The Hot Rock (1970) - Donald E. Westlake

 “It’s a jinx,” Dortmunder said. “Don’t give me any more horoscope stuff, all I’m saying is I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in jinxes, but there’s one jinx in the world and that emerald is it.”

- The Hot Rock, Donald E. Westlake, 1970

John Dortmunder has a reputation as a smart crook, but one thing he never learned is that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. So when his buddy Kelp comes to him with a can’t miss proposition, he barely hesitates before signing on. It seems that a recent civil war in Africa has led to the formation of two countries: Talabwo and Akinzi. Akinzi wound up in possession of an emerald claimed by Talabwo, but refuses to return it. Thus, Talabwo’s ambassador to America approached Kelp, and Kelp Dortmunder, with a plan. They are to steal the emerald from an exhibition and bring it to the ambassador, for which they, and anyone whose services they need, will receive $30,000 apiece. Well, what are two poor crooks to do in the face of temptation like that? They round up a crew, case the joint, and steel the emerald. All of which goes according to plan, up until they attempt their escape. I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but the long and the short of it is that they make their escape sans emerald. And so they’re back to square one, planning a different scheme to steal the same emerald.

This is the general pattern of the plot Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock (1970). Dortmunder et al. devise a plan to steal the emerald, only for it to slip through their fingers due to pure bad luck, prompting the development of another, even crazier scheme. And the schemes are crazy. (Though I’ll avoid going into details, the highlight is one involving a borrowed train and an insane asylum.) Westlake originally conceived the novel as a dramatic heist story, but his plot ideas kept getting wackier until he realized that he had the makings of a good comic novel on his hands. (Luckily for him, given how successful the series would turn out to be).

As should be clear by this point, The Hot Rock is not really a mystery, for the simple reason that there’s nothing to solve. It’s a comic heist story, and a very amusing one at that. Unfortunately, though, that leaves me with very little to say about it. There are some clever twists, and the reader is likely to anticipate some of them, but they are not in any sense fairly clued. There’s no grand narrative trick or subversion of the expected structure. It’s just an entertainingly written crime novel with a lot of large-scale set-pieces. And that’s not at all a bad thing, but it doesn’t leave much to talk about without getting in to spoilers.

Consequently, despite The Hot Rock appearing on the syllabus of deductive fiction, there isn’t all that much to say about it from a genre historical angle either. Certainly, one can trace a line of decent from, for example, Hornung’s Raffles stories and Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. Of these, judging only from this novel, the Dortmunder series seems to have more in common with the Raffles stories, which focus on the commission of a theft from the thieves’ perspective, than with the Lupin series, which often included deductive elements. Westlake’s main innovation here was creating a series in which the premise was predicated on the protagonist’s bad luck, where much of the entertainment comes from seeing the improbable ways that things go wrong and the equally improbable ways he comes up with to try to fix things, as opposed to the usual format of this type of story, which is watching things go largely as planned, with occasional setbacks thrown in to keep things exciting.

Looking back over this review, it seems as if my thoughts on the book are ambivalent, but that’s not the case. The Hot Rock is an amusing novel, and I enjoyed it enough that I plan to return to the series in the future. The next Westlake I read, however, will likely be one of his whodunits, since his comic style would fit wonderfully with a full-fledged mystery.

Death of the Living Dead (1989) – Yamaguchi Masaya

Say what was that name you called me?
What was that grin you grinned?
An expression so uncertain
That breaks a line so thin?

