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RecommendedBaby, Would I Lie? (1994)
Mysterious Press, 291 pages, $19.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-89296-532-0
Singer Ray Jones has his own theater on traffic-jam strip in Branson, Missouri, new center of country-and-western music. And Branson traffic is about to become even more congested than usual as reporters from everywhere pour in to cover Ray Jones's trial for the murder of a former employee. Among them are Sara Joslyn, girl reporter for New York City's Trend: The Magazine for the Way We Live This Instant, and her editor, Jack Ingersoll.
Sara is tickled pink to be the only reporter invited to join Ray Jones's entourage. While she covers the trial, Jack works on a parallel story about the unethical-not to mention illegal-methods used by the tabloid Weekly Galaxy to get the scoop on the trial. In the end Sara gets even more of a story than she bargained for when she discovers why good ol' boy Ray singled her out to be a member of his group.
Smoke
(1995)
Recommended
Mysterious Press, 454 pages, $21.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-89296-543-7,
Books on Tape: 3983
Freddie Noon is a twice-convicted thief in New York City. So when he's caught by Dr. David Loomis and Dr. Peter Heimhocker stealing electronic equipment from their research facility, he decides that becoming their experimental subject is better than the alternative: a third, and very long, stay in the slammer. Freddie takes both of the doctors' experimental formulas instead of just one and promptly becomes invisible-which, of course, makes it easy for him to escape.
This send-up of the tobacco industry is high comedy. The research that renders Freddie invisible is funded by the American Tobacco Research Institute in its continuing efforts "to come up with anything and everything that might help in the human race's battle against the scourge of cancer, except, of course, further evidence that might recommend the giving up of the smoking of cigarettes." And since an invisible man would make a wonderful spy, the race is soon underway by tobacco-company flunkies to find Freddie Noon.
As in most satire, a lot of the humor here derives from caricature. There's Mordon Leethe, the aging tobacco-company lawyer who's spent most of his life trying not to think about the implications of his work; Loomis and Heimhocker, who avoid thinking about the ethical implications of their research as long as the funding keeps rolling in; Barney Beuler, the crooked NYPD cop who manages to stay a step or two ahead of Internal Affairs while looking after his own interests; Jersey Josh Kuskiosko, the lecherous and double-crossing fence who gets his comeuppance, several times, from an invisible Freddie; and Jack Fullerton the Fourth, the tobacco empire CEO who's dying of emphysema but manages to light up a cigarette despite the oxygen tube in his nose. Finally, there's Jack Fullerton's successor, Merrill Fullerton, who has a brilliant plan to keep himself in business: "'We've spent the last forty years,' he said, 'trying to make cigarettes safe for the human race, and we've failed. We can spend the next forty years making the human race safe for cigarettes!'"
Once the reader grants the impossible premise-that a person could be made invisible-everything else follows logically and humorously. Loomis and Heimhocker, in their research involving skin pigmentation, have developed two separate formulas. They've experimented by giving each formula to one of their cats, and two translucent cats now wander around their building. The researchers know they need to do human testing, but they balk at using the formulas on themselves; after all, "how could a translucent scientist hope to be taken seriously in the medical journals?"
But what raises Smoke above the level of a mere comic romp is the developing relationship between the two main characters, Freddie and his girlfriend, Peg Briscoe. Peg freaks out-understandably-the first night that the invisible Freddie crawls into bed next to her. And it's not easy living with an invisible man-just think about it. You can never be sure where he is and whether he's watching you. (Peg can see Freddie only when he's fully clothed and wearing pink Playtex gloves and one of the masks-Freddie prefers Bart Simpson-Peg gets for him at a costume supplier.) And you can't do simple things that normal people do like go out to dinner together. But when Peg is in danger, Freddie, who could easily just disappear, puts himself at risk to rescue her. As Peg explains to Freddie's mother (and to the lurking Freddie) at book's end, "'It took me a while to adjust, but it's gonna be okay now. He came and helped me when I was in trouble, and he didn't have to, and I realize we need each other, we've got to be together.'"
The Ax (1997)
Mysterious Press, 273 pages, $23.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-89296-587-8
Most of the serial killers we meet in modern fiction are tortured souls, abused as children or tormented by multiple personalities. But what if an otherwise ordinary man made a perfectly logical decision to become a mass murderer?
