The American Comedy

PLATO, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, once defined man as a "featherless biped." His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others. So who’s right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle? I can think of only one living writer who might reconcile the two—and that’s Donald E. Westlake, the author of the best crime-caper stories ever written. Indeed, properly read, Westlake has already reconciled Plato and Aristotle in his stories, by showing us man as the animal who can laugh at himself, use speech to explode human pretensions, and thus reach toward civilization. Donald Westlake is not only our finest living comic mystery writer, but perhaps one of our finest living philosophers. The bookstores nowadays stock an endless number of comic mysteries, the best known by Lawrence Block, Carl Hiaasen, and Gregory McDonald. Amusing as these writers often are, it is an injustice to place Westlake in their company. He is an author of a wholly different rank. His true peers are such great American humorists as Mark Twain and Ring Lardner and such great American crime novelists as Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, and Raymond Chandler. You might not realize this if you go to see What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, currently showing in theaters. Starring Martin Lawrence as Westlake’s ill-starred thief (renamed from John Dortmunder to Kevin Caffrey), the film is the latest of Hollywood’s generally failed attempts to present Westlake’s crime capers—a series that includes Robert Redford in The Hot Rock (the best of a weak lot), George C. Scott in Bank Shot, Paul Le Mat in Jimmy the Kid, and Christopher Lambert in Why Me?

But you can’t miss Westlake’s skill in the recently published Bad News, the latest chapter in the comic saga of the inimitable John Archibald Dortmunder—master thief and American hero, a man whose bad luck is topped only (and barely) by his resourcefulness and determination. What’s more, The Hot Rock, the first Dortmunder adventure, has just been reissued in paperback with a new preface recounting the ambiguous genesis of this singular character. And finally, Westlake has just produced—under his pseudonym "Richard Stark"—the novel Flashfire, the nineteenth adventure of his master criminal Parker, the anti-Dortmunder and reigning champion in the amorality division of American mystery fiction. Under his own name, Westlake has written forty-seven works over the past four decades. During that period, he’s also written twenty-three novels under the name "Richard Stark" (four starring Alan Grofield, a charming actor and occasional thief who is worthy of revival). And under a cloud of pseudonyms—at least five, but it’s a good bet there are more—he’s written dozens more. With characteristic irony, Westlake says of his crime-noir character Parker and his crime-blanc character Dortmunder: "It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name." But precisely the opposite is true: Westlake expresses his serious thoughts in comedy because it is truer and healthier to see what is laughable about the typical, the everyday. Westlake was not originally a comic novelist. He was led to that path by the conventional mystery. Though his first novels, The Mercenaries and Killing Time, were well crafted, they remained within established boundaries. He then began experimenting with more unconventional perspectives. He wrote novels about suppressed rage (361), a young man corrupted by degrees (Killy), and the criminally insane (Pity Him Afterwards). Westlake’s most impressive early work was Levine, a series of short stories about Abe Levine, a middle-aged homicide detective with heart trouble. What makes Levine such a compelling character is his very seriousness about that which is most serious: his mortality. These early experiments didn’t necessarily lead Westlake to look at criminal things comically, but their range prefigures the turn he made in 1965 with the story of Charlie Poole, The Fugitive Pigeon. (Westlake preferred the title The Dead Nephew, but was overruled by his editor, who forbade authors from employing "death" in a title.) Charlie is a master of the art of laziness, whose Uncle Al, a mid-level mobster, found him "the perfect job"—running a money-laundering mob bar. The mob expects Charlie to lose money, and he lives up to expectations. "My Uncle Al was right; it was the job I was born for." "Nephew" is a term of art for Westlake. A nephew is somebody irresponsible or incompetent for whom one grudgingly feels responsibility. Nephew Charlie’s life takes a turn for the worse when two mob enforcers, Trask and Slade, enter his bar and show him a card with his name and an ink blot. They are incredulous at Charlie’s incomprehension: "What a nephew. You are the biggest nephew that ever lived.