RAGNAR JONASSON'S DARKNESS: THE SHOTS INTERVIEW

This is the interview that ran in Shots magazine. I posted a link to that on 29 October, if you'd like to scroll back to IT for that day you can read my introduction to it. I also reviewed the book back in March, and you can link to that review here. Otherwise, here's my first version of the Shots interview (there were a few small changes in the web version....

Ragnar Jonasson's most recent novel, The Darkness, was so impressive that I worked on arranging an interview from the moment I knew I was visiting Iceland. We met at his office, in a handsome but unimposing house just off the centre of Reykjavik. Inside, it's been converted into a slick modern headquarters for an international investment firm, for whom Jonasson is a lawyer in his day job. This was a pleasant Icelandic summer day in August, some sunshine, temperature in the high teens celsius. It had been a bit colder wetter and more rainy that morning, when my son and I went out of Reykjavik harbour on a whale watch, to which the whales themselves were not as accommodating as the crime writer.

Of course in Iceland when you have a day job, the days are very long in summer and very short in winter. Which is why my first question was how he managed to balance his high-powered day job with his steady output of novels. The interview has been edited slightly to avoid spoilers, given that the finish of The Darkness is so powerful.

RJ: I write every night in the winter, which gives me enough time to finish a novel. It's like a hobby, like some people go hiking, or watch TV. I plan one book a year, and in Iceland the big publishing date falls before Christmas, because books are a traditional Christmas present here. Sometimes I'm tempted to do more, but I really like being a lawyer, and if I did have more time free, much of it would likely be spent marketing my books, not necessarily writing more.

MC: You started writing professionally at a very young age, translating Agatha Christie. How did that come about?

RJ: I needed a job for the summer! Christie had been well-translated into Iceland, but I discovered there were quite a few works still out there, and I liked them. I starting translating short stories for magazines, and did it for 10-15 years, again like a hobby. Then the crime-writers who came before me started to make Icelandic crime a lively genre and proved it could be done. So Icelandic readers learned to like crime fiction, but it needed to be a believable story when you're set in a small country where there aren't as many crimes.

MC: Indridason, for example?

RJ: Yes, of course, and it was very interesting how he began by using a situation which depends on Iceland's being an unusual country.

MC: What drew you to Christie specifically? Because your 'Dark Iceland' series is very much in the Christie tradition.

RJ: I love the classic set-up, a limited number of suspects, but you have to do something with it—it would look awkward if you copied the settings and characters.

MC: But there are similarities in the societies, from what I've seen.

RJ: Iceland is a very closed and stratified society, which is more obvious in small communities, which is part of why I set the series in the north. It's about a close community, nature and the landscape, and the weather. I'm blessed with having this strange country to work with.

MC: Having just looked at the old law site at Pingvellur, I wonder if it's a judgemental society too?

RJ: Certainly in the old days. I'm not so sure it's still like that, because people do try to stick together.

MC: You see some tension in your characters, the way Ari Thor is relatively simple and straightforward, somewhat traditional, where his girlfriend Kristin is more modern in many ways.

RJ: Ari is a bit shy, with a sort of closed-off life and personality, like many Icelanders are,

so his personal life can have problems. But the crimes he investigates are the kinds where that personality allows him some leeway in getting to the solutions.

The Darkness features a new detective for Jonasson, Hulda Hermansdottir. She is a dedicated, hard-working, old-fashioned kind of cop, who has been passed over for promotions partly because she is a woman and partly because that doggedness doesn't always fit in, when she won't play the office political game. Now she is being pressed into unwanted early retirement, and to get her out of the way, she's offered one last cold case to choose to investigate. It involves the death of a young Russian woman, found on the coast, and ruled suicide. But that doesn't sound right to Hulda...

MC: I heard you interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Front Row (full disclosure: a programme to which I am an occasional contributor) a few months ago after The Darkness was published in hardback, and although it was an interesting discussion of reading and publishing in Iceland, I was shocked because they never once asked you about your novel!

RJ: Well, I was very happy to talk about my country, and we are a very literate society. But yes, to talk about my book would have been nice.

MC: I thought The Darkness was one of the very best novels crime novels I read this year, and what I particularly liked was the way it ends. I had the same sort of 'you can't do THAT!” reaction I had when I read Joe Gores' Interface: you've played with the genre's conventions brilliantly.

