The Getaway Car Page 16

  Since it wasn’t really crime stories Higgins was trying to write, his interest from the beginning was never in the caper itself. His interest was a novelistic one: What do his characters want? What are they willing to do to one another to get what they want? How do they manipulate, struggle, excuse? Why do they want what they want, and what happens inside them when they either do or do not get it?

  As Higgins, in later novels, moved away from the world of Eddie Coyle, following his true interests into the lives of other characters in other settings, critics and readers alike were annoyed and disappointed. Where were the wonderful romantic losers? Where were the great bouquets of overheard dialogue in grimy smoky bars, the cheap betrayals glancingly alluded to, the flop sweat sheening on those sallow, doomed faces? From his sudden initial burst of success, Higgins soon ebbed into a middle range of unexcited acceptance, publishing roughly one book a year, all of them rewarding but none frantically anticipated.

  It may be time to reassess Higgins, and Victories, his twenty-second book in twenty-two years, just may be the proper vehicle for it. Beginning with the title. Anyone with even the slightest acquaintanceship with the Higgins world will know that within it there are no total victories, that it would be impossible for Higgins to refer to victory without an ironic edge. And his whole career has been an ironic victory, has it not?

  Henry Briggs, the reluctant hero of Victories, is a retired ballplayer, a onetime relief pitcher, a star but never a superstar, now sharing a small-town New Hampshire home with a shrewish wife. He’s semi-estranged from his grown son and daughter, and through a local politico has taken a job as game warden, which he treats seriously and fairly. Now is 1967, with anti-Vietnam feeling just beginning to show its political muscle, and the local Democratic pols persuade Henry to run for Congress against the entrenched Republican officeholder. Henry doesn’t know it, but the pols fully expect him to lose. He’s merely the sacrificial lamb, put out there to protect the regulars from the growing power of anti-war radicals within the Democratic party.

  There have been any number of political novels written in this politics-besotted nation, but rarely if ever one with the particular angle of view of Victories. On a narrow canvas—the struggle over one minor House seat in New Hampshire—and using a limited palette of dialogue and reflection and simple action—no big-league chicanery, no smoking guns of any kind—Higgins lays out as clearly as anyone ever has just how this hopeful hopeless buoyant ridiculous self-governing scheme of ours operates. It probably would be a good idea for the Russians en masse to read this book, to learn before it’s too late just what sort of new game they’ve decided to learn to play.

  If Higgins has a major flaw, and he does, it is in his portrayal of women. Apparently he has never been in the presence of an actual woman; how else explain the clumsy failures of this normally brilliant observer? Women are more than a mystery to him, they are blank spaces with names.

  One of the most telling ironies of Victories is surely an unconscious one: The female character who grates the least is mute. This from a master of dialogue. And the most awful character is a New York woman, a political fund raiser, who marches on for one scene of dreadful monologue—thudding bricks of prose, no cross-pollination of chat from the other characters at all—and then marches away again, dragging a whole lot of the novel’s credibility with her.

  In order to keep his hero from seeming too good to be true, Higgins assures us he’s a womanizer, but not once do we see what that means. Not once does Henry interact with a woman as though he has any interest in her at all. Far from being the womanizer Higgins claims, his Henry is clearly sexless, a nice guy who’s polite to the ladies, operates on equal terms with men, and tries to behave decently.

  For a writer whose goals are high and honorable, it must be a tragedy to be so totally unable to cope with half the human race. It has to harm every serious attempt he ever makes, and suggests he’s best off after all in those smoky male-only bars.

  Which is a pity; what he sees, he sees with wonderful clarity. For a nitty-gritty study of politics at ground level, you will not find a better novel anywhere than Victories.

  ON REX STOUT

  Letter to Rex Stout’s Biographer, John J. McAleer

  November 13, 1973

  Dear Mr. McAleer,

  Rex Stout has done something very rare in his novels. He has created an on-going mini-world, a sealed-off chamber as distinct from our world as Middle Earth. When I pick up the latest Ross Macdonald I expect his character in our California, but when I pick up the latest Rex Stout I know I will enter once more into that same alternate universe, in which Archie Goodwin will drive a Heron through the streets of some city called New York. The only other writer I know of currently working in that sort of separate continuum (not counting fantasists like Tolkien) is Anthony Powell, with his Dance to the Music of Time series; which is where that comparison ends, since Powell’s purposes and methods are very different from Stout’s.

