{"id":273,"date":"2004-07-24T23:04:50","date_gmt":"2004-07-25T03:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=273"},"modified":"2004-07-24T23:04:50","modified_gmt":"2004-07-25T03:04:50","slug":"westlake_donald_6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2004\/07\/westlake_donald_6\/","title":{"rendered":"Westlake, Donald E.: (09) What’s the Worst That Could Happen?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>So [after reading The Road to Ruin<\/cite><\/a>], in search of a Dortmunder plot, I went back to one of my very favorite Dortmunders, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?<\/cite><\/strong>. As far as I’m concerned, this is very nearly perfection: it has a lovely packed plot (Dortmunder gets caught by a rich householder who steals a ring off his hand, Dortmunder pulls several jobs trying to get it back), great observations about New York and D.C. and Las Vegas, and the highest density of favorite lines of probably any of the books. For instance, I’ve been known to cite this passage as a remarkably accurate description of the drive to D.C.:<\/p>\n

\n

Two hundred fifty miles between New York City and Washington, DC, give or take a wide curve or two. Through the Holland Tunnel and then New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey Del Maryland Maryland Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Maryland lunch Maryland outskirts of Washington outskirts of Washington outskirts of Washington, and now it was up to Anne Marie to be the harbor pilot who would steer them to their berth.<\/p>\n

They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide grassy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the same<\/em> pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the goddam green hills were still<\/em> there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road’s design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock falls mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or there’s the hit musical of the bad guy’s company:<\/p>\n

\n

As for that show, it was Desdemona!<\/cite>, the feminist musical version of the world-famous love story, slightly altered for the modern American taste (everybody lives). Hit songs from the show included “Oh, Tell, Othello, Oh, Tell,” and “Iago, My Best Friend” and the foot-stomping finale, “Here’s<\/em> the Handkerchief!”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or the line that just sums up Dortmunder perfectly:<\/p>\n

\n

“Good news,” Dortmunder said, with some surprise, as another person might say, Look! A unicorn!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is an interesting contrast with Road to Ruin<\/cite> in another sense, as they both have crooked rich guys as Dortmunder’s targets, but the one in Road to Ruin<\/cite> is far less likeable. I’m not sure if this was a result of the shifting public perception of CEOs (as one character says, “every white-haired man in America that owns a suit has testified in front of Congress”), or just of a feeling that the time had come ’round again for a nastier antagonist.<\/p>\n

I’d like to think that What’s the Worst That Could Happen?<\/cite> is not necessarily the pinnacle of the Dortmunder series, but as Westlake has just turned seventy-one, it may be time to start ramping my expectations of future books down. It’s much to Westlake’s credit that he hasn’t succumbed to the Brain Eater far earlier, as some other authors have, and of course he may never do so, but expect the worst while hoping for the best and all that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So [after reading The Road to Ruin], in search of a Dortmunder plot, I went back to one of my very favorite Dortmunders, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?. As far as I’m concerned, this is very nearly perfection: it has a lovely packed plot (Dortmunder gets caught by a rich householder who steals a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Westlake, Donald E.: (09) What’s the Worst That Could Happen?”<\/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-273","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\/273","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=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}