Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 Read Free Page A

that high of
forty-six short stories and novelettes in 1959, by 1966 I was down to zero
novelettes and only one short story (which was never published). Between 1967
and 1980 I wrote no novelettes at all and only seven short stories, most of which
had been commissioned.
                   Some of Abe Levine's sensibility, if nothing
else, came out f in a group of five novels I wrote in the late sixties and
early i seventies, using the pen-name Tucker Coe, about an ex- cop ) named Mitch Tobin. But Tobin was not Levine, and death
was not Tobin's primary topic.
                   Abe Levine's saga remained incomplete, and I
knew it, and it gnawed at me from time to time. Once, in the late seventies, I
tried to rework the stories into a novel, intending to plot out that final unwritten
story as the last section of the book. (At that time, I thought it was a story
about a burglar.) But, although I see an organic connection among the stories,
they are certainly not a novel, nor could they be. They are separate
self-contained stories, and putting them in novel drag only makes them look
embarrassed and foolish. That novelizing project failed of its own futility,
and I stopped work on it long before I got to the new material; so the final
story remained unwritten.
                   It might have remained unwritten forever
except for Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Press. In the spring of
1982 he and I were talking about another project I don't seem to be working on,
which is a book about Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood {Jasper didn't do
it). I told Otto about Levine, about the five stories I'd written and the one I
hadn't written, and he asked to read them. Having done so, he then said he
would like to publish them as a collection, but they weren't long enough to
fill a book. "You'll just have to write the other story," he said.
                   Well, of course I didn't have to write the
other story. But the truth was, I wanted to write that story, it had been
itching at me for a long, long time, but I had never had the right impetus at
the right moment before. Did I have it now? Obviously, since you are holding
the book in your hands, I did.
                  The last story.
                   I might be able to write just one more story
about Levine, but I knew from the beginning that that would be it. I couldn't possibly
resurrect the character, dust him off, and run him through an endless series of
novelettes, not now. But one story; yes.
                   There were problems, though, and the very
first problem was time. The first five stories were all over twenty years old.
The final story could not take place twenty years later in Levine's life, even
though it was doing so in his author's. Should I rewrite the earlier stories,
updating them, moving them through experiences they had never known; Vietnam , Watergate, the Kennedy assassinations, the
changing public perceptions of policemen, all the rest of it? Should I rather
attempt to write historical fiction, to write the final story as though it were
being written in November of 1962 instead of November of 1982?
                   I’ve thought about the problem of updating
before this, and generally speaiking Fm against it. I believe that television
has made a deep change in our perception of time — at least of recent time —
and that in some way all of the last fifty years exists simultaneously in our
heads, some parts in better focus than others. Because of television and its
re-runs and its reliance on old movies to fill the unrelenting hours, we all
know Alan Ladd better than we would have otherwise. We all understand men in
hats and women in shoulderpads, we comprehend both the miniskirt and the new
look, automobiles'of almost any era are familiar to
us, and we are comfortable with the idea of a man making a nickel phone call.
Train travel is not foreign to us, even though most