The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  In Pop. 1280 (1964), the menacing deputy of Thompson’s youth returns in the person of Nick Corey, another homicidal sheriff. When another character asks whether the force of circumstances can excuse immoral actions, Nick replies:

  “ ‘Well . . . do you excuse a post for fittin’ a hole? Maybe there’s a nest of rabbits down in that hole, and the post will crush ’em. But is that the post’s fault, for fillin’ a gap it was made to fit?’

  “ ‘But that’s not a fair analogy, Nick. You’re talking about inanimate objects.’

  “ ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘So ain’t we all relatively inanimate, George? Just how much free will does any of us exercise? We got controls all along the line, our physical make-up, our mental make-up, our backgrounds; they’re all shapin’ us a certain way, fixin’ us up for a certain role in life, and George, we better play that role or fill that hole or any goddang way you want to put it or all hell is going to tumble out of the heavens and fall right down on top of us. We better do what we were made to do, or we’ll find it being done to us.’ ”

  And later: “There were the helpless little girls, cryin’ when their own daddies crawled into bed with ’em. There were the men beating their wives, the women screamin’ for mercy. There were the kids wettin’ in the beds from fear and nervousness, and their mothers dosin’ ’em with red pepper for punishment. There were the haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy . . . . I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn’t seem at all bad by comparison.”

  Nick Corey, killing almost dispassionately, thinks he is doing God’s work. An unprejudiced sort, he champions a black man who is being bullied; later he kills the bully, and when the black man turns out to have witnessed the act, kills him too with no regret. By the book’s end he sees himself as Christ returned to earth, shepherding souls to judgment.

  Thompson’s characters are holdup men and small-time grifters, corrupt lawmen, punch-drunk fighters, escaped lunatics. They lead horrible lives, do awful things and come to bad ends. Typically, there are no winners in a Thompson novel. Even the innocent are guilty, and no one gets out alive.

  In The Nothing Man (1954), the narrator is a reporter, emasculated in the war and permanently embittered. In the course of the book he thinks he has murdered three people, only to find out at the end that he hasn’t killed anyone; one was killed by another character, one committed suicide, one died accidentally. Even in acts of violence, he proves impotent.

  In The Getaway, bank robbers turn on one another as a matter of course. Two survive, a husband and wife who reach sanctuary in Mexico. But the place turns out to be hell; they can’t leave, and the need to betray each other in order to stay alive destroys their love.

  Perhaps we’re more ready to listen to Thompson’s message than we were 30 years ago. Perhaps his vision, relentlessly bleak, fits our times better than his own. Or maybe any generation is more willing to accept such a message from a distance.

  For my own part, I liked Thompson better before the world decided he was a genius. His books pack more of a punch if you pick them up for two bits and come to them with no expectations. Today, though, his quirky little paperbacks can’t measure up to the hype. When a cover blurb calls him “the best suspense writer going, bar none,” the impulse to strike a revisionist pose is almost overwhelming.

  But to hell with that. Jim Thompson, who received too little recognition during his lifetime, is getting rather too much of it now. So what? He still has things to tell us; his books are worth reading. Just keep in mind that it ain’t Shakespeare.

  Donald E. Westlake

  * * *

  Don Westlake and I were close friends for fifty years, from the day we introduced ourselves in the anteroom of Scott Meredith’s office. We bonded instantly and the bond deepened with time. There was a stretch of a couple of years in the late ’60s when we didn’t speak, and some people claim there was a woman to blame, but we got over it.

  Then he died during a family vacation in Mexico on the last day of 2008, and the following afternoon I got a phone call from Otto Penzler. Later that day—or perhaps it was the following day—Margery Flax at MWA requested an obit for their newsletter.

  Here’s what I wrote:

  When the phone call came and brought the bad news, one of the first things that came to mind was John O’Hara’s line: “George Gershwin died yesterday, but I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to.”

  I certainly don’t want to believe my old friend Don is gone. He’s been a part of my life for fifty years. We met in the waiting room at the Scott Meredith agency; we had both worked there, though not at the same time, and we’d both managed the transition from employee to client, and now we introduced ourselves and walked out of there and into a friendship. By then we had already sold our first appalling books to the same venal publisher, and seen our first weary stories appear in the same dreary magazines. We had a lot to talk about, and that never changed.

  What a wonderful writer he was. He fell into crime fiction, that’s how most of us got there back in the day, but I swear I think he could have written anything. In 1963, he sent me the manuscript of a novel he’d just completed. The title was Memory, and it was a dark and gripping novel about a man suffering from amnesia. He was at once attempting to build a new life for himself and find out who he was and where he’d come from, and it was a fool’s errand indeed, because he kept losing memories of his new life as he went along.

  I don’t remember the details, I read it just once, and 45 years ago, but (barring that build-up of amyloid plaques that haunts us all) I’ll never forget the book’s impact. It was a powerful existentialist novel, let me tell you, and the reason you haven’t read it—the reason nobody’s teaching it right now in college courses—is that it never got published. Here was a long dark novel by a young writer no one had ever heard of, represented by an agent with little clout in the world of serious literature.