RJ: Thank you! That was both deliberate but also how the story itself grew. I had an idea I could work backwards, because I knew from the start it was the only way I could end the book. I know the ending may come as a surprise, in fact I expected it, but it was really the only logical way it could end. It was so powerful. The reaction in Iceland wasn't so risky, because you can do more because the crime-writing tradition has been going only a short time. But outside Iceland it was more of a challenge to break the rules, so to speak, but it was a challenge I had to take.

MC: Especially because your earlier books are so relatively traditional?

RJ: You really do want to challenge the form. You know the rules, and you want to break them in your own way. That was always my intention.

MC: And it is somewhat judgemental.

RJ: Yes, there is a price to pay in the end. You cannot go back. Back in the early centuries of this state there was no police. Which sometimes means individuals feel they have no choice but to act.

MC: You establish a great deal of sympathy for Hulda.

RJ: Which made many readers almost angry at the way the story progressed. They liked her, and I loved that reaction. But I'm working on two more novels featuring Hulda, which go back into her early career.

MC: How do you work The Darkness into that?

RJ: They won't give away the twists of The Darkness, but I think to those who've read the first book, it will provide added value to understand that. A deeper meaning, if you will. And I've started the next Dark Iceland novel. I already knew the plot for that one.

MC: It will keep you busy.

RJ: I wouldn't feel comfortable any other way!

Ragnar needed to get back to work, as calls were literally lining up while we spoke in the conference room, but before he did I told him I particularly loved the very last scene of The Darkness, a coda of sorts which is seeped in a kind of polite authoritarian hypocrisy, but also reminds us of how, even in a small, closed society, we may know very little about each other. He thanked me, and I thanked him for his time. Two days later, as my plane left Iceland I looked back at the island and thought just how powerfully and subtly Jonasson had interpreted his society. And how unexpectedly.

The Darkness, translated by Victoria Cribb, is out in paperback from Michael Joseph.

RAGNAR JONASSON'S THE DARKNESS

Hulda Hermannsdottir is approaching her retirement from the Reykjavik police. She's just cracked a hit and run, where the victim was a child-molester, and she has decided to leave the case unsolved. At the same time, she is called into her boss' office, and told to take her retirement early, immediately, in fact, and to clear her office for another in a long series of up-and-coming younger men who passed her by during her long career.

As slight recompense, Hulda gets her boss' agreement to work one last case, and chooses the death of a Russian asylum-seeker which had been written off a year earlier as suicide or accident by one of her colleagues. It doesn't take Hulda, who is a methodical, dedicated worker, to uncover evidence that the death may have been a murder.

At first, the impressive thing about The Darkness is the way Hulda fits into that popular stereotype of the depressive Nordic detective. Hard-working, team-playing and alone since the death of her husband to a sudden heart attack aged 52, Hulda has little in the way of a life outside her job: she walks and climbs in the countryside, but gave up the family home by the shore and now lives in a faceless high-rise in Reykjavik itself.

But as the story progresses, and we begin to see more of the original crime, we also learn more about Hulda's own story: born illegitimate, her father a nameless American solider who disappeared back to States, her mother forced to live in a certain shame by the tight boundaries of Icelandic society. If we thought of Hulda as typical of a certain kind of detective, we see too that she is a product of a society which in many ways has changed, but whose emotional bounds were set pretty strongly generations before. And now she is one of those older Icelanders who discover they are easily pushed aside, easily disappeared.

In fact, Jonasson's two stories move almost in parallel, the the mystery of Hulda herself is in many ways as gripping as the search for a killer in a murder no one but Hulda believes happened. Jonasson tells the killer's story from a separate point of view, and because of this, the sharp-eyed reader will know long before Hulda who the killer must be. Even so, the 'solution' to the crime comes as a sharp twist in the tale, one which plays against the reader's expectations. Were the story left there, it would resonate strongly. But in an epilogue of understated brilliance, Jonasson turns the entire story around on itself, and puts Hulda right back where she started, a victim, of sorts, of society's preconceptions.

