Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (2 page)

 
          
 
Nevertheless, for seven months I turned my
attention to other things, and it wasn't until May of 1962 that I finally gfave
in to the inevitable and wrote "The Death of a Bum." It was one of
the easiest writing tasks Fve ever had; I knew the character somewhat better
than I knew myself; I had known the story for more than half a year; I had already
decided it was uncommercial, so there was no point trying to please any
particular editor or audience. Sometimes writers say that this or that story
"wrote itself," which is never true, but "The Death of a
Bum" required a lot less midwifing than usual.

 
          
 
As I’d expected, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery
Magazine couldn't use the story, though the editor wrote a very nice and
sincere letter—not of apology, but of regret, since he too had grown to like
Levine. I wrote back explaining that I'd been prepared for the rejection and
was neither surprised nor hurt. I then left it to my agent to do what he could.

 
          
 
It took nearly three years, and I don't know
how many submissions, but at last "The Death of a Bum" was published,
in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, in June of 1965. And there the series ended.

 
          
 
It ended for a variety of reasons. One of
them, naturally, was the three-year span between the writing of "The Death
of a Bum" and its publication; I felt I couldn't write a new story about
Abe Levine before the previous story had found a home. This may seem an
unnecessary self-restriction, but in my mind the stories had evolved in such a
clear step-by-step way, each one leading to the next, that a story written as "The
Death of a Bum" but published before it or instead of it would at least
for me have destroyed the organic reality of the character and his life.

 
          
 
Another reason for the series ending was a
change that had taken place in my own career, which had become schizophrenic in
the nicest possible way. The tough guy novel I had written under the name of
Richard Stark— The Hunter—had been liked and bought by an editor at Pocket
Books named Bucklyn Moon, a fine man of whom I cannot say too much (but one
thing of whom I must say is that I wish he were still with us), who had liked
the lead 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 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 Americans today have never
in their livee ridden a train. Without our much realizing it —and without the
academics yet having discovered it as a thesis topic — we have grown accustomed
to adapting ourselves to the time of a story's creation as well as to its
characters and plot and themes.

           
 
Besides which, updating is hardly ever really
successful. The assumptions of the moment run deep; removing them from a
generation-old story isn't a simple matter of taking the hero out of a
Thunderbird and putting him into a Honda. It's root-canal work; the moment of
composition runs its traces through the very sentence structure, like gold ore
through a mountain.

 
          
 
And if it isn't possible to bring
twenty-year-old stories blinking and peering into the light of today as though
they were newborn infants, it is equally unlikely for me to erase the last
twenty years from my own mind and write as though it were 1962 in this room, I
am twenty-nine, and most of my children aren't alive yet. If I write a story
now, this moment will exist in it, no matter what I try to do.

 
          
 
I have written that final story, czilled
"After I’m Gone." I have as much as possible tried to make it a story
without obvious temporal references, neither then nor now. I have tried to make
it a story that could be read in a magazine in 1983 without the reader
thinking, "This must be a reprint," and at the same time I've tried
to make it flow naturally from the Levine stories that preceded it. No one
could succeed completely straddling such a pair of stools; certainly not me.
But if I have at least muted my failure and made it not too clamorous, I'll be
content.

 
          
 
As for Abe Levine, we are old friends. He's
been there all along, inside my head, waiting for the next call. I had no
trouble getting to know him again, and it's my fond belief that he is clearly
the same person in the last story that he was in the first, however much time
may or may not have gone by. I would like to introduce him to you now, and I
hope you like him.

 
          
 
Donald E. Westlake