Westlake, Donald E.: (01) The Hot Rock

I bought several caper movies on DVD recently, including the film adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock. (Discussion of the film itself is on my LiveJournal.) The movie, of course, prompted a re-read. This is the first of the Dortmunder comic crime novels, in which Dortmunder and the gang have just one goal: to steal an emerald. Unfortunately, with the kind of luck Dortmunder has, it requires them to pull off five or so different jobs, which steadily escalate in absurdity until you get moments like:

In his office on the opposite side of the building, Chief Administrator Doctor Panchard L. Whiskum sat at his desk, rereading the piece he’d just written for the American Journal of Applied Pan-Psychotherapy, entitled “Instances of Induced Hallucination among Staff Members of Mental Hospitals,” when a white-jacketed male nurse ran in shouting, “Doctor! There’s a locomotive in the garden!”

Doctor Whiskum looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He said, “Sit down, Foster. Let’s talk about it.”

plus everyone’s favorite catch-phrase, “Afghanistan banana stand.”

The big pleasures of these books are the characters, the sheer inventiveness, and the smooth plots. The small pleasures are the prose and the recurring gags, many of which I was pleased to spot all the way back at this first book, such as the C&I—Capitalists and Immigrants—Bank, and why Fred Lartz stopped driving (took a wrong turn into Kennedy Airport), and so forth.

If you like caper movies, deadpan humor that likes and respects its characters, or superbly crafted prose, you have absolutely no reason to avoid the Dortmunder books. About the only place you shouldn’t start is Drowned Hopes, which is atypically dark; otherwise, enjoy.

[And with that, I am caught up on the book log! Scroll down and down—I was only seven books behind . . . ]

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