Jonasson, whose first novels were more traditional mysteries set in small-town Iceland, a setting which became well-known in similarly-set popular series Trapped, has moved into different territory with The Darkness. The book is billed as the first of a 'Hidden Iceland' trilogy, and the hidden Iceland it traverses is the country of the mind. The Darkness builds to an absolutely moving ending, haunting and sobering. And it plays with and shatters the expectations of the genre like no novel I can recall since Joe Gores' classic Interface, which is high praise indeed. It's a bravura piece of writing, and The Darkness may be the most unsettling, lasting and best, crime novel you'll read this year.

The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson
Penguin: Michael Joseph, £12.99, ISBN 9780718187248

JOE GORES: THE TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

My obituary of Joe Gores, one of my favourite crime writers, is in today's Daily Telegraph, unbylined as is their custom; you can link to it here. Gores was a friend of my friend John Basinger; they had been together in Kenya when Gores was teaching there, and speaking with John recently he said he and a third common friend from those days had been able to get together on the phone not so long ago. Despite his illness, John said; Joe was bothered only by the fact that his illness was making it difficult for him to write; he was one of those old pulp-magazine style pros who looked at writing as a daily job, not a grind, but something that rewarded the persistent hard work that went into it. I think his writing shows it, not just in his understanding of the markets to which he sold, and the readers for whom he wrote, but his deep understanding of the genre in which he worked. His body of work, including the classic DKA series, is impressive enough, but he hit an amazing peak in the mid-1970s, with his back to back masterpieces Interface (see my essay on that book here) and Hammett, which to my mind ensure his place among the all-time greats.

JOE GORES' SPADE AND ARCHER

It was 35 years ago that Joe Gores published Hammett, a brilliant novel in which Dashiell Hammett turned detective, though turn isn't quite the right word, since he was a real detective before becoming a great writer, a career path followed by Gores himself. This was his second classic in two years, because the year before, 1974, Gores' had published Interface, an absolutely crucial hard-boiled work, about which I've written before (you can link to that here). Now Gores revisits Hammett with Spade & Archer, a prequel to The Maltese Falcon. It grows out of Gores' intimate knowledge of both Hammett and the pulp era, which is both its strength and its weakness. 

Almost everything about the novel rings true, whether you're referring to the original Maltese Falcon Hammett wrote, or the third, and most famous, of its film adaptations. The beauty of John Huston's film is not only that he stayed faithful to the novel, using large chunks of the book's dialogue virtually verbatim, but that the casting was so true to the book's portrayal of the characters. we now see Bogart as Spade, Mary Astor as Bridget O'Shaugnessy, Sidney Greenstreet as Gutman, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Ward Bond as Tom Polhaus, right the way through the film. Gores has to keep this in mind, while still fleshing out his characters with backstory, and, for the most part it works. 

 He finds it hard to match Lee Patrick's Effie; she's a bit more mature and one of the guys in the film than in Gores' version, and he has a bigger difficulty with Miles Archer and his wife Iva. Although he builds their backstory with Spade, and his characterisation of Archer is good, in Gores' version the partnership is new at the point it is about to get dissolved; my impression is always that Spade and Archer have coexisted longer as partners. Gores' version does give an even bigger resonance to the moral position we know Spade will later take, when a man's partner is killed, especially, and something the movie invites you to forget at the end, when you have been screwing his wife, and that may be why he plays it that way. But the case which shows Archer's colours to Spade, and to us, is a beautiful set-up of all the things Hammett was concerned about, union-busting, the power of owners, and the use of detectives to help them, and it sets both Spade and Archer's characters firmly. Gores' portrayals of visits to Chinatown, Spade's relationship with the police, and Nob Hill toffs are all spot-on, the feel of the pulp magazines permeates them. 

This is the other slight problem with the novel, in that the story resolves itself much like one of Hammett's classic Black Mask tales. We tend to forget that, although we think of Hammett in hard-boiled terms, those stories had large elements of traditional 'who-dun-it' mysteries and pulp adventure stories about them. Hence, Gores' main villain spends most of the novel offstage, and is 'caught,' as it were, through a detective-story ploy, rather than the kind of climax we associate with hard-boiled pulp. As someone steeped in the period and the genre, I appreciated it, but I wonder if it might lack the punch some of the audience expected? Oddly, I wondered the same thing when I read the early, somewhat mixed, reviews when Spade & Archer was originally published in the States. As I say, it was more than enough for me. A novel that's well-written in modern terms, yet true to its period roots, that draws on the characters we know but builds on them, and that sets its story in a world that's both exotic and recognisable; I don't know what more you can ask for in a book like this. I think it works better than Robert B Parker's Chandler sequel, Perchance To Dream, and it's yet another reminder that Joe Gores is indeed an overlooked master of the detective story.