  Years later Don’s agent told him the world had changed, and he could now probably find a publisher for Memory. And Don read it over and decided it was a creature of its time, and that its time had come and gone. I never agreed with the decision, but it was his to make, and he made it.

  Maybe someone will dig it out and publish it now. I don’t think he’d mind. And I’d like the chance to read it again.

  I suspect his career would have been different if Memory had been published back when it was written. Some years later Don wrote three or four stories about young people in relationships, and they made the rounds of the magazines, and they all came back. So he stopped—not because he didn’t want to write the stories, but because he didn’t get any more ideas. If Memory had succeeded, his unconscious would have supplied him with more ideas in a similar vein. When it didn’t, other things came to him instead.

  And here’s the thing: He sat down to write every day, and for over half a century he never wrote a clumsy sentence or a dull paragraph or a tedious book. It is surely not the only test of a book’s merits that you can read it with enjoyment more than once, but it is a very real test, and Don’s books always aced it. Every couple of years I read the whole Parker series all the way through, and I suspect I’ll go on doing this.

  And how I’ll miss the man who wrote them. He was a very dear friend. His company, off the page as well as on it, was always engaging, always a delight.

  Seventy years have passed since O’Hara wrote those words about Gershwin, elevating denial to the level of a public virtue. O’Hara has been gone himself since 1970. Yet the line endures—and so do Porgy & Bess and Rhapsody in Blue, and Appointment in Samarra and From the Terrace. And so will the Parker books and the Dortmunder books, and The Ax and Dancing Aztecs and Adios, Scheherezade and Baby, Would I Lie? and . . . oh, you get the idea. Make your own list.

  Donald Westlake died New Year’s Eve, and I have to believe it, whether I want to or not. But I don’t have
to like it.

  * * *

  I don’t know what triggered a memory of Memory, but I’m glad it came to mind, glad I wrote about it. Abby Westlake, who’d never heard tell of the novel, read what I’d written and went to Don’s files. The man kept everything, and his files were always in perfect order, and damned if she didn’t find a raggedy-ass carbon of Memory. I looked at it, and there it was, the book I remembered. I showed it to Charles Ardai, and in due course Hard Case Crime published the book, and I commend it to your attention.

  While awaiting its publication, I wrote about Donald and Memory for Mystery Scene:

  Remembering Memory

  It was sometime in the spring of 1963 that the mailman brought me the carbon copy of a 300-plus page manuscript. He brought it to 48 Ebling Avenue, in Tonawanda, New York, where I’d been living with my wife and daughter for a little more than a year. My wife was pregnant—our second daughter would be born on Memorial Day. I was writing a lot and doing reasonably well with it, producing erotic fiction for a couple of publishers, short stories for crime fiction magazines, and the occasional book of fabricated sexual case histories under a medical pen name. The house was a good one on an attractive lot, and while the marriage may have been doomed, I didn’t yet realize it. All I lacked was the companionship of other writers. I’d had that in New York, and had thrived on it, and back in Buffalo I felt the deprivation.

  The manuscript that turned up in my mailbox was from my closest friend, Donald Westlake. Before the move to Tonawanda, Don and I had lived a very long subway ride apart, he and his wife and two sons in Canarsie, half a mile from the last stop on the Fourteenth Street line, my wife and daughter and I at 444 Central Park West, which at the time was a luxurious building in a neighborhood that wasn’t quite good enough to be called marginal. By the time we moved, the Westlakes were preparing a move of their own, to a house in Englishtown, New Jersey. A fair amount of mail went back and forth between Tonawanda and Englishtown, but it wasn’t the same.

  Now the day Don sent me a copy of the book he’d just finished, for that’s what the manuscript was, had been a day like any other day, with the exception that I’d been having chest pains. I was not yet 25 years old, and an unlikely candidate for a heart attack, but I had this occasional unpleasant sensation on the left side of my chest, and I managed to worry about it, and indeed called my doctor and arranged to come over the following day. (And let me spare you any unwarranted suspense. There was nothing wrong with me, and decades were to pass before it finally dawned on me that those symptoms, and other intimations of mortality around that time, almost certainly derived from the sudden and wholly unexpected death of my father a little over two years earlier.)

  Here’s the point: Don’s manuscript arrived, and we had dinner and put the kid to bed, and I started reading. And my wife went to bed, and I stayed up reading, and after a while I forgot I was having a heart attack, and just kept reading until I finished the book around dawn. And somewhere along the way I became aware that my friend Don, who’d written a couple of mysteries and some science fiction and his fair share of soft-core erotica, had just produced a great novel.

  And then, of course, nothing happened.