Burke Devore, the protagonist of Donald E. Westlake's darkly comic novel The Ax, is that man. Middle-aged, with a daughter in college and a son in high school, Devore has devoted most of his life to working his way up within the specialty paper industry. When his company merged with another and downsized, Devore and his colleagues became expendable. He's now been out of work for two years, and he's getting desperate. Faced with the realization that he's not anybody's top choice to fill a job vacancy, he develops a plan to kill off the competition.
I can't change the circumstances of the world I live in. This is the hand I've been dealt, and there's nothing I can do about it. All I can hope to do is play that hand better than anybody else. Whatever it takes.Inexperienced at murder, Devore bungles his way through shooting the first two competitors (and one man's wife as well who, unfortunately, gets in the way). He gets better at murder as he progresses, though, taking pride in his ability to devise clever and effective ways to eliminate the other job seekers without bringing suspicion upon himself.(p. 71)
I'm not a killer. I'm not a murderer, I never was, I don't want to be such a thing, soulless and ruthless and empty. That's not me. What I'm doing now I was forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders' logic, and the executives' logic, and the logic of the marketplace, and the logic of the workforce, and the logic of the millennium, and finally by my own logic.
Show me an alternative, and I'll take it. What I'm doing now is horrible, difficult, frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life.
(p. 129)
The novel ends with Devore getting ready to go interview for the job he's been shooting for all along. Let's hope he gets it.
For another unusual variation on the serial killer theme, see The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns.
The Hot Rock (1970)
Simon and Schuster, 249 pages, $5.95 hardcover, ISBN 671-20541-2,
Books on Tape 4063
The Hot Rock introduces John Archibald Dortmunder, the criminal you can't help but like. According to William L. DeAndrea in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, Westlake's "most successful comic novels, the Dortmunder series, grew directly from the grim Parker books" (p. 372). The comic Dortmunder is the obverse of the antihero Parker (who appears in novels published under the pseudonym Richard Stark).
Whenever a job (read "theft") opportunity presents itself, Dortmunder calls together his core group of friends. His chief allies are Andy Kelp, an ex-con who specializes in stealing cars, and Stan Murch, who drives the stolen cars. Kelp always steals cars with MD license plates because doctors know how to outfit themselves with luxury. Murch lives with his mother, a cab driver; for entertainment Stan and Mrs. Murch listen to records of sounds from the Indianapolis Speedway. Over the course of the Dortmunder series the reader comes to appreciate the recurring characters for their endearing qualities; they're a bunch of funny, lovable chums who just happen to be crooks.
In The Hot Rock Dortmunder is hired to steal a valuable gem, the Balabomo emerald. Possession of the emerald has become a bone of contention among two emerging African nations, and Major Iko, the U.N. ambassador from Talabwo, wants the priceless stone back for his country. The Dortmunder gang doesn't succeed in swiping the emerald on their first attempt, but they're willing to try again—and again, and again. Each succeeding attempt is more outlandish than the previous one, and the equipment Major Iko must supply becomes bigger and bigger.
No one outdoes Westlake in the comic caper novel. What's so amazing is how Westlake manages to outdo himself with each book in the series. While it's not necessary to read the series in order, doing so will enrich your enjoyment, as Westlake frequently refers to events that occurred earlier in Dortmunder's escapades.
Trust Me on This (1988)
Mysterious Press, 292 pages, $5.50 paperback, ISBN 0-445-40807-3
This send-up of tabloid journalism is the precursor to Baby, Would I Lie?. Young reporter Sara Joslyn has just lost her job when the small New England newspaper she worked for was bought out, then discontinued, by a giant corporation. With the lure of a huge salary, she goes to Florida to work for the Weekly Galaxy, the most notorious supermarket tabloid, whose stock in trade is alien abductions and entertainment-industry gossip.
On the way to work her first day at the Galaxy, Sara discovers a corpse in a Buick Riviera on the side of the highway. She begins to realize she's entered the nether world of journalism when no one at the Galaxy cares about her discovery. Was it a movie star's body, her editor, Jack Ingersoll, wants to know. "On what TV series does he appear?" Jack asks.
So Sara immerses herself in the kind of stories the Galaxy features: the staged birthday party for 100-year-old twins in a nursing home that must go on even though one of the twins dies the day before, the race for photos of a big TV star and his bride on their honeymoon.
Trust Me on This displays Westlake's comic genius at its best. Read it the next time you're in the mood for a laugh-out-loud funny book.
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