JOE GORES' INTERFACE A Forgotten Friday (the 13th) Entry

It's hard to call Joe Gores' Interface a 'forgotten' book, especially since it was re-issued in 2004, thirty years after it first appeared, in Orion's 'Crime Masterworks' series. But it's worth looking at again, especially because Gores followed it up in 1975 with Hammett, another great novel, which became a fine, if flawed film, and now of course has a new novel out in the US, Spade & Archer, a knowing prequel of sorts to The Maltese Falcon. It hasn't been announced in this country yet, so I haven't seen it, though I have seen some mixed reviews, which have led to me think it isn't perhaps as hard-boiled as one might've thought it might be.

I say that because I think Interface was, arguably along with George V Higgins' debut The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, the most important crime novel of the 1970s. Where Higgins was looking forward, in the sense he was working out a style that no one in the genre had used before, and which he would refine to the point of brilliance, Gores looked back, producing a novel that probably was the greatest take on the idea of hard-boiled detectives anyone had attempted to that point, and probably greater than any de-construction of the genre since. Apotheosis is a word often used without justification, but to me, Interface is the apotheosis of the hard-boiled novel.

Gores was breaking ground pretty consistently back then. His 1969 novel, A Time Of Predators, anticipated Death Wish by a few years, although it's closer to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, one of his two most misunderstood movies (The Getaway being the other, and for many of the same reasons) although I haven't read The Siege Of Trencher's Farm, the source novel for the film, it came out the same year, so neither was presumably an influence on the other. His DKA series was, in essence, police procedural set in a detective agency, specializing in skip tracing: long before Alex Cox's film. He was one of, if not the first, writers to emphasize the mundanity of routine private investigations, something that would be followed by any number of private eye writers. He'd also played around in the DKA novels, including a cameo appearance by Richard Stark's Parker, a gesture returned by Donald Westlake in a novel of his own.

I mention Parker, because Gores dedicated Interface to Parker, 'that Stark villain...because he's such a beautiful human being.' And that's quite a big clue into the business of Interface, because the crook in that story, called Docker, is Parker with a slight limp, and the nominal hero, Neil Fargo is as bent a private eye as you've ever seen. The book begins with Docker killing two men and stealing drugs for which he was supposed to be the bag man, limping away with both money and heroin. Docker was a Vietnam buddy of Fargo's and Fargo has brought him in, acting as middleman between a local dealer, Kolinsky and an importer, Harriss. Kolinsky keeps a junkie mistress, called Robin, who's given up on life, and she knows Docker, and Fargo is looking for her, because she's actually Roberta Stayton, an heiress whose father pays Fargo for the search.

It's not a pretty story, and it's not told in pretty terms: in fact it seems of a piece with all those grimy looking early 1970s crime movies, the dark and grimy side of the bright New Frontier, when the veneer of society's civilising structures had been removed from the ever-present underworld. It's a novel about failed dreams, and about obligations to the past; a novel about the ruin of Vietnam and the sonambulant world of drugs. Most of all, it's about what being a private detective is all about. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has a line about not really being as crooked as he's supposed to be, and of course he has responsibilities he cannot escape, lines he will not let himself cross. The same is true in this book, which spends 200 pages deconstructing everything about a private eye you're supposed to believe, and then putting it back together with one twist that turns it all on its head. I loved the novel when I read it for the first time, and it is so well-done I was still caught by its twist when I re-read it thirty years later. Joe Gores has always been the real deal, and this is the most real of all his books. It's a classic, it's one of the all-time greats. Over the years I've handed out a number of copies of the book to friends; it's the kind of book you want everyone who loves the detective novel to read.