  I don’t know what Don expected. I myself assumed someone would publish the book, and that it would get good strong reviews, and be generally well received. I don’t think I expected Memory would make Don rich, but then this was almost fifty years ago, and I don’t think any of our crowd saw writing as a road to wealth. A year or so earlier, I was in Don’s upper flat in Canarsie when he confided that he felt he’d arrived as a writer, that his future was secure. “I think,” he said tentatively, almost reluctant to speak the words aloud, “that if I just keep on with what I’ve been doing, I can be fairly sure of bringing home ten grand a year.”

  What I never foresaw—and I doubt Don did, either—was that his agent would be unable to find a publisher for Memory.

  But that’s what happened, and in retrospect it’s not all that hard to understand why. Henry Morrison, who represented Don at the time, was younger than his client, and his experience as an agent was largely with genre fiction. More to the point, Henry worked for Scott Meredith, who ranked in the more elevated literary circles a few rungs lower than pond scum.

  Henry tried hard, and sent the manuscript all over the place, and most of the editors who read it thought it was terrific. Many of their responses contained the words “I wish I could publish this” in one form or another. But that sort of expression of regret was as far as their enthusiasm could carry them. They all sent Memory back where it came from.

  Because what it was, when all was said and done, was a rather lengthy novel with no marketable topical hook by an author whose track record was substantially less than useless. (Don had published several hardcover mysteries with Random House, a top publisher, but this was no recommendation in the world of Serious Literature, not in 1963. One of the books, The Mercenaries (now available from Hard Case Crime under Don’s original title, The Cutie), had been shortlisted for the Edgar for best first novel. Impressive? Now, perhaps, but less so a half century ago. Back then, the Edgar award was something about which nobody outside of MWA gave the northern end of a southbound rat. But for the small group of people who wrote them and the somewhat larger group of folks who read them, mysteries got about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield.

  On the other hand, publishing was less corporate back in the day, and a publisher could take a chance, and even bring out a book he knew he’d lose money on just because he thought it ought to be out there where people could read it. So I still find it curious that nobody would buy the book. Why didn’t Random House publish it, if just to keep the author happy and add a little literary-world luster to his mystery-world reputation?

  Never mind. The manuscript kept coming back, like a bad penny, or swallows to Capistrano. And eventually Henry ran out of places to send it.

  Years later—late 1970s, it must have been—Henry told Don that he thought he could probably find a publisher for Memory. He had long since parted company with Scott Meredith, and Don’s stature in the mystery field had grown considerably. And the mystery itself was rather less of a red-haired stepchild in the world of letters.

  Don told me this, and told me too that he’d had a look at the book and decided its time had come and gone, that it was too dated in too many respects to be published.

  I wasn’t sure that was so. It seemed to me that the novel’s virtues were enduring ones. But I hadn’t read it since 1963, so what did I know?

  (I should probably add, right about now, that Henry has not the slightest recollection of any of this. He doesn’t remember the novel, nor does he recall that there was ever a book of Don’s he’d been unable to sell, let alone that he wanted to try again fifteen years down the line. “This was a book I couldn’t sell?” he said. “Well, why on earth would I remember something like that?” Memory indeed!)

  Don died suddenly on the last day of 2008. Within days someone at MWA asked me to write something about him for The Third Degree. In the piece I talked about Don’s great versatility as a writer, and how his career might have taken different turns but for certain bumps in the road. In that context I told about Memory, and what Don might have written if its reception had been less discouraging.

  I emailed a copy to Don’s widow, Abby, and told her someone might read it and make an effort to locate Memory, so she should prepare herself for inquiries in that regard. None came, as it happened, but this was the first Abby had heard of the book, and when she came upon a carbon copy of the manuscript in Don’s considerable files, she knew what it was. Would I like to read it?

  It was, I must say, a bedraggled copy. I don’t suppose there are many of us left who actually remember carbon paper, and I have to tell you I don’t miss it a bit. It was indispensable for years, and every time I came to the end of a page, I slipped a sheet of it between a sheet of good typing bond and a sheet of cheap manila paper—second sheets, we
called the cheap stuff—and inserted the ensuing sandwich into the typewriter. It was many years before low-cost photocopying would allow me to dispense with carbon paper, and just a few more years before I could get rid of the typewriter, too. And now, with electronic submission, one barely needs paper, and with ebooks one won’t need anything printed, and—

  Never mind.

  It was bedraggled, and some of the pages were torn and scotch-taped, and others were torn and untaped. And Don, like most of us, sometimes tried to get too many copies out of a sheet of carbon paper, so some of the pages were harder to read than others. But, by God, it was the book, and it was all there, and it was legible enough for me to recognize it as the book I’d read forty-five years earlier, and it was still the great novel I remembered.

  Now what?

  The first thing I realized was that the manuscript would have to be scanned. It was very hard to read in its present state, and the pages were in any case too fragile to survive many readings. Photocopying would just create an even less legible copy. Scanning seemed the answer, and I tried to do just that, but either my scanner or my competence therewith proved unequal to the task.

  So I thought of Charles Ardai. I knew him to be a great fan of Don’s, knew he’d been delighted to republish some of Don’s early titles at Hard Case, and saw him as the ideal publisher for Memory.