Thank goodness for Donald E. Westlake.
Friday morning, I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at my bookshelves. I just didn’t feel like reading anything I had. Finally, my eye lit on Good Behavior, which was sitting off to the side. With a sigh of relief, I swooped down upon it and then sped out the door to work.
I’d re-read Good Behavior within the last six months or so, but Westlake is almost infinitely re-readable, particularly his Dortmunder books. To paraphrase the opening of the most recent, Bad News, Dortmunder is a man upon whom the sun only shines when he needs darkness. Good Behavior opens with him dangling from the rafters of a convent after a burglary gone awry; the nuns look upon him as proof of divine intervention, as their newest member has been kidnapped by her father (who’s trying to deprogram her out of the Catholic Church). If only Dortmunder will get her back—from the seventy-sixth floor penthouse of an office building with very tight security—then they won’t tell the cops about his nocturnal activities.
These books are consistently entertaining, witty, and smoothly plotted. I particularly like Good Behavior, because, well, how can you not like a caper with nuns? The only small flaw on this re-read is that my paperback reprint had been subjected to a copyeditor with no sense of humor: when Dortmunder is given the way to pull off the caper, in the Mother Superior’s office, he says, “Let us prey,” not “Let us pray.” It was still perfect subway and before-bed reading, though, and I highly recommend the Dortmunder books to just about anyone. (Do ignore the movies, though; as far as I can tell, the movie What’s the Worst that Could Happen? has precisely three things in common with the book: the title, the ring, and some of the names. The book is hysterical.)