DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Levine.

Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprint: Tor, 1985. No UK edition.

   In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Westlake was a frequent contributor to the digest-size mystery magazines. Included among his output were five novelettes — four published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine between 1959 and 1962 and one in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in 1965 — about Abraham Levine, a detective with Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct.

   Levine is no ordinary cop; he is fifty-three years old and lives on the edge of his emotions, constantly worrying about his aged heart, constantly taking his pulse; a man who is “so tensely aware of his own inevitable death that he wound up hating people who took the idea of death frivolously,” as Westlake writes in his introduction to this collection of the five early Levine stories plus one brand-new novelette.

   Each of Levine’s cases ties in with his relationship with death, “his virtual romance with death,” for “death fascinated Levine, it summoned him and yet repelled him.”

    “The Best-Friend Murder” involves him in a complicated psychological case of murder and suicide whose principals are both young, healthy males.

    In “‘Come Back, Come Back … ’” it is Levine versus a man on a ledge, a man who wants to take his own life.

    In “The Feel of the Trigger,” perhaps the best of the four AHMM novelettes, it is Levine versus Levine when he is forced into a kill-or-be-killed showdown with a teenage murderer.

    “The Sound of Murder” takes Levine “farther down the same road, and when I finished it,” Westlake says, “I wondered if I hadn’t gone too far … made him someone no longer relevant to his theme.”

    Not so. He brought Levine back for one more appearance, albeit three years later, in “Death of a Bum” — a story that was rejected by AHMM and other markets because it has no resolution, because it has instead one of the most painfully emotional endings of any story in the genre. It was and is the ultimate Levine story; Westlake knew it and retired the character.

    Until 1984, that is, when the idea for this collection was broached to him. The early stories weren’t sufficient to make a complete book; he would have to write a sixth Levine novelette for that purpose.

   On the one hand, it is fortunate he agreed to do so, for now the early stories have been made available in book form. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that Westlake chose to write “After I’m Gone.”

    Not because it is a bad story; it isn’t — it is Westlake at his most facile, with an up-to-the-minute plot involving high-tech gangsters and a perfectly fitting and proper resolution, both of the story and of the miniseries.

    No, the problem is that the intense feeling that makes the early works so poignant — the very core of the Levine series — is missing here. There is a detachment, a truncation of emotional content — as if Westlake, after twenty long years, has lost touch with the essence of his character.

   That one slick, somewhat superficial (and therefore frivolous) story keeps this collection from being what it should be: a wholly suitable monument to a man named Abraham Levine, a man who hated people who take the idea of death frivolously.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.