Interface by Joe Gores 1974
Orion Crime Masterworks edition, 2004 £6.99
ISBN 0752851888

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME! GUARDIAN/OBSERVER 1000 NOVELS EVERYONE MUST READ: CRIME

The second chapter in the Guardian/Observer's '1000 Novels Everyone Must Read' was titled 'Crime', but anyone looking for a coherent best of the genre would be disappointed. Of course such lists exist to attract attention, if not controversy, and this one was specifically designed to rise above the usual suspects, such as the 50 best crime novels chosen by the Times back in April (see it here) or the Telegraph's last February (here). It's somewhat harder to pick apart than those were (see, for example, Mike Stotter at Shots here on how difficult it is to know where to start) but there are some egregious omissions--and inclusions-- by any standards.

Having said that, it is important to note that the list was introduced with a tortured attempt to define their goals, a Mission Statement which, using prose George Bush might envy, detailed an attempt 'to reflect as much of the spectrum as possible, as well as the regularity with which literary novelists have made evildoers their theme. The difference? The latter break genre rules, typically eliminating the hero who solves or prevents crime. And they usually write more stylishly; but the recent rise of the literary crime fiction epitomised by PD James has made that distinction less clear.'

Oh really.

This at least explains why Carrie O'Grady is such a treasured crime reviewer for the paper; her review of Fred Vargas, which was so amazingly wrong-headed it prompted an entire essay: 'The Guardian's Telegraph Crossword Theory of Crime Fiction', which you can find linked in the 'Bullseyes' section at the right, or here, made exactly the same sort of myopic distinction, with same sort of celebration of the epitome of 'literary' crime fiction ignoring some seven decades of writing. O'Grady features prominently in writing the entries here; you might not share her sense of the importance of Michael Innes's 'impish glee', but it helps explain why Anthony Berkley is a 'master of the genre' and Donald Westlake doesn't appear, in any of his guises, as if Richard Stark's writing didn't mark a revolution of crime style.

Yet even within their own parameters, the G/O can't achieve any consistency; not least because rather than reflect as much of the spectrum as possible, they tended, by choosing multiple books by favoured writers, to narrow that spectrum considerably. For example, five books by Ruth Rendell, none by, say, Margaret Millar, or Kate Wilhelm, or Laura Lippman's Every Secret Thing, if they want something recent. Colin Dexter has two books included, one because, according to Ms. O'Grady 'the Jag, the jokes, the crosswords...it's all here' (the crosswords?!) but where is John Harvey? Michael Dibdin gets his own section written by Mark Lawson, in which four books are chosen, perhaps these were the books Mark must read before he dies. Guardian reviewer Matthew Lewin gets to provide a sidebar on 'modern hardboiled crime', but the selections are only two of James Lee Burke southern gothics, and two by James Ellroy: yes, LA Confidential is a must, but why The Big Nowhere rather than the more crucial Black Dahlia or the more manic White Jazz? Why not the amazing American Tabloid, the start of the still unfinished American Underworld trilogy? Indeed why not a Lloyd Hopkins novel or even Ellroy's startling debut, Brown's Requiem? And in modern hardboiled crime, where is Michael Connelly?

Or, for that matter, Joe Gores, whose DKA novels are the most real of non-police procedurals, whose Hammett became a film (see below) and opened a sub-genre for writers as detectives, and whose Interface is the most serious bending of the hard-boiled detective hero that anyone has done before or since (you can find my essay on it here).

The selections also seem overly influenced by film (or TV) adaptations, and not just because they need art to decorate the section, and they must believe film stills work better than book covers, but also because films are a short cut to a writer's work (and reputation). Even so, is 'Get Shorty' really the Elmore Leonard you'd feel everyone 'must' read? Why The Manchurian Candidate and not Winter Kills? On the other hand, Jim Thompson gives you The Grifters and Coup de Torchon, as well as Peckinpah's excellent The Getaway (and its insipid remake). And yes, in this case, a still of a soaked Ali MacGraw may well make a better illo than the cover of Thompson's book.

In spy fiction are 'Tinker, Tailor' and 'Constant Gardener' really more essential reads than 'The Honourable Schoolboy'? Those two are listed among the choices, while the more crucial 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' is included as part of an essay, The Best Spy Fiction, by Henry Porter (at least one of whose books, Empire State, deserves mention) which includes only two other candidates, both by Eric Ambler. On the main list are three James Bonds (all by Ian Fleming; I'm amazed they could resist including Kingsley Amis or Sebastian Faulks) but none of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helms. And is there really no place at all for the spy fiction of Robert Littell, Charles McCarry, Alan Furst, Paul Hennisart, or, indeed, Norman Mailer?

