Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 Read Free

character in that book, Parker, and asked me, "Do you think you
could give us two or three books a year about him ? " I thought I could. For several years, I did.
                   At the same time, the writing I was doing
under my own name had taken a completely unexpected (by me) turn. Comedy had
come in.
                   Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I was
never a comic. All through my life, in grammar school, in high school, in
college, I was never the funniest kid in class. I was always, invariably, the
funniest kid's best friend. Out of college and in New York and beginning to make my career as a
writer, I got to know a couple of funny writers and I was their best audience.
I wasn't the guy with the quick line; I was the guy who loved the quick line.
                   Well, I had a relationship with comedy, it
seems, which I'd never dealt with or thought about. But comic elements started
creeping into my stories in surprising and sometimes alarming ways. Even in
"The Sound of Murder," look at how many comic references, comic
elements there are in a story which is in no way comic. Undoubtedly that was an
unconscious part of my reaction to the coldness and humorlessness of both The
Hunter and 361.
                   It was two and a half years after "The Sound
of Murder" before the comic side was at last given its head. In the early
spring of 1964 I started a mystery novel, intended to be published under my own
name by Random House, about a young man who runs a bar in Brooklyn which is owned by the Maha. They use it as
a tax loss and to launder money, they occasionally use it as a package drop,
and the young man has the job of running it because his uncle is connected with
the Mob. At the beginning of the story, two mob hitmen enter the bar as the
young man is about to close for the night, try to kill
him, and miss.
                   This was intended to be an ordinary
innocent-on-the-run story, in which the innocent can't go to the poUce because
of his uncle's mob connection. The schnook-on-the-run story, as in The 39 Steps
or Alfred Hitchcock's movie Saboteur (in which Robert Cummings played the
schnook, and not to be confused with Hitchcock's Sabotage in which Sylvia
Sidney played the schnook), has certain comic elements built into it, but it
needn't be a comic story, nor did I initially see my mob-nephew tale as a comic
story.
                   But something went wrong. The conventions of
the form prostrated themselves before me. Something manic glowed in the air,
like St. Elmo's fire. Instead of the comic's best friend — Shazam! —became the
comic!
                   I finished that book in May of 1964 and called
it The Dead Nephew. My editor at Random House — Lee Wright, the best editor I
have ever known, though two others come close —hated that tide, and I hated
every alternative she suggested, and she hated every other title I offered, and
finally, exhausted, we leaned on our lances and gasped and agreed to call the
thing The Fugitive Pigeon. It became the first of a run of comic novels which,
so far as I know, has not yet come to an end.
                   Well, The Fugitive Pigeon was published in
March of 1965 2uid "The Death of a Bum" appeared three months later,
and by then I was deeply into being a comic novelist. And in those periods when
I came to the surface for air I would turn into a coldly emotionless novelist
named Richard Stark who wrote about a sumbitch named Parker. And Levine
receded.
                   But he never entirely faded from view. From
almost the beginning I had had that rough idea for a Levine story which I'd
never written, and which I now realized was the logical story to follow
"The Death of a Bum," but the silence had lasted too long, my
concentration was elsewhere, and in any event I had just about given up writing
short stories and had certainly stopped writing novelettes. From