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.