Mailer? Well, I say this because the list also includes two of Thomas Pynchon's novels. The Crying Of Lot 49 was a clever choice, but V, which was my favourite book when I was 17, and still is one of them now, is more of a stretch. John Dugdale does point out that, in V Pynchon pardies the John Buchan/Erskine Childers--both included in the Guardian's list-- thriller, but V is a novel filled with literary parody, not a crime novel itself.

Mailer wrote a huge spy novel, Harlot's Ghost which holds up very well, and to which the promised sequel remains unwritten. He also wrote a parody hardboiled, Tough Guys Don't Dance. There's murder at the heart of An American Dream, my own favourite of his novels, and of course there's The Executioner's Song, probably his best book, which is a non-fiction novel and certainly more rewarding for you to read than most of the books on this list.

I mention Mailer also because a very erratic group of 'literary' works are shoe-horned in, the likes of Ian McEwan, Patrick Susskind, Sarah Waters, Brett Easton Ellis, and Donna Tartt (someone must've loved that Bennington/Manhattan circle 15 years ago!). These are the literary lights who 'with regularity make evildoers their theme', yet nothing included by any of them holds a candle to An American Dream, much less American Tabloid.

There are also a lot of classic novels, including Zola's Therese Raquin and Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo. I love the latter, (who doesn't) and I guess it has crime (perjury) at its core (as well as a great prison break), but its inclusion really opens the door to any number of adventure novels, and might best have been put into a supplement of books you have to read before you hit puberty. Genre seems to create some major stumbling blocks for the Guardian. Peter Carey's Kelly Gang is surely a western, even if it is set in the southern hemisphere, while both the Michael Crichton novels included are surely sf. Why them and not any other sf classics that involve crime, like Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (not that it's Dick's best, but it does have a detective, and it was made into a famous film by a British director). If you've got The Three Musketeers, why not Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination? Why not Crichton's Eaters Of The Dead?

The whys and why-nots were the decisions of a 'panel of experts' but the write-ups for the entries chosen were apparently then assigned elsewhere, so we can't blame those who wrote the entries. For example, I doubt anyone 'must read' James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish but I'll concede it does have some historical value here in Britain. As John Sutherland writes, Chase had studied Warner Bros. gangster movies, but perhaps he wasn't aware that the 'experts' had also chosen for this list William Faulkner's Sanctuary, which would make it worth his pointing out that Chase evidently studied Faulkner's book far more closely than any movie.

One can quibble too choices of books for the authors who were included; I'm not sure who'd choose Lush Life as the only Richard Price novel, or Sidetracked for Henning Mankell, but those quibbles aren't as important as asking why two Sara Paretsky and no David Goodis, two John Grishams and no Ross MacDonald, or why Jonathan Lethem but not Michael Chabon.

There are some positives. Nice to see George V Higgins, who surely qualifies for such a list even were it reduced to a dozen. Yes, Eddie Coyle was the one made into a movie, but it is still one of Higgins' very best. Good to see Sjowall and Wahloo remembered, even if one suspects they chose The Laughing Policeman because they don't know there's also a movie of The Man On The Roof! There's Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Pledge, recognition of his place within the pantheon. Among the literary choices is Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, for which John Mullan makes a good case. All of Hammett's four great novels are in, though someone (I'm assuming it wasn't Maxim Jakubowski, who wrote the entry, but one of the sub editors 'correcting' him) felt compelled to Anglicise it, transforming Red Harvest's setting of Personville (aka Poisonville) to Pentonville (!) Even the Continental Op might be amused by that one.

As I said, these lists exist to stir debate, prompt rants, and sell papers. But also, in this case, to educate the audience. And it is so heartening to learn that, thanks to PD James, crime fiction may someday attempt to rise to the literary heights of Perfume, Fingersmith, American Psycho, or The Secret History. Mission Accomplished!

