I withdrew, from the short gent’s new bowl, a potato chip. All the chips in this bowl were identical—medium tan, shaped like a moray eel, with a consistency suspiciously like fiberboard—as though they were all clones from some original proto-chip.
“I did two story treatments,” I said, as the tasteless chip passed through my mouth, chased by vermouth. “The counterfeiting treatment was generally agreed to be a mistake, so then I did the kidnapping treatment, and that was generally agreed to be okay. Until, unfortunately, it got to Lew Wasserman, head of Universal, who had to approve the project before it could be slated for production.”
The novelist said, “Don’t tell me Lew Wasserman objected to plagiarism.”
“I doubt he approves of it,” I said, “at least not in its actionable forms, but that wasn’t the problem in this case. The problem was, Lew Wasserman had just become a grandfather. Now, I’d altered from a true-life story—and from Clean Break as well—by making the victim a bright self-sufficient ten-year-old boy rather than a baby, since fearing for a baby’s safety is inimical to comedy, but it wasn’t change enough for Grandfather Lew. ‘You can’t make a comedy about a kidnapping,’ he said, apparently never having heard of O. Henry’s ‘The Ransom of Red Chief.’ In any event, that killed the movie deal.”
“Is that it?” demanded the novelist. “That’s the whole story?”
“Well, not exactly. In stealing ideas, the professional novelist’s richest hunting ground is himself. One’s own earlier work is full of potentially useful material. A quick paint job, rearrange the furniture, and voila!”
“I do love France,” said the lady with the lace at her wrists.
“But if you’re going to Europe,” I said, “you should certainly—”
“You stole from yourself,” suggested the novelist.
“Granted. I would have sued me, but I settled out of court.”
The short gent, dip-chipping his way through the pseudo-chips, said, “What did you steal?”
“The whole idea, lock, stock, and barrel. I’d already written two comic novels about a gang of professional criminals who are more unlucky than inept, led by a gloomy fellow named Dortmunder. At the suggestion of my very good friend Abby Adams, I borrowed back the kidnapping story and turned it into the third Dortmunder novel, called Jimmy the Kid. Since what I was writing was a book, I changed the original from a movie back to a novel, and included excerpts from that novel, which was called Child Heist, written by a tough crime novelist called Richard Stark, who works the same general territory as Lionel White.”
The novelist gave me an unfriendly look. “If I were Richard Stark,” he said, “I’d sue.”
“Well, the fact is,” I told him, “I’m Richard Stark. I’ve written any number of novels under that name about a tough professional thief called Parker, but Child Heist isn’t among them. It is an invented novel from a pseudonymous author appearing in a real novel by the same author based on a producer’s idea to use a real-life case in which actual criminals performed a crime based on The Snatch, by Lionel White.” I drank vermouth.
The short gent said, “So the Child Heist excerpts in Jimmy the Kid are all of the book that was written? The rest doesn’t exist?”
“Right.”
“Will you ever write the rest?”
“Somehow I doubt it. In the first place, I think I’d get cross-eyed by now, and in the second place, wouldn’t it somehow complete the circle? Wouldn’t I—or Richard Stark—simply wind up writing The Snatch?”
“Then Lionel White would sue you,” the novelist told me, with some satisfaction.
“He might. On the other hand, having been at both ends of that kind of thievery, I know it takes a lot of provocation to make a plagiarism suit seem worthwhile.”
“Oh, no it doesn’t,” said the polemical novelist.
“It does with most of us. And we all borrow, all storytellers do, whether we know it or not. The books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, they still float in the bilge of our brains, along with our own experiences and prejudices and hopes, and sooner or later something comes out of us that we originally got from somebody else. For instance,” I said, backing away from the company, “this entire conversation is nonexistent and borrowed from Tom Wolfe.”
“Which one?” cried the short gent, as I moved away.
“Both of them!” I told him, and headed for the bar. “A very tall bourbon,” I told the chap in the white coat. “And you might as well add an ice cube.”
INTRODUCTION TO KAHAWA
This was written for a new edition of Kahawa published in 1995.—Ed.
I was in Los Angeles, meeting with some other people on some other business entirely, and when I got back to the hotel, there was a message from Les Alexander, in New York. I had known Les as a friend for some years, and while we had talked about working together on something or other, it had never happened. At that time he was a book packager and sometime television producer; he is now a film producer. I was and am a novelist with a minor in screenwriting.
When I returned Les’s call, he was boyishly excited. He had a true story, he said, that would make the basis for a great novel. I told him, as I tell everyone in such circumstances, “I’ll listen, but I won’t give you an answer today. I’ll call you tomorrow. I don’t want to make a mistake and be locked into something I don’t really want to do, or locked out of something it turns out I did want to do.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “A group of white mercenaries, in Uganda, while it was under Idi Amin, stole a railroad train a mile long, full of coffee, and made it disappear.”
“Forget the twenty-four hours,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
So it began as a caper. I’ve written capers, before and since, both serious and comic, so I feel I know a bit about the form. (It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name.)
One thing I know about the caper is that it helps if the job is outrageous in one way or another. Once, for instance, before the government started paying by check, Parker stole the entire payroll from a United States Air Force Base. Dortmunder, not to be outdone, has made off with an entire bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home.