  A closer comparison is Sherlock Holmes, which of course I’m not the first to notice, and to my taste Nero Wolfe wins that one hands down. To begin with, Stout is a far better writing craftsman than Doyle, and a much more scrupulously fair mystery writer. Beyond that, the Holmes-Watson world was rather smaller and rather fuzzier at the fringes than the Wolfe-Goodwin world; I almost think, for instance, that I would recognize Orrie Cather on the street, and of what secondary Holmes character could one have the same feeling?

  But the best thing about the Nero Wolfe novels, in my opinion, is Stout’s audacity. Having his own mirror universe to play with, godlike, gives him a confidence and a field of action the rest of us can only envy from a distance, and I love the way he uses it. Only rarely is he noticeably outrageous, as in the finish of The Doorbell Rang, but in almost every book he is quietly outrageous. Looking for the murderer of a prize bull; assembling groups of suspects as though that sort of meeting were easy to arrange; giving literary criticism through whether or not Nero Wolfe dog-ears the page.

  What Stout has done, finally, beggars comparison. He has arranged a series of novels in such a way that when we open one we are not only meeting again an old friend, but a whole company of friends. And we are not inviting them into our home, they are inviting us into theirs. They are good companions, interesting and clever and humorous, and their surroundings are familiar and comfortable and well-appointed, and sitting among us all, quiet but friendly, is the master of the house himself.

  I met Rex Stout for the first time a few years ago, but I’d already met him and spent many evenings with him for a long time before that. The rest of us tell anecdotes, one at a time; he has built a house by the side of West 35th Street and has become a friend to man.

  And that’s what I have to say about Rex Stout. I know it all sounds like a PR man’s puff, but it’s the way I feel. On the critical side I think the plotting in the Nero Wolfe novels is sometimes loose and often skimpy, but I don’t go there for the plots. I go there to see my old friends and watch Archie be archly secretive about his sex life and hear Wolfe say, “Pfui.”

  Yours,

  Don Westlake

  Introduction to Rex Stout’s The Father Hunt

  This was published in 1995 as the introduction to a mass market paperback edition of The Father Hunt in Bantam’s Rex Stout Library series.—Ed.

  Some years ago I read an introduction to something or other by somebody or other, in which the introducer presented the idea—as fact—that all writers of fiction have completed their significant work by the age of forty-five. I was, I think, still in my early thirties at the time and so remained calm at this news. Somewhat later the suggestion did return to my mind, however, this time with teeth in it; and I admit I fretted, to the extent that I finally mentioned the gloomy fact to a friend who, taking pity on me, said, “Let me mention two novelists who began to write at age forty-five. They are Joseph Conrad and Rex Stout.” After which I stopped worrying about introductions.

  Rex Stout may h
ave started late, after several other successful careers, but he hit the ground running. Nero Wolfe sprang full-grown from Stout’s forehead in that first book, and though in later years he would write non-Wolfe novels and even try his hand at another series character—from Wolfe to Fox should have been easy, after all—his doom was sealed (a melodramatic phrase that Mr. Stout would never have employed) right from Fer-de-Lance.

  Nero Wolfe has become one of those rare creations—like Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Horatio Hornblower, and Jeeves—who both overshadow and outlive their authors; and I remember when I first met Mr. Stout, around 1965, being disappointed that he wasn’t Wolfe. (He was, instead, charming, open, witty, and wonderfully generous to a young writer.) Had Stout ever chosen to terminate one of Wolfe’s rare journeys to the outside world in the trusty old Heron by dropping him off at (or in) the Reichenbach Falls, no one could have blamed him, but I believe Stout submitted with good grace (a cliche he would never have employed) to Wolfe’s dominance, and they lived comfortably together for forty-three years.