“Commercial Breakup” (Thomas Dolby)

 

(Note: This is a review that I wrote early last year, just after I read Death of the Living Dead. Had I written it now, I would have done it very differently. However, I have decided to leave it mostly as is. I still agree with its content, and it doesn’t bug me to the extent that I want to go through the effort of revising it. Let’s just say that it’s a snapshot of how I was writing reviews a couple years ago, and be glad I didn’t start blogging then…)

The Barleycorns could, by any definition of the word, be called an odd family. There’s the patriarch, Smiley, a skilled mortician who, forced to leave England due to his womanizing ways, emigrated to America and decided to reestablish his practice in a grand way, founding the Smile Cemetery, the largest and most prestigious funerary establishment on the east coast. There are his sons, John, a dour, business-oriented man set to succeed his father as head of the house of the dead, William, a would-be theatrical producer who’s always looking to secure more funding, Jessica, Smiley’s only daughter, who married the son of one of his business associates, and James, who, disconcertingly proud of his skills as an embalmer, has no interest whatsoever in such trifles as the management of the cemetery (and that’s without getting into the segment of the Barleycorn siblings who have already shuffled off their mortal coil.). And there’s our protagonist, Francis “Grin” Barleycorn, son of Steven Barleycorn, one of the aforementioned late lamented, who, instead of joining the family firm, chose the life of a punk rocker. From front to back, the Barleycorns are a family touched by death, every one of them having worked in or trained for a role in the running of the cemetery, but, in more ways than one, they’ll soon find that they don’t understand death as well as the thought. For, all around the world, the dead are returning to life. And, against the tableaux of these unnerving events, the Barleycorns will be confronted with death in an even more immediate way when someone begins killing them off. But who would want to kill in a world where the dead can come back to life?

This is the question posed in Yamaguchi Masaya’s Death of the Living Dead, which was released in December of 2021, in an excellent translation by Ho-Ling Wong. Published in 1989, it was Yamaguchi’s debut novel and is considered one of the major works of the shin honkaku movement. Though I had been aware that Yamaguchi had been trying to get it released in English for a few years, I must say that its sudden publication took me by surprise. Especially as it wasn’t the first Japanese mystery novel involving the dead returning to life to be published last year. An surprising coincidence, but a welcome one. (According to the back of the book, there’s a Hollywood film adaption in the works, which probably explains how a publisher was finally found. One wonders how the film will turn out…)

The first half of the novel is rather slow moving, focusing mostly on the establishment of the setting, characters, and themes, but it’s extremely riveting, as well as necessary to the plot. If you don’t pay close attention here, I can assure you that you have very little chance of solving the mysteries that follow. And once the plot gets moving, it really gets moving. Between the killer stalking the Barleycorns, the corpse that vanishes between its funeral and burial, and the possible return of a serial killer from years back, you start to wonder how all of this could possibly tie together.

But tie together it does. As unrelated as they seem, all of these plot threads contribute to a solution that is astonishingly elegant in its simplicity. Its central point is downright Chestertonian (which is quite fitting, given how often he’s quoted here). It’s so blindingly, elementally obvious that we (or at least I) never consider it.

And this isn’t the only similarity to Chesterton. Like the Father Brown stories, Death of the Living Dead is fundamentally a piece of humanistic detective fiction. Yamaguchi is interested in exploring how people relate and react to death, both individually and as a society. This exploration comes into focus well before the mystery itself, but don’t think that they are unrelated concerns. The philosophic questions at the heart of the novel are essential to the solution, and the mystery throws the philosophical questions into sharp relief. Furthermore, to bolster this theme, Yamaguchi includes well-researched information on subjects as diverse as funerary customs, Medieval art, and the history of embalming. This is the kind of mystery that Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne would have written.

(At this point, there’s an aspect of the novel’s that I’d like to discuss, but it’s something that some people might consider a spoiler. To be clear, I don’t think it is, and it’s mentioned in the table of contents anyway. Plus, most, though not all, of the reviews out there mention it (and if you’ve read any of those, you already know exactly what I’m talking about). Still, I certainly don’t want to spoil anyone’s reading experience, so if you want to go in absolutely blind, skip the next paragraph and come back when you’ve finished the book. For everyone else, read on…)

