And I wonder whether Don might never have felt fully in his element writing a do-gooder hero, whether Manville or Bond. If you think about it, in Don’s most memorable novels his protagonists, whether it be Parker, Dortmunder or the leads of standalone novels like The Ax, are all on the wrong side of the law. They initiate actions whose reverberations propel the story. With this in mind, it’s no surprise, perhaps, that it’s the villain of Forever and a Death, Richard Curtis, who emerges as the book’s most interesting and richly developed character, and whose devastating end gives the book its unforgettable final scene.
* * *
There are wonderful things in Don’s treatments I wish I could have seen on screen. For example, when Bond first meets with M he’s discomforted to learn there’s a new 003. They recycle the numbers?!? M explains that since 00s never live for long, it’s simplest to recycle the nine digits. Bond reflects on how strange it is to realize that one day there will be another 007 and, of course, another M too. It’s a tour de force moment that underlines the danger of what Bond is about to do, makes a meta-reference to all the actors past and future who will be Bond, and generates a melancholy emotion during a scene that’s usually very dry.
But if he’d gone to script Don would have been writing a story that would then have been tossed around and reshaped by many others. It would have become more conventional Bond and less Westlake. As an executive, conventional Bond enlivened by Westlake is a dream. But as a Westlake fan, pure Westlake is still the best Westlake. So, while I still wonder what a Donald Westlake Bond screenplay might have yielded, I cherish the book.
With the publication of Forever and a Death my quest is complete. As a teenager I’d been in search of a Westlake book, then the man, then a film collaboration; and now he’s brought me full circle, back to finding a Westlake book, and one I never imagined could have existed. A book that is filled with uniquely Westlake-ian pleasures and makes me appreciate and understand his work in ways I never had before.
In our attempts to make a movie together, I worked with Don one more time after Bond 18. I convinced him to adapt a series of detective novels by Steven Saylor set in ancient Rome. Don did a superb job and the movie would have been made if not for Gladiator coming along first and stealing its thunder.
In Don’s script, the detective, Gordianus, exonerates a group of slaves for a murder they didn’t commit. On the final page of the script he learns that though he’s proven them innocent, all he’s accomplished is exchanging one bad fate for them for another: they’re being shipped to Egypt, where they’ll wind up in worse bondage than before.
The final bittersweet lines Don wrote sum up both his philosophy of life and my feelings reading Forever and a Death. “We can only do what we can,” Marcus Mummius counsels Gordianus, who replies, “And hold to beauty where we find it.”
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