  That would be a long time for any association to last, and is even more remarkable since one of the associates was forty-five years old at the beginning; but what’s more interesting, at least to me, is that Nero Wolfe is not a very nice person. He’s self-absorbed, selfish, and self-satisfied. He’s arrogant and uncivil and socially a fright. He’s prissy and misogynistic. He orders people around and gets away with it; in one book he even orders J. Edgar Hoover around and gets away with it. How on earth did Rex Stout put up with the fellow all that time?

  Maybe more important, why do we put up with him? Why did all the Nero Wolfe novels sell so very well, and go on selling in edition after edition? Why, seventeen years after Rex Stout’s death, is his creation still alive in this freshly printed book you hold in your hands? Are we wrong to enjoy Nero Wolfe so much?

  No. We are right to enjoy Rex Stout’s presentation of Nero Wolfe so much, through the brilliant prism of Archie Goodwin. Archie is ingratiation itself, an easy raconteur, an amiable chap who is bright without arrogance, knowledgeable without pretension, and quick-witted without brusqueness. If Nero Wolfe is the pill—and he is—Archie is the sugar coating.

  What makes Wolfe palatable is that Archie finds him palatable. What makes him a monster we can enjoy rather than flee from is that Archie stands between us and him. We like Archie, and Archie likes (tolerates, is amused by, is ironic toward, but serves) Nero Wolfe. It’s a wonderful conception, strong enough to build a massive readership upon, yet flexible enough for Rex Stout to use over and over for decades, in story after story.

  Not that story is the primary issue here. One doesn’t drop in at the house on Thirty-fifth Street for the plot line but for the house itself and its denizens—lovingly described, familiar, comfortable, though with Nero Wolfe in charge and Archie as Virgil never so comfortable as to bore.

  That Wolfe isn’t really that clever a detective hardly matters. (In the present book Archie even has fun over the fact that he and Wolfe can’t tell one cigar ash from another, a nicely ironic reference to Sherlock Holmes, another infuriating madman made palatable by his ingratiating interpreter.) That most Nero Wolfe novels—not including The Father Hunt, be assured—depend on at least one thundering coincidence matters not at all. Even the occasional minor glitch, as though Stout had an affinity with those Indian tribes who deliberately include a flaw in their designs so as not to compete with the perfection of the gods, doesn’t matter. (This time the glitch is extremely unimportant and occurs in Chapter 12, where Archie assures a young lady that a certain man’s name would mean nothing to her even though Archie and the young lady had met the man together in Chapter 8; no matter, no matter.)

  Stout had fun with Nero Wolfe. Well, he had fun with life. Having some years earlier written a Wolfe novel called The Mother Hunt, it was probably more than he could resist not to write one called The Father Hunt. It was written when he was seventy-nine, and it all still works. As time goes by, I increasingly find that another comforting thought.

  INTRODUCTION TO JACK RITCHIE’S A NEW LEAF AND OTHER STORIES

  This was written as the introduction to a 1971 paperback collection of Jack Ritchie’s short stories.—Ed.

  In July of 1969 I wrote a letter to Jack Ritchie, whom I’d never met. It said, in part:

  Ten, eleven years ago, while trying to learn how to sell stories to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, I bought every back issue of the thing and read them all in one extended chug-a-lug, emerging at last with a permanently stunted mind but also with the pleasure of having read two consistently first-rate writers, of whom Jack Ritchie was both the more prolific and the more first-rate. In the years since, I have used you twice with friends who wanted to write short stories, handing them leaning towers of AHMM and telling them to read all Ritchie. . . .

  Now the suggestion has come from Dell that I write an introduction to your collection, and it seems to me you’re the man to decide about that. I’ve been thinking to myself, what if out of the blue some guy were to suddenly shoulder his way into my book, what would my reaction be? I decided I’d get irritated.

  If you too would get irritated, please tell me so and I will understand. If you wouldn’t get irritated, I’d be delighted to ramble on about you in print.

  Jack’s response was gracious and to the point: “By all means I’d like you to write an introduction for the collection of stories and don’t hesitate a moment about rambling on and on.”

