December 1, 2020
Westlake fans should be celebrating Hard Case Crime's ongoing project to reprint the author's early and long-unavailable work. This time it's a truly wacky comic caper, originally published in 1980, involving a gang of international thieves who attempt to steal a castle being transported in pieces from South America to Paris, where it will be reassembled for a trade exposition. The catch? Shepherded away in one of the castle's columns is a fortune in cash and jewels belonging to the country's dictator. Our motley crew, led by the ever-harried Eustace Dench, must steal the entire castle and then hunt through the pieces for the loot. Chaos ensues on a grand scale--think the Marx Brothers racing about Paris, battling other motorists in the manner of Monsieur Hulot in Jacques Tati's film Trafic. Compounding the bedlam is the fact that this collection of double-crossing crooks from England, France, Germany, and Italy are all monolingual. Their world-class failure to communicate drives Westlake's Gang That Couldn't Talk Straight into one dead end after another, all to hilarious effect. Far more slapstick than typical Westlake fare, but great fun.
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December 21, 2020
In this breezy crime caper from MWA Grandmaster Westlake (1933–2008), Escobar Lynch, the exiled president of the Latin American country of Yerbadoro, intends to smuggle his ill-gotten wealth out of the country by secretly hiding it in the stone blocks of a disassembled castle being sent to Paris as part of an international exhibition. Meanwhile, Eustace Dench, a self-styled criminal mastermind, along with a hastily assembled band of international thieves, lays plans to hijack the castle and its hidden loot while en route to the City of Light, but none of the gang members speak the others’ language, nobody is sure which stone blocks contain the treasure, and everyone secretly plans to make off with the loot themselves. While the author juggles too many characters to develop them fully and the early sections drag as he assembles his cast, the novel hits its stride as the thieves steal and re-steal the plunder from