And what could be more outrageous than to steal a mile-long train from the dread Idi Amin, and make it disappear?
This is going to be fun, I thought.
Then I started the research. Please permit me at this point to say a strong word against research. I hate it. My feeling is, the whole point of going into the fiction racket was so I could make it all up. We get enough facts in real life; that’s the way I see it.
Unfortunately that’s not the way anybody else sees it. If you get a fact wrong in a novel, people will write you letters full of the most grating kinds of sarcasm and superiority. Of course, not all facts are equally holy among readers. Should you get a detail about a gun or a car wrong, the weight of mail will drive the postman into the sidewalk, but if you get the population of Altoona, PA, wrong, you probably won’t hear from many people at all; three or four. So if I were to write a novel set in Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin Dada, and if I cared about the health of my mailperson, I had to do some research.
And here’s the other thing I hate about research. Once I actually start it, I get lost in it. Research is my own personal Sargasso Sea. It’s exactly like entering one of our civilization’s mental attics, a quotation book or thesaurus or large dictionary, looking for just one thing, and being found in there three days later by search parties, seated on the dusty floor, intently reading.
That’s what happened this time. I had current events to research (Idi Amin, and how he got where he got, and what it meant) as well as history (the European exploration/invasion of Central Africa, and what followed), so there was much to get lost in. The end was reached when I found myself halfway through a one-thousand-two-hundred-page book called The Permanent Way, by M. F. Hill, which was the official history o
f the building of the railroad on which my coffee train would travel half a century later. “That’s it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. As soon as I finish the other six hundred pages of this book, I’m going to work.”
The Permanent Way, and other books, were interesting and useful, but one book, called Uganda Holocaust, by Dan Wooding and Ray Barnett, published by Zondervan, changed both me and the novel I was going to write; for the better, I think.
It seems that some Christian evangelical sects set great store by “giving witness,” which is to say, speaking about and airing and publicizing great works of charity or martyrdom or goodness, done in Christ’s name. It also seems that Idi Amin’s primary goal during his years in power was to eliminate Christianity from Uganda, a large if unworthy task, since Uganda’s sixteen million people were seventy-five percent Christian. Amin’s onslaught resulted in over five hundred thousand Christian martyrs, people who went to their deaths not because they were political or rebellious or dangerous, but only because they were professed Christians. This was the largest and most extensive Christian martyrdom since Rome before Constantine. How’s that for distinction?
The instant Amin was driven from Uganda, Wooding and Barnett flew in with tape recorders to take witness from the survivors, and published the results in Uganda Holocaust, a book that not only made me horribly familiar with the workings of the State Research Bureau, but also changed the character of the story I would tell. As I told my wife at the time, “I can’t dance on all those graves.”
So it was still a caper, but now it was something else as well, something more, and, I think, deeper. My own emotions of pity and rage and contempt were entwined with the story, though I knew better than to let them take over. But they were there, spicing the stew.
And altering the book in more ways than one. As you know, in our country “sexandviolence” is one word, and piously we recoil from its depiction; sure. In Kahawa, though, both sex and violence had to play a stronger part than usual in my novels, because the material demanded it. I would never throw in what is called gratuitous sexandviolence, because I have too much respect for story. If a word, one single word, distracts the reader from the story I’m trying to tell, out with it. Since both sex and violence can be distracting, I usually depict them sparingly, trying mostly to get my effects by allusion and implication. Not so in Kahawa; the book demanded a stronger approach.
Of course, when it was published, I got complaining letters, and their general tenor was, “I’ve always liked your books, and so has my teenage son/daughter, but how can I show him/her this book with all this graphic sex in it?” Five hundred thousand dead; bodies hacked and mutilated and debased and destroyed; corridors running with blood; and nobody complained about the violence. They complained about the sex. Ah, such wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties.
My research was not limited to books; my wife and I also went to Kenya, and to London, to see some of the locations and talk with some of the people. (We did not go into Uganda, merely looked at it across Lake Victoria, since this was 1980, Amin was barely three years out of power, and Uganda was still in a state of anarchy. Trips to Uganda at that time were mostly one way.)
Accompanying us on the trip was the person who had originally told Les Alexander the story, which he had knowledge of because of his connections with the pilots who were supposed to fly the coffee shipment from Entebbe. This person has been in many interesting places at interesting times, and was an education in himself, though not quite perhaps as solid as an education from books. Later, when he learned that I was writing an introductory note of gratitude to those who had helped me put the book together, he phoned to ask a favor: Would I mind thanking him under a pseudonym? (He mentioned the name he would prefer.) He didn’t want his own name in print, but he did like the idea of being thanked for his part in the enterprise.
So I thanked one person under an alias; is that the strangest part of the story? Maybe.
About that title. Kahawa. It is the word for coffee in Swahili. It leads to the slang word for coffee in some parts of Europe: “kawa.” (In Polish, “kawa” is the regular word for coffee.) The original is the Arabic “qahwa,” or the Hebrew “kavah,” and really it’s all the same word, virtually around the world. A c or k or q at the beginning, a w or v or f in the middle. Kahawa is coffee. Unfortunately, it’s a little obscure to be a title.
