by David Dodge
This horrid realization came to me fifteen years ago, give or take an offspring or two. Reggie and I have the quota we set for ourselves; two boys, two girls, all good kids sound of wind and limb, not too hard to look at and with signs of dawning intelligence. The boys are in prep school in England, and I must say that when they come home for holidays, vacations and long weekends their manners are a lot better than mine were when I was in their age bracket. They call me “Sir,” believe it or not. The prep school requires it of them, not I, but for a man who never made it higher than pfc. in the U.S. Army, “Sir” from the yard-birds falls sweetly on the ear.
The girls, who spend five days a week in a boarding school in Rome, are less respectful to their old man. They call me Ricci, short for ricciuto, meaning “curly” in Italian. All in all, you could say I’ve got it made. A good family, a good home, a good life, still a lot to be done with Isola Regina but a good future with it and for it, everything good. Except for the festering secret locked away in my bosom that my wife, the mother of my children, the woman I love in spite of all and am stuck with for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness as in health, all the rest of the marital manacle, is a living lie, a bunco-steerer in sheep’s clothing. A female Elmer, in short.
Of course, I can’t let her get away with it forever, although in fifteen years I have so far been unable to figure out a gaff to hook her with. If I can work a good clean artistic con maybe I’ll give Daddy’s fortune back to her afterward, just for the beau geste. God knows she’s never had any need for it nor, as far as the evidence goes, spent a penny of it. Even the five thousand quid I paid her lies untouched in a bank account I opened in her name. When I ask her, as I do from time to time when I’m not too busy with other domestic problems, why she doesn’t spend some of it on herself, she smiles with the lazy contentment of a female spider digesting its mate and says, “Curly, love, what could I possibly want that you haven’t given me?”
It always makes me think, in a discouraged way, of old François André‘s comment: If a mark isn’t greedy for something he hasn’t got, it’s impossible to sucker him. But I’ll get her yet; some day, somehow. Meanwhile, would any of you ladies or gentlemen like to draw the first match?
Afterword
My father wrote The Last Match over thirty years ago in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I now live. He was no longer up to traveling—he died here in 1974—and had always taken seriously the standard advice to authors that they write about what they know, and so he wrote The Last Match out of his head, skimming through the memories of a lifetime, combining fact and fiction, real-life personalities and invented characters, landscapes and lovers and lifestyles to his heart’s content.
A lot of it I remember myself. We played the match game together, he and my mother and I, when I was eight years old and we went down the Amazon on a wood-burning steamer called the Morey. It was just like the one in The Last Match, and the purser’s name was Buchisapo too.
I know that because I read it in a book. When he wasn’t writing mysteries my father was putting together travel books, a whole series of autobiographical accounts of the trips we took when I was a little girl. I have such a well-documented childhood that at times I’m not sure whether a thing really happened or it’s just something I read in a book, but I know Buchisapo was real because I have a photograph of us together on the Morey.
My father wrote about what he knew right from the start. In the late 30s he was working as a CPA in San Francisco and my mother was an editor at Macmillan. She bet him five bucks that he couldn’t write a decent mystery, so he wrote a novel about a San Francisco CPA named Whit Whitney who gets involved in a murder. It was called Death and Taxes, not surprisingly, and Macmillan, also not surprisingly, published it in 1941.
After three more Whit Whitney books—he was writing at night and holding down a Navy desk job in San Francisco during the war—he decided to leave the Navy and see the world. Our first trip got us as far as Guatemala, and because we were green and inexperienced travelers that book was called How Green Was My Father. A few countries and a few books later came 20,000 Leagues Behind the 8 Ball, in which we went down the Amazon.
We started that trip in Arequipa, Peru, where we lived for a couple of years and where he wrote Plunder of the Sun (reprinted last year by the estimable folks at Hard Case Crime, as a matter of fact), a Peruvian thriller about buried Inca gold. Hollywood turned it into a Mexican thriller about Aztec gold, starring Glenn Ford and Patricia Medina (whom my father referred to as the Latin Alan Ladd because she had only two expressions). After decades in oblivion, it’s being re-released on DVD this year. I may even take a look at it myself.
The Last Match’s Peruvian escapades also gave my father a chance to revisit his late teens, which he spent in the merchant marine on a ship sailing back and forth to Chile. He started out as an oiler, he told me, and patiently explained the difference between an oiler and a wiper and a fireman. He had a blurry blue propeller on his left arm, a lifelong souvenir of the night he and his drunken buddies decided to tattoo themselves with knitting needles and wound up in jail in Antofogasta. My mother hated that tattoo, but he was proud of it and refused to get rid of it.
By 1950 we were in the south of France, where we settled just as a cat burglar started sneaking over rooftops into the bedrooms of the rich and famous and making off with their jewels. When the burglar knocked off the villa next to ours my father figured there had to be a novel in it somewhere and wrote To Catch a Thief which went on to greater glory as a Hitchcock film starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant.
Most of the stories he tells in the Cote d’Azur section of The Last Match are true, sort of. He really did interview François André, the barrel-maker’s son who wound up owning most of the casinos in France, although their conversation probably didn’t go quite as it does in the book. And the story about the gullible French aristocrat who is persuaded to pony up a fortune to help his government defend itself against the Red Menace is entirely true, although my father changed the poor guy’s name, probably to protect him from further ridicule.
The North African sections are pretty accurate too, bolstered by the year my parents spent in Casablanca in the early 60s. The American and
Foreign Bank of Tangier was notorious, and there really was money to be made smuggling cigarettes across the Mediterranean.
As for the fictional characters? They’re based on earlier fictional characters, by and large. Reggie is little more than a recycled Francie Stevens—Grace Kelly’s unforgettable ice queen from To Catch a Thief—with a British accent. Le Sanglier appears as Le Borgne in To Catch a Thief both of them based on a real-life Corsican cigarette smuggler called The Plank. And the nameless hero? The crook who tells the story? Oh, he’s just David Dodge, I think, dreaming of long cons. My father—the most scrupulously honest man I’ve ever known—loved the whole world of con men and bunco rackets and professional card sharks, and worked them into his books over and over again.
There’s one aspect of The Last Match, though, that troubles me. At this distance, three decades later, it’s appallingly sexist. What can one say about our hero’s relationship with Boda the sex symbol—or for that matter with leading lady Reggie and her entirely * implausible virginity? All the hero’s relationships with women—including that dismal battered wife he rescues from the Nazi on the Amazon—strike me as profoundly bogus. How could my father—a liberal to his bones who encouraged me to strike out in any direction I wanted, and so attached to my mother that he died ten months after she did—come up with these broads? Even thirty years ago I think I would have been offended. Now all I can say is: Hey, Papa, we’ve come a long way, baby.
The decades of our lives, his and mine, blur together. He wrote The Last Match in the early 70s, ostensibly about fictional events in the 50s and 60s, but in fact reaching all the way back to his early years in the 20s and 30s, long before I was born. And now here I am in San Miguel—the same age as he was when he d
ied here, come to think of it—reliving our adventures. And still playing the match game.
Kendal Dodge Butler
San Miguel de Allende
Learn more about David Dodge at
www.david-dodge.com
Get The Complete First Year of
HARD CASE CRIME
…and Save More Than 30%!
If you missed any of the books from Hard Case Crimes debut year, this is your chance to get them all—at a savings of more than 30% off the cover price! Twelve great books including three Edgar Award nominees, two Shamus Award nominees, and oustanding crime classics by some of the most popular mystery writers of all time:
GRIFTER’S GAME by Lawrence Block
FADE TO BLONDE by Max Phillips
TOP OF THE HEAP by Erle Stanley Gardner
LITTLE GIRL LOST by Richard Aleas
TWO FOR THE MONEY by Max Allan Collins
THE CONFESSION by Domenic Stansberry
HOME IS THE SAILOR by Day Keene
KISS HER GOODBYE by Allan Guthrie
361 by Donald E. Westlake
PLUNDER OF THE SUN by David Dodge
BRANDED WOMAN by Wade Miller
DUTCH UNCLE by Peter Pavia
Find out why critics have called Hard Case Crime “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” and why USA Today, The New York Times, and the Sunday Morning program on CBS have all run raves about our books. All for less than $5 per book (plus just 25 cents per book for shipping)!
To order, call 1-800-481-9191
(10am to 9pm EST) and ask for the
Complete First Year of Hard Case Crime.
All 12 books for just $58 (plus $3 for shipping; US orders only)
In Print for the First Time Anywhere -
A NEW INTERNATIONAL THRILLER
BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘TO CATCH A THIEF’
When a handsome swindler working the French Riviera meets a beautiful heiress on the beach at Cannes, sparks fly. But so do bullets - and soon he’s forced to flee the country with both the police and the heiress on his trail.
From the casinos of Monaco to the jungles of Brazil, from Tangier to Marrakech to Peru, the chase is on. And not even a veteran of Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables would dare to place odds on where it will end…
Raves for the Work of DAVID DODGE…
“Pure virtuosity.”—The New York Times
“Hard-hitting…the find of the month.” — Time
“Fast and exciting.” — The New Yorker
Original cover painting by WILLIAM GEORGE for HARD CASE CRIME