  So that’s what I’m doing here. As to what Jack Ritchie is doing here, he is a quiet, unassuming worker out there in the vineyard who has perhaps finally come into his own. First, of course, with the publication of this book, for although his stories have spread like Smiths through most of the anthologies published in the past decade, this is the first volume devoted entirely to Jack Ritchie stories. And second, more indirectly, through films. The first major movie effort of Elaine May, the treble half of Nichols-May (she wrote the screenplay, served as director, and co-starred with Walter Matthau), is based on the title story from this collection.

  Jack Ritchie happens to be a brilliant man in the wrong pew, a miniaturist in an age of elephantiasis. He knows, maybe better than anybody else currently at work in the area, that a short story needs emphasis on both words—it should be a story, full and round and plotted and peopled and with a satisfactory finish, and it should also be short.

  The late Anthony Boucher, mystery-story reviewer for the New York Times and compiler of the Best Detective Story annuals, summed Ritchie up this way: “Jack Ritchie is consistently one of the most original writers (and possibly the most economic) in the crime-fiction magazines.” Jack’s stories feed you information like a computer, fast, efficient, precise, and painless.

  In the musical Top Banana, the comedian complains to his writer about a skit that takes two pages in a doctor’s office before the comedian comes on. When the writer says he needs the two pages to set the scene, the comedian says to a crony, “Get me into the doctor’s office.” The crony turns to the audience and says, “Here we are in the doctor’s office.” If I ever meet Jack Ritchie, I’ll be terribly disappointed if he doesn’t look like that crony.

  There are a number of different talents we’re trying to describe here. A writing talent of the first rank, to begin with. A quiet, deadpan humor that always seems to know precisely how far to go. An imagination that has produced in the last dozen years so many short stories that the eighteen in this volume barely scratch the surface. A skill at economy that just can’t be described economically. (Look at the first paragraph of the first story herein, “Package Deal.” I know writers who would be two chapters into a novel by the end of that paragraph. And if you went to look, it’s seven-to-two you didn’t come back to this introduction till you finished reading the story. Good, wasn’t it? Required no introduction, did it?)

  What do you do with a man who persists in being a brilliant miniaturist in a society that equates literary excellence in terms o
f poundage, a world that determines how good a book is by how much grass it kills if you leave it under the hammock? One thing you can do is try to tell people how good he is, as I am trying to do now. Or as Anthony Boucher frequently did. Let me offer another statement of his:

  What I like most about Jack Ritchie’s work is its exemplary neatness. No word is wasted, and many words serve more than one purpose. Exposition disappears; all needed facts are deftly inserted as the narrative flows forward. Ritchie can write a long short story that is virtually the equivalent of a full suspense novel; and his very short stories sparkle as lapidary art.

  Finally, though, Jack Ritchie himself offers (inadvertently) the best and most economical (of course) description of Jack Ritchie. In a story of his called “Piggy Bank Killer,” not included in this collection, the narrator says of another character in the story, “I had the feeling the boy could have written War and Peace on the back of a postcard.”

  Exactly.

  FOREWORD TO THURBER ON CRIME

  Westlake contributed this introduction to a 1991 collection of James Thurber’s writings and cartoons. When Westlake notes that Thurber made use of confusion and bewilderment, it calls to mind Westlake’s own website: in the last years of his life, it opened with a screen that showed nothing but the words “I believe my subject is bewilderment.” Bewildered, the visitor waited a few seconds, then the screen changed to read, “But I could be wrong.”—Ed.

  Gentle comedy is the hardest to make work. The fellow who slips on the banana peel, catches the cream pie smack in the kisser, gets his necktie set on fire—all of those are guaranteed yocks. To laugh at the cartoon character who has already taken three steps into midair before noticing he’s gone beyond land’s edge, and who has now just time to give us one unbelieving look before the plummet; easy as falling off a cliff. But gentle comedy, comedy in which the disaster is either subtly referential or nonexistent, that’s tough. What’s funny about a guy who doesn’t spill the soup in his lap?