{"id":12,"date":"2001-08-12T10:51:34","date_gmt":"2001-08-12T14:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=12"},"modified":"2001-08-12T10:51:34","modified_gmt":"2001-08-12T14:51:34","slug":"westlake_donald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/08\/westlake_donald\/","title":{"rendered":"Westlake, Donald E.: (06) Good Behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"5046345\"><\/a> <a name=\"link_5046345\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Thank goodness for Donald E. Westlake.<\/p>\n<p>Friday morning, I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at my bookshelves. I just didn&#8217;t feel like reading <em>anything<\/em> I had. Finally, my eye lit on <strong><cite>Good Behavior<\/cite><\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d re-read <cite>Good Behavior<\/cite> 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, <cite>Bad News<\/cite>, Dortmunder is a man upon whom the sun only shines when he needs darkness. <cite>Good Behavior<\/cite> 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&#8217;s trying to deprogram her out of the Catholic Church). If only Dortmunder will get her back&#8212;from the seventy-sixth floor penthouse of an office building with <em>very<\/em> tight security&#8212;then they won&#8217;t tell the cops about his nocturnal activities.<\/p>\n<p>These books are consistently entertaining, witty, and smoothly plotted. I particularly like <cite>Good Behavior<\/cite>, 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&#8217;s office, he says, &#8220;Let us prey,&#8221; <em>not<\/em> &#8220;Let us pray.&#8221; 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 <cite>What&#8217;s the Worst that Could Happen?<\/cite> has precisely three things in common with the book: the title, the ring, and some of the names. The <em>book<\/em> is hysterical.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thank goodness for Donald E. Westlake. Friday morning, I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at my bookshelves. I just didn&#8217;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 &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/08\/westlake_donald\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Westlake, Donald E.: (06) Good Behavior&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,66,6],"tags":[433],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-dortmunder","category-mystery","tag-westlake-donald-e"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}