POSTSCRIPT (24/1): It turned out that the Crime supplement was actually far more sensible than those that followed, whose categories, after Comedy (where the choices made Crime's look rational and comprehensive), grew increasingly more bizarre, like the oxymoronic Family and Self, State Of The Nation, and my favourite, War and Travel. The beauty of that one was that it allowed them to include Black Beauty, South Wind, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (which isn't a novel, and if we're including non ficton where's Dispatches?) and even The Mark Of Zorro (what, no Fu Manchu?), while excluding War And Peace. Think about it. The outre categories meant inclusion for most of Pynchon, which was a good thing, but among all the fashionable moderns and Guardian contributors, they found no room for anything by Richard Powers, in my mind the very best 'younger' novelist writing in English. And how CAN anyone discuss the self or the nation without reference to Philip K Dick?.

DONALD WESTLAKE: IN MEMORY OF A CON MAN

Note: You can also find this essay at Shotsmag Confidential, here. Shots (www.shotsmag.co uk), is where I write a monthly American Eye column. 

Most obituaries of Donald Westlake concentrated, rightly, on his prolific output, more than 100 novels and an equal number of short stories, as well as some exceptional screenplays. Westlake was one of the last of a dying breed, the generation which followed the great pulp magazine writers, and made their livings pounding out paperback originals on manual typewriters. For Westlake, the habit was so ingrained he never gave up his typewriters; he once explained to me that, although he stockpiled old machines to cannibalize for parts, the real difficulty was finding ribbons, which he went through at a prodigious rate.

I met Westlake a couple of times; the last was a wonderful lunch thrown by Quercus at Chez Elena in Charlotte Street, where Don and Abby were literally the life of the party. I started thinking how Donald Westlake was the antithesis of his Richard Stark alter ego, in much the same way that the Dortmunder books are a reflection in a fun house mirror of the Parker novels, and then it occurred to me that a central theme of Westlake's work has always been human frailty. His characters are done in, or nearly so, by their weaknesses, their foibles, and in his plots, which he basically made up as he went along, he lets his characters find their own ways through situations which usually have arisen from those flaws. They generally run up against people with more serious flaws, most commonly greed, and things accelerate from there. 'You never really know what you're doing,' he explained, and I think that applies to most of his characters too.

Even Parker, who wants to know, and control, everything. In fact, Parker is a successful professional thief precisely because he has none of those human failings, the reason for that being he has very little in the way of human feeling, especially in the first series (Parker redux is a somewhat kinder, gentler sociopath), and he takes advantage of, or takes revenge on, those who do have them.

Like many great comic writers, Westlake's humour had dark roots. The best comedians see the world as a noirish place, and find it funny. Westlake described the Parker books as growing out of an image he had of a man walking across the George Washington Bridge, the feeling of being an outsider he'd experienced himself coming to New York during a peripatetic youth. When he said that, it reminded me of the somewhat lost hero of Up Your Banners, a straightforward comic novel he wrote around the student protest movement in the late 1960s, and Westlake loved my reminding him of that. He made the connection to Parker himself, saying he'd introduced Grofield, the actor and part-time thief, to the Parker novels in order to have a little comic relief. Grofield spun off into a few books of his own, and at about the same time Westlake, as Tucker Coe, wrote five novels about the ex-cop Mitch Tobin, whose existential angst in expressed by his working on a wall in his backyard. It was as if Tobin were the antithesis of Grofield. Remember too that the opening of the Grofield novel Blackbird, with its failed armored car robbery, was used as the opening of the Parker novel Slayground which was also made into a British movie starring Peter Coyote, Robbie Coltrane, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite actress.

It's tempting to concentrate on the playfulness of Westlake's writing: how he and Joe Gores inserted their characters into each other's books, how Grofield pops up in The Hot Rock (still one of the great heist movies, and one of Robert Redford's best roles, with Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel stealing every scene they can from him) or how in Jimmy The Kid the Dortmunder gang use a fictional Parker novel, Child Heist, as the blueprint for their own kidnapping. It was while contemplating exactly how I was able to write the words 'fictional Parker novel' with a straight face that it finally occurred to me that what Donald Westlake actually was, what made him such a treasure as a writer. Westlake was a con man, a first-class con man, and we readers were the marks.

