to read the earlier books first.

some favorites

• Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series
• PG Wodehouse: many many titles
• Jane Austen's 6 novels
• Ring Lardner: You Know Me Al
• Josephine Tey: The Franchise Affair; Brat Farrar
• The Provincial Lady in America by E. M. Delafield
• George Smiley books by John le Carre
• A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• Colin Dexter: Inspector Morse mysteries
• Agatha Christie (esp. Miss Marple)
• Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone; The Woman in White
• Ngaio Marsh mysteries
• Bruce Marshall: The World, The Flesh, and Father Smith
• Lassie Come-Home by Eric Knight
• James Herriot: All Creatures Great and Small series
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• Charles Dickens

best books I read in 2008

*I've affixed asterisks to the best titles.*

Mysteries: These were good but not great. I'm still looking for a great new mystery author, and have high hopes for Donald Westlake.
Elizabeth Ironside: Death in the Garden and The Accomplice
Barbara Vine: Anna's Book
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses

Sea books: Patrick O'Brian is the best, followed by CS Forester. Ramage will suffice if you need a fix of salt air and a couple of broadsides.
Dudley Pope: Ramage series
Nordhoff and Hall: Mutiny on the Bounty

Classics:
CS Lewis: Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters*
Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda and sequel

Best-kept secret:
Louis Hemon: Maria Chapdelaine*

Baseball:
Rind Lardner: You Know Me Al*

Politics:
Mark Steyn: America Alone*

Parenting:
Neufeld and Mata: Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers*
Robert Karen: Becoming Attached*

donald westlake

The next book I read will be by Mr. Westlake. He wrote comic mysteries as well as hard-boiled detective fiction.

(Photo: Louis Lanzano - AP)

From the Corner:

Donald Westlake R.I.P. [Mark Hemingway]

One of the best crime/mystery writers around just passed away. The work of the prolific Westlake, also wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, was the subject of numerous Hollywood adaptions including the influential Point Blank with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson (the more recent Mel Gibson vehicle Payback was based on the same classic Stark novel), the underrated Robert Redford heist movie The Hot Rock and others. I don't know if Westlake was a conservative, but he was a favorite author of Bill Kristol and once wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard, FWIW.

UPDATE: Terry Teachout, critic par excellence, was a fan of Westlake and has a nice remembrance here.

01/01 08:58 PM

Don't miss the Teachout remembrance mentioned above.

From the Post:

Westlake wrote more than 90 books, mostly on a typewriter. Aside from his own name, he also used several pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West, in part because people didn't believe he could write so much so quickly.

The print-version of the Post ran a longer and better article. In it, Westlake is called "the funniest man in the world" by Carolyn See. Patricia Sullivan writes, "As Richard Stark he produced the leanest, bleakest and fastest-moving crime novels of the 1960's."

I know that when I check, I'll find that my husband has already gone online and reserved some Westlake books for us from the library. :) Thanks!

the screwtape letters

by CS Lewis















I read this classic about 25 years ago, long enough to forget everything about it except that it deserves its reputation.

Here's an excerpt on the gift of free will:

"Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve." (from chapter 8)

the death of the heart

by Elizabeth Bowen

Tried and failed to read this. Not my cuppa at all. Too psychological?

the case of the gilded fly

by Edmund Crispin

Well, I finished The Case of the Gilded Fly. If I had been in a better frame of mind, I might have enjoyed it more. I was more or less obsessed with the presidential election while reading it, and I was impatient with the erudite and mannered Oxford characters, and the quirky Gervase Fen. Once again, I was left cold by the characters. This happens to me so often, I'm beginning to wonder if the fault lies in myself.

I do think it would be worthwhile to try more books by this author. I did love the writing, especially the beginning passages I mentioned earlier.

finished knots and crosses, started the case of the gilded fly

Knots and Crosses was pretty good, especially if you like the deranged-serial-killer-with- past-personal-link-to-detective genre. I'm going to try another one. They're not the refined type of British, or in this case, Scottish (or is it Scotch?) mystery, but more down and dirty. But our policeman, Sgt. Rebus, is different and kinda believable.

Meanwhile, I've started The Case of the Gilded Fly. Very British. Written in 1954, set in 1940 in Oxford. Characters are sophisticated and nasty (some of them, anyway). I loved the beginning - wonderful writing about a train slowly, maddeningly arriving at Oxford station. Also great writing about our sleuth, a professor of English who is an amateur policeman, close pal of a policeman who's an amateur literary critic. I'll try to post a couple of excerpts.

This book has a theater context. That's a negative for me; I find the whole theater thing wearisome, even when it's presented in a critical light. But I'll continue.

knots and crosses

by Ian Rankin

I'm reading the first book in the John Rebus series. Set in Edinborough. Sgt. Rebus is after a serial killer. Shades of Inspector Morse, mostly in that the protagonist drinks and smokes to excess, and has various other personal problems. Really quite different from Morse, though. Rebus does more police "grunt work" than Morse ever did.

I'm not too far into it, but so far it's quite good. Rankin is a skilled writer, and not prone to the political or cultural correctness so typical of recent mystery writers.

Follow-up post here.

becoming attached

Finally finished Becoming Attached by Robert Karen. Highly recommended for parents. But long -- 400 pages.

The author makes a potentially heavy, tedious subject more interesting by fleshing out the personalities of the various psychologists and analysts whose stories he is telling. Actually, their personalities are relevant to the the subject, which is the history and nature of attachment theory told within the history of child psychology.

It's a lot better than it sounds -- honest!

If you read it along with Hold On to Your Kids by Neufeld and Mata, you'll be as prepared as anyone can be to become a parent.