THE MANY NAMES OF WESTLAKE

by Rob Lopresti

This is a bittersweet moment for me. I just finished Get Real, which was the last Donald Westlake book, unless there are some oddities lying around in the vault (lucky for us if there are). Dortmunder and the gang went out in style. At one point the gloomy thief waxes uncharacteristically philosophic and almost lyrical as he explains why he is against honest labor.

“Money from wages,” Dortmunder said, “is not the same as the same money from theft. Money from theft is purer. There’s no indentured servitude on it, no knuckling under to whatever anybody else wants, no obedience. It isn’t yours because you swapped it for your own time and work, it’s yours because you took it.”

When I wrote a piece about Westlake’s death I promised to reprint here a column I wrote in the late lamented Murderous Intent Mystery Magazine back in 1996. It lies below with a few changes, and is followed by Westlake’s response.

The column

The wonderful book Murder Ink contains one of the weirdest group interviews ever recorded. Halfway through it, someone poisoned one of the participants, Tucker Coe, the author of five novels about a sensitive-cop-turned-unlicensed-private-eye. Then Richard Stark, author of many hardboiled classics, pulled a gun and took the wallets of the other participants, an anonymous interviewer, Donald Westlake, and self-proclaimed hack Timothy J. Culver.

Of course, all this mayhem occurred in the brain of Westlake himself , for the other gentlemen are merely some of his pen names. He also wrote science fiction as Curt Clark and satire as J. Morgan Cunningham — and those are just the ones he admitted to.

I don’t know whether these multiple identities led to Westlake’s fascination with names, or vice versa. In any case many of his characters have problems with their handles.

For example, the hero (if that’s the word I want) of Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner is cursed with a surname tha tis invariably mispronounced as a very vulgar word. He responds to life’s little jest by becoming a practical joker, which is how he winds up in jail. Similarly, Ian MacDough, in Nobody’s Perfect, is a Scotsman infuriated because no one ever pronounces his name correctly (MacDuff, of course.)

The comic novel Brothers Keepers is a virtual catalog of name games. Before Brother Benedict, the main character, became a monk his name was Charles Rowbottom Finchworthy Swellingsburg. “They never leave enough room on application blanks,” he laments.

While trying to save his Park Avenue monastery from being torn down by developers, Brother Benedict meets a group of wealthy young Irish-Americans whose wasted lives are suggested by their last names: Bone, Foney, and Flattery. (“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he is told at one point.) Fans of William Faulkner will be pleased to know that one of the rapacious developers is named Snopes.

But the most spectacular example of Westlake’s identity-shifting may be Jimmy The Kid. In this novel Dortmunder decided to steal the plot of a novel by (who else?) Richard Stark. (Westlake stole this idea from some French criminals who really did borrow a kidnapping plan from a book by Lionel White. Confusing?)

During the course of the novel Richard Stark’s lawyer gets involved, threatening to sue someone for plagiarism. The lawyer’s name is a nom-de-plume once used by Westlake’s own lawyer. This means – watch closely, I have nothing up my sleeves — the attorney for Westlake’s pseudonym is a pseudonym for Westlake’s lawyer.

Follow up

When this column appeared I naturally sent a copy of Murderous Intent to the man himself. Westlake sent back a gracious thank you note that said in part: “I’ve always had fun with names. There’s Chief Inspector Mologna pronounced Maloney) in Good Behavior. Dortmunder himself was named after a German beer, and in the movies where the name had to be changed he’s been other beers, such as Ballantine in Bank Shot… Right now I’m trying to find a name for the lead of a new book, to suggest his superfluousness. Names like Oatious. Maybe he’s Ed Rundant. Or maybe I shouldnt get too cute.”

But by any name, Westlake would read as sweet.