This is no great revelation. Go to Westlake's website and you're greeted with a quote 'I believe my subject is bewilderment' and then another one 'but I could be wrong'. He even wrote a novel called God Save The Mark, which won the first of his three Edgars. When he wrote an Arthur Hailey-parody paperback original, Comfort Station, as J. Morgan Cunningham, the book appeared with a blurb saying 'I wish I had written this book'. Signed Donald E Westlake!

Think about it. Westlake started out working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, writing critiques of manuscripts sent in, with a fee, by hopeful would-be writers from across America. Meredith found some great wordsmiths there. Evan Hunter, of course, like Westlake, would establish a second identity for a different sort of book. Lawrence Block would, like Westlake, move between hard-boiled and comic crime. This crowd included Brian Garfield and John Jakes, who would become best-sellers. All of them would write to order under multiple pseudonyms. Some, like Robert Silverberg, could turn out perfectly-typed one-draft manuscripts as quickly as they could type. These guys would play poker every week, and practice their con games. They even wrote one novel as a joint enterprise to help one of them out, one player sitting out and writing as chapter while the rest played on, then another sitting out, and so on.

Meredith, as their agent, would get them bulk contracts for paperback originals and contract the work out. This included a huge number of adult novels, of which Westlake claimed to have written 28, though others put the number at 39, or more. He used the name Alan Marshall (or Marsh) for most of them, wrote some with Block who was writing as Sheldon Lord, but also let other writers use the name to sell books published under imprints like Bedside, Nightstand, and the probably unintentionally punning Midwood. It was the same publisher who printed Jim Thompson's later novels, including The Grifters, for which screenplay Westlake won another Edgar, and an Oscar nomination. He described writing these books by doing exactly one chapter, fifteen pages a day, for ten days, and figured out that at $900 a pop, he was earning $22.50 an hour. In the Dortmunder novel Bank Shot (filmed with George C Scott lisping for reasons best-known to him) Kelp hits a car whose trunk is filled with adult novels, and all the titles Westlake lists as being visible are ones he wrote.

Westlake then wrote a very funny novel, Adios Scheherazade, about a man who writes porn, cashing in one more time on that genre which is probably the biggest con of all, when you think of con-men as giving the mark what he thinks he wants. I wonder if one of the reasons Westlake wasn't more successful in Hollywood was that those guys, the Hollywood machers, never really know what it is they want. At least not what they want from the people they now call 'content providers'. But you look at Westlake's best work, like the screenplay of The Grifters, or the original screenplay for The Stepfather, or his adaptation of his own novel Cops & Robbers, or the Hammett adaptation Fly Paper (despite some odd casting) for Showtime's Fallen Angels series, and you know that he knew what he wanted from a film, from a story. Or maybe it was because he simply liked sitting at the typewriter and being the master of his own destiny.

But I can't escape this sense of Westlake carrying on the con as the reader turns the pages, and I think that's why the Parker books are so special, and may remain the focus of critical attention on Westlake's career. Critics tend to value seriousness over humour, and Richard Stark's books were written with such a taut prose, especially considering the early Sixties milieu in which they first appeared, that they jumped out at you. He was performing that same con, keeping your attention focused, but with such economy that the story-telling was subsumed totally in the force of the story. I remember being transfixed by them when I discovered them, somewhat bizarrely, in the library at Dickinson College, where I found myself teaching. I've written at length for both Shots and Crime Time on the film adaptations of the Parker books; although Point Blank remains a classic film, and was Westlake's own favourite, I remain exceptionally fond of John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall the screen's best Parker (though, as in all the many adaptations, he was not called Parker). It is a small and perfectly formed crime film that deserves a higher reputation.

Westlake's reputation, on the other hand, has probably never been higher. The early Parker books are being reprinted by the University of Chicago, which says something about American academe as well as the quality of Westlake's writing. Those fabulously entertaining Sixties novels are re-appearing, and as for the early adult stuff, well, let's say university presses need not worry.

But anyone who knew Donald Westlake, even casually, was aware of how full of life he was. You imagine someone who writes seven days a week as being an introvert, but he was anything but. He died on New Year's Eve, as he and Abby were about to go out, and although that is tragic, I see something touching in the thought that he lived his life at a full pace until he just suddenly stopped.

Writers never die, of course, as long as they are being read. And I believe Donald Westlake will go on being read for a very long time. Readers love being conned, after all, and who could do it better?