Perhaps the most striking thing about Death of the Living Dead is the fact that Grin, who’s both the protagonist and the detective, himself becomes one of the living dead early on in the book, after he is poisoned with arsenious acid. The undead here aren’t the shambling zombies of horror fiction, they retain their personalities and memories. This puts him in the unusual position of having to catch his own killer, but it also adds some extra complications. Chiefly, he has to hide the fact that he’s dead, from both his family and his girlfriend, Cheshire, who acts as his Watson. The only person he lets into his confidence is Dr. Hearse, a close friend of his grandfather’s (and one of my favorite characters!), a professor of thanatology and occasional consultant with the local police. Grin has the good doctor embalm him, as coming back to life doesn’t stop the process of decomposition. Aside from throwing a new wrinkle into the plot, this turn of events also has another narrative function. Since only Grin and Dr. Hearse know that someone poisoned Grin, everyone else investigating the Barleycorn killings is in possession of imperfect information. The police can’t hope to solve these killings, but Grin, and the reader, can.

Not that the police had much of a chance to begin with. The local police are, shall we say, somewhat dysfunctional. The sergeant gladly blabs everything he knows to the press, the junior detective is only interested in two things, getting promoted and slacking off, and the senior detective, Richard Tracy, is a workaholic who’s unhealthily obsessed with his job. At first, he seems to be the force’s only sane man, but as the crimes begin to pile up, Det. Tracy’s stress levels get closer and closer to the breaking point. He also provides one of the novel’s absolute funniest scenes. Near the end of the book, he proposes a false solution which starts out brilliantly clever. However, as he goes on, flaws start appearing in his explanation. They start out subtle, but by the end his audience is chiming in one after another, pointing them out faster than he can keep up with.

As you may have guessed from Det. Tracy’s name, the view of America in Death of the Living Dead is very pop-culture influenced. This becomes apparent early on, particularly in the scene set in NYC, which, with its boom-box carrying gangsters and corrupt cops, feels like it could have come from an over-the-top 80s action flick. As strange an atmosphere as this may seem for a classically styled puzzle-plot mystery, it actually works quite well. After all, you wouldn’t exactly expect strict realism from a novel where punks run around solving murders as the dead rise from their graves…

As far as I can see, the novel only really has one flaw, and not a major one at that. Near the beginning, it’s stated that worldwide, thirteen people in total have returned to life. Conceivably, some may have escaped risen unnoticed, but it couldn’t be that many. So revivification seems to be a fairly rare phenomena, yet in the small town of Tombsville, the living dead just keep on coming, in numbers that are truly surprising, given how few rose before. Vaqrrq, ol gur raq, whfg nobhg gur jubyr Oneyrlpbea snzvyl unf znqr gur erghea gevc (spoilers concealed using rot13). Now, this isn’t a hard science fiction novel, and I’m not demanding some kind of detailed explanation for this. But since we’re told at the beginning that this is an uncommon thing, I think most experienced readers will factor that into their theorizing. Unless told otherwise, we assume that everything in a mystery could be relevant, so I wish that Yamaguchi had somehow indicated that this wasn’t something we needed to pay attention to, rather than just hoping that we don’t notice the mother of all statistical anomalies.

But, that said, I can’t say that this even remotely impacted my enjoyment of the novel. I didn’t even notice it until a few days after finishing it. And that I was still thinking about it days later says a lot. Death of the Living Dead is a triumph as a novel of detection, but it’s also a moving rumination on man and mortality. It’s a book that I’ll not soon forget, and I highly recommend it.

(As I mentioned, I still agree with everything in this review. But I do have a couple of things I’d like to add. The first is actually something that I meant to mention in the review, but which completely slipped my mind. It’s simply that I admire Yamaguchi’s choice of chapter quotes. It takes skill to be able to use John Dickson Carr, Jorge Luis Borges, and King Crimson in the same novel.

The second point has less to do with the book itself, and more to do with its reception. I’ve been shocked at how little attention it’s gotten since its release. When it has been reviewed (on a handful of blogs and in the Washington Post) it’s garnered high praise, but by and large it seems to have slipped under the collective radar. And that’s a shame, because in my opinion this book is a masterpiece of the genre and deserves a wide readership.)