{"id":541,"date":"2007-09-21T21:53:42","date_gmt":"2007-09-21T21:53:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=541"},"modified":"2024-02-05T21:18:11","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T02:18:11","slug":"westlake_funny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2007\/09\/westlake_funny\/","title":{"rendered":"Westlake, Donald E.: (14) <cite>What&#8217;s So Funny?<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A quick catch-up post: <strong><cite>What&#8217;s So Funny?<\/cite> is Donald E. Westlake&#8217;s most recent Dortmunder novel<\/strong>, which is not longer that recent because this post got stuck behind quite a lot of other things.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t a great Dortmunder book, but it isn&#8217;t a brain-eaten one, either. An ex-cop blackmails Dortmunder into &#8220;retrieving&#8221; a very fancy, very heavy chess set currently locked in a bank vault while various rich people fight over it. Though it&#8217;s not action-packed, it has a particularly excellent Dortmunder moment late in the book, good contributions from the two newest recurring characters, and a portrait of life in a big law firm whose accuracy I can&#8217;t vouch for but that I enjoyed in a schadenfreude kind of way. Add in Westlake&#8217;s usual sentence-level craft, and I&#8217;m a satisfied reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A quick catch-up post: What&#8217;s So Funny? is Donald E. Westlake&#8217;s most recent Dortmunder novel, which is not longer that recent because this post got stuck behind quite a lot of other things. This isn&#8217;t a great Dortmunder book, but it isn&#8217;t a brain-eaten one, either. An ex-cop blackmails Dortmunder into &#8220;retrieving&#8221; a very fancy, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2007\/09\/westlake_funny\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Westlake, Donald E.: (14) <cite>What&#8217;s So Funny?<\/cite>&#8220;<\/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-541","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\/541","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=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2790,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/2790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}