Tue 21 Feb 2023
An Archived Review by Bob Adey: DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Dancing Aztecs.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[9] Comments
DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Dancing Aztecs. Evans, hardcover, 1976. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1977. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1989.
Good humorous crime stories ere very few and far between, and this has to be one of the best of them. The plot concerns a stolen golden statue (of a dancing Aztec) which somehow gets mixed in with a consignment of copies. The sixteen statues are given out to the members of a civil rig11ts group, and then various crooks and con men and gold diggers (some of them from within the ranks of the civil rights group itself) spend the rest of the book trying to find out which one is the real thing.
It’s witty and funny and beautifully observed. Ilf and Petrov did a similar thing with chairs but it couldn’t have been any better than this. Simply crying out for a movie version — but perhaps somebody’s already done (or doing) it!
February 21st, 2023 at 9:28 pm
Unfortunately, no one has, then or yet.
February 22nd, 2023 at 3:59 am
… but there is a very good film of The Twelve Chairs, starring Ron Moody.
February 22nd, 2023 at 9:08 am
I agree. I remember once discussing this will Bill Pronzini, who said (rightly), “No one does New York like Westlake.”
February 22nd, 2023 at 4:00 pm
In fact, according to IMDB, there are more than a dozen films based on The Twelve Chairs – and it has the same plot as The Six Napoleons by Arthur Conan Doyle.
February 22nd, 2023 at 6:03 pm
Much as I love Dortmunder, some of Westlake’s best comic capers were non series entries like this.
February 22nd, 2023 at 6:27 pm
DANCING AZTECS was made into a French film back in 1997 entitled – La Divine Poursuite. It’s okay, with some wild slapstick, but loses something in the translation – mainly NYC.
February 22nd, 2023 at 8:05 pm
And so it was. Here’s the IMDb link:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118992/reference/
The English title seems to have been THE GODS MUST BE DARING.
Thanks, Joe!
February 26th, 2023 at 4:48 am
This book was also published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1979 as A NEW YORK DANCE.
February 26th, 2023 at 4:56 am
An earlier Mystery*File review of this book by Bill Pronzini: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=926