The problem was the change in my book as I got into the research. Originally, I was going to call it Coffee to Go; a fun title for a fun caper. After a while, that title just slunk off in embarrassment. Then I found myself toying with pomposities like The Time of the Hero, but my feeling is, if the title is too boring to read all the way through, it might keep readers from trying the novel. So Kahawa it is.
The original publisher of Kahawa, in 1982, was in the midst of an upheaval. My original editor was let go before publication, to be replaced with an oil painting of an editor; pleasant, even comforting to look at, but not much help in the trenches. The publisher moved by fits and starts—more fits than starts, actually—and though the book received good reviews, no one at the publishing house seemed able to figure out how to suggest that anybody might enjoy reading it. So it didn’t do well.
My current publisher is not suffering upheavals, my current editor is lively and professional, and when it was suggested that Kahawa might be given a second chance of life, I was both astonished and very pleased. I’ve made minor changes in the text, nothing substantive, and agreed to write this introduction, and here we are, by golly, airborne again.
By coincidence, I ran into that oil painting at a party a few months ago. He said, “Are you writing any more African adventure novels?”
“No,” I said, “but Warner is going to put out Kahawa again, in hardcover.”
His jaw dropped. “Why?” he asked. (This is what we have to put up with, sometimes.)
“I think they like it,” I said.
I hope you do, too.
LIGHT
This was found in typescript in Westlake’s files, but it was never published. It seems to have been written sometime in 1998 or 1999, between the publication of The Ax and The Hook.—Ed.
In 1960 I published my first novel, a crime mystery called The Mercenaries. Since then, I have published forty novels, one non-fiction book and one juvenile under my own name, plus twenty-one under the pseudonym Richard Stark, five under the pseudonym Tucker Coe, and a few others. I have never had a major success, but I write fast, and well enough, and so I have made my living with my pen now for thirty-eight years.
In June of 1997, my fortieth novel was published, called The Ax. It was in some ways a departure from the general run of my books, but then again, I’ve made departures before. Most of my books have been comic to one extent or another, though I have written international adventure, and fantasy, and psychological suspense, and straight crime novels.
Starting in 1970, with a book called The Hot Rock, I have also written about a series character, named John Dortmunder, a capable and work-manlike professional criminal who lives under a black cloud (me), and to date I have put the poor man through nine novels and six short stories. However, in the same period, I also wrote some twenty novels that were not about John Dortmunder, so I’ve managed to avoid the trap of being shackled to a series character, one of the many traps lying in wait for the unwary writer. (We do remember Conan Doyle’s failed attempt to knock off Sherlock Holmes.)
In fact, I’ve managed to avoid all the traps. Since I was never a bestseller, no one’s expectations about my work were very high, but since I was prolific, I could turn out enough wordage to make a living.
Also, the movie industry helped. From time to time, movie rights to one of my books would be sold (or optioned), and from time to time I’d be hired to write a screenplay about something or other. The movie industry needs writers, but ignores writers as a matter of principle; it is the perfect place for a writer who doesn’t want to be noticed.
And I didn’t wa
nt to be noticed. I wanted to write whatever came into my head, and not worry about it. So that’s what I did.
But then, in June of 1997, The Ax was published. It did not become a best-seller either, except for two weeks on the Los Angeles Times list, but it did exceed everybody’s expectations. It got excellent reviews. It sold better than my previous books. It got attention. It caught my publisher’s attention.
I am published by the Mysterious Press label within Warner Books, and my publisher is an excellent one; knowledgeable and supportive. When The Ax “took off,” they noticed, and supported, and even took out a full-page ad in the daily New York Times. I was very pleased.
At the same time, I had returned to my Richard Stark pen name for the first time in twenty-three years, and in October of 1997 Comeback by Mr. Stark was published, again to more than the usual notice, including an extended write-up in Time magazine. Again, I was pleased.
In the meantime, I had of course started another book. It was not a departure, like The Ax, nor was it exactly like the several books I’d earlier published in the nineties. It was a little comic insurance fraud novel, closest in spirit to books I’d written in the seventies. I finished it, and gave it to my editor and my agent, and the gloom could be heard to descend. (It sounds like a grounded blimp losing air.)
Gently I was told that this could not possibly be the book that would follow The Ax, nor could it be the book that followed the return of Richard Stark. I did see that.
Unfortunately, I did. I saw what they meant, and I had to agree. I had a certain responsibility now. The book I published after The Ax and Stark redux could not be just any book. I had newer readers now, who would come to that next book with a certain level of expectation. They wouldn’t necessarily need The Ax again, they could certainly understand that I also had my comic moments, but there was a level of emotional truth that really should be present in whatever book I published next. Later, in the future, I might return sometimes to my more frivolous ways.
I had to agree. I do agree. The only problem is, I don’t know what that book might be. As I told my agent, “It’s a little late for me to have second-novel problems, but that’s what this is.” My rhythms have been thrown off, and all because I’ve lost my precious anonymity (except, of course, in Hollywood, which doesn’t matter).
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