Fri 17 Apr 2009
I realized, when I saw that Hard Case Crime was reissuing Donald Westlake’s The Mercenaries as The Cutie and that Ramble House was reissuing Ed Gorman’s The Night Remembers, that I’d reviewed both for Drood Review back in the early 1990s.
Here they are. I enjoyed them a lot, but I am curious as to what I’d have to say about them today, after 18 years of life…
From The Drood Review of Mystery, April 1991:
DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Mercenaries. Carroll & Graf, reprint paperback, 1991. Random House, hardcover, 1960. Also published as: The Smashers, Dell, paperback, 1962; and as The Cutie, Hard Case Crime, 2009.
Thirty years lends a curious and bloodless innocence to Westlake’s debut novel. In The Mercenaries, the criminal organization is just that: a business enterprise run by suited, thin-lipped executives.
The protagonist is Clay, a dutiful middle manager who takes care of the details and shuts off his emotions when employees must be (literally) terminated. Those emotions get a workout, however, when he’s forced to play private eye to find the “cutie” whose murder of a connected man’s mistress may be the opening salvo in a power play aimed at Clay’s boss.
Written in steady, unobtrusive style, The Mercenaries speeds along, going almost too fast to allow us to figure out what Westlake’s trying to accomplish. Is this an early spin on blue-jawed gangster stereotypes, or a dry spoof of the then-popular Organization Man?
References and details and Clay’s early ’60s New York “sophistication” date marvelously. If all of the plot details don’t jell at the story’s conclusion, it’s because we see things through Clay’s eyes. And in the disorienting and ambiguous ending, Westlake foreshadows the genesis of one of his most famous characters, Parker.
From The Drood Review of Mystery, March 1991:
ED GORMAN – The Night Remembers. St. Martins, hardcover, 1991. No mass market paperback edition. Ramble House reprint: hardcover/trade paperback, 2008.
Sixtyish Jack Walsh, retired Cedar Rapids deputy turned private investigator, is presented with a classic predicament: the wife of a man he sent to prison wants him to prove her husband’s innocence. It takes one corpse (that of a would-be blackmailer) and one intimation of mortality (a cancer scare for Walsh’s lover) to put him on the job.
Gorman dedicates the book to Bill Pronzini “and somebody else who shall remain Nameless.” While there’s a superficial resemblance to Pronzini’s well-seasoned sleuth, the two characters’ real common ground is their maturity. Each brings his life experience to his cases, neither needs to be a tough guy and both are able to be empathetic and judgmental at the appropriate times.
Characterization is Gorman’s strong suit and he presents Walsh’s sensitivity without dropping into easy sentimentality. The sometimes awkward, sometimes silent relationship between Walsh and his mildly restless lover is uncomfortably true to life in the ’90s.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:35 am
The Cutie/The Mercenaries takes on even more interest in relation to Westlake’s later comic novel The Busy Bodies where he does the whole Mobster in the gray flannel suit thing for comic effect with the hero a bumbling fool who rises in the organization entirely based on his ability to dress sharply and coordinate his ties. You have to wonder if he was thinking of Cutie when he wrote The Busy Bodies.