Wed 13 Mar 2019
DONALD WESTLAKE – Kahawa. Viking, hardcover, 1982. Tor, paperback, 1984. Mysterious Press, hardcover reprint, 1995; paperback, 1996.
This was originally published in the early 80s, as I’m sure most of you knew but I didn’t. Evidently it sank without a trace then, and now Mysterious is re-publishing it with a new introduction by Westlake.
Lew Brady, a good, old-fashioned soldier-of-fortune, is stranded in Alaska, reduced to teaching truckers how to fend off union strong-arms. He’s only partly assuaged by the fact that he’s with his lover, a bush pilot.
Then comes a call from an old mercenary friend who wants him to come to Africa and help steal a train. That’s right, a train. It belongs to Idi Amin, the Uganda strongman, and it’s full of some very pricey coffee. Brandy and his lady pilot hie themselves to the Dark Continent, where they find good and bad guys of all races, and enough excitement to banish boredom forever.
There are few if any who do caper novels better than Westlake. All the old pro’s skills are in evidence here, if not in quite as polished form as they are today. He created a fascinating cat of characters, with the real-life portrait of Idi Amin hovering chillingly over them all.
Uganda was a bad, bad place to be in those days, and Westlake brings it to life for you. It’s a thick book, 496 pages, and therein lay my only cavil — it’s hard to maintain the level of intensity a caper novel requires for that length, and I thought that Westlake occasionally failed to do so.
But it’s still a decent book, by one of the best. If no one made a movie of this, they missed a damned good bet.
March 13th, 2019 at 5:38 pm
Barry got this one exactly right. If you’re a fan of caper novels, this is one you simply don’t want to miss.
On the other hand, it’s simply too long. There’s something to be said for leaving the readers of stories like this wanting more, not less.
March 13th, 2019 at 8:26 pm
Westlake’s attempt to move into the big adventure novel genre is very good but ultimately unsatisfying for reasons I have never quite been able to nail down.
Entertaining and worth reading, but not major Westlake or a really successful big adventure novel.
March 13th, 2019 at 8:56 pm
His mistake may have been in trying to expand the caper or heist novel that he was comfortable with into the Big Adventure Novel. If you can think of a BAN as long as KAHAWA, I’d be happy to know about it.
(It’s been too long since I read KAHAWA. I remember enjoying it, but there may have been other problems with it. Its length may not have been the major one. My sense is that it’s not a book that most readers think of when Westlake’s overall body of work comes up for discussion.)