Double Feature by Donald E. Westlake

As promised at the end of this post, this year I've resolved to clear a path through the fifty-ish books, practically all unread, in my Hard Case Crime collection. (To browse their catalog, click here. They're doing the Lord's work over yonder.) I will avoid spoilers; it's the plot twists and secrets that make the genre so much fun and I will dance around them like Fred Astaire tiptoeing across the proverbial stage. 

First up: Double Feature, a "two-reeler" per its dedication that reprints a novella "A Travesty" and a long short story "Ordo". Both were first published in the 70s as Enough. 

Westlake had previously published a book titled Two Much, and the original inscription to Enough featured the definition of "enough" from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary: "too much." Kind of an involved gag. Charles Ardai (Hard Case Crime impresario) decided on the more immediately accessible Double Feature for this reprint. 

How are the novellas? Both fantastic. Salinger-esque in spots. Voice-and-sentiment-and-detail-wise, I mean, not necessarily that Salinger is some universal standard. One hears the name "Donald E. Westlake" often enough, and almost universally favorably, but primarily by other genre fiction writers. Too bad, the writing here is crisp enough to appeal to readers of any genre. This was my first Westlake - hey, everyone starts somewhere - but it will by no means be my last. I actually enjoyed it enough where my second entry in this series will be 361, another HCC by Westlake staring down at me from the shelf.

The first of the two stories is "A Travesty." A bit of a non-title, in my opinion. The plot: Carey Thorpe is a film critic and author of esoteric analyses for obscure film journals for the Kips Bay Voice. (Kips Bay is on the east side of Manhattan, a posh enough zip code in the 70s – probably still, I don’t know). His life gets more complicated when he accidentally kills his girlfriend (well, one of his girlfriends, not to be confused with his wife), the film star Laura Penney, and is immediately blackmailed by the private detective Laura’s husband hired as he suspected she was having an affair. Thorpe, a quick study in blackmail as well as murder, wastes little time in blackmailing the private detective, which works for a little while but not for long.

In the meantime, the cops investigating Laura’s murder take a shine to Carey, and he soon discovers he has a heretofore unknown talent for crimesolving. “Over and over he spots that one little clue that cracks the case.” Accompanying them to a crime scene of a director killed in his projecting room, he solves it “the way fictional detectives in bad mystery stories so often do. Over and over he spots that one little clue that cracks the case (….) Now if he actually wanted this to happen, it would be impossibly contrived and far-fetched (like most detective novels) but because it’s just something Carey finds himself doing reflexively, more or less because it’s so damned obvious to him that he can’t keep from speaking up, and, because, after all it’s what detectives ire always doing in the movies.”

The quotes are from the Westlake Review write-up of this story. Spoilers abound over at that link, so if you wish to avoid them, there you go. (It's a great review, though, and the comments are even better.) This aspect of the story felt intrusive at first, and then it became quite funny. And resolves itself very well in the last chapter. That last thing quoted above is a running motif of the novella. Carey thinks of everything in terms of movies – like most people in real life, I suppose. The private detective blackmailing him is likened to Martin Balsam and several other would-be-spoilers-to-even-describe-their-role-in-the-story are filtered similarly through cinematic touchstones.

Ardai’s intro asks Westlake’s posthumous forgiveness for some “modest tinkering.” I don’t know how modest it was, never having seen the original copy. Westlake’s fans seem an industrious bunch out the web, so I assume someone has a link somewhere comparing the two versions. I’d like to know which of the two authors to thank for paragraphs such as these:

"The gilded cage enclosing this contented canary was a seventh-floor co-op apartment in a grim red-brick building in Corona, Queens, not far from the Long Island Expressway. One saw it out there, churning away in the blighted darkness beyond the living room windows like a diorama of life on the planet Jupiter. The apartment itself was warm and yellow and bright, with furniture that must have looked just as flimsy and just as tacky in the Long Island showrooms from which it had been purchased. A great rectangular green-and-yellow painting of a meadow glade in spring, the grandmother of all jigsaw puzzles, dangled over the sofa like an eavesdropper, while Staples and I sat daringly beneath it, drinking Corona Hills Scotch with club soda and chatting about great murder mysteries of fact and fancy."

 or

"It was like being stuck in one of the sweeter Disney cartoons, one of the early ones where the sentimentality really cloys. Great pink clouds of love floated everywhere, and tiny blue-birds seemed to flutter just beyond my peripheral vision."

Or any other dozen examples. I’m going to assume Westlake in each circumstance; it’s only fair. I doubt the tinkering would extend to anything conspicuous. Ardai mentions he did this happily enough when Westlake wrote him for him during the author’s lifetime, so I take it on faith that that’s the case.

All of the 70s touches are great and really add to the proceedings. That’s the kind of thing that you can’t really put on the author, it’s just a side effect of having been published during an era of time from which the world has moved on. The Tommyknockers has similar delights, as does the Canterbury Tales. But when a writer has a good eye for detail and the symbolic value of detail as well as how technology can drive a plot – particularly a murder plot – everything is put to excellent use. (Particularly the answering machine and the projector with reels of Gaslight Carey has at his home. “You mean you own that movie? You have it right there in your apartment?”)

The second of the two novellas - and considerably shorter than the first - is "Ordo," named after its protagonist, Ordo Tupikos, a Greek-American sailor who was once, unbeknownst to him, married to a movie star. She wasn't a movie star when he knew her; she was just Estelle Anlic. Now she is a siren of the silver screen, Dawn Devayne. (Sirens and Greek sailors - you see what we're getting at, here.)

Ordo travels to Hollywood to seek her out, sort of as a murder mystery: who has "killed" Estelle and taken her backstory? (He finds out about this as a movie magazine printed a picture of their wedding, so he has been written into the backstory of the legend.) And there I shall leave you, since even though there's not much to spoil, it's all very much worth discovering on your own. 

I wondered what the connection was between "A Travesty" and this one, outside of both involving movie stars. I'll quote once again the Westlake Review:

"Ordo, who is not the least bit discontented, who is totally at ease with himself at all times, really wants to crack this case, and when he finally does, he’s satisfied with the answer he got, and he goes back to his life, and that’s it.  End of story.  It’s interesting; I wouldn’t say it was fun.   It’s funny at points, but you don’t laugh while reading it."

I think that's it, on both counts. It's a melancholy story with some real emotional weight and all that life-is-like-that hit-ya-in-the-feels stuff at which great writers excel. It's hard to get across simple truths like be satisfied with yourself even in extraordinary circumstances. Stay lashed to your mast. The past is another country. 

"People on game shows are very emotional."

Both were made into films: "Travesty" (retitled A Slight Case of Murder, a TV movie from 1999 with William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman) and "Ordo" a French film from 2004.  I haven't seen either, though now they're on the list.

~

The Hard Case Chronicles will continue soon. I'll be reviewing some other books/ other projects in the interim. And more TNG and more comics-crap sooner or later.

Stay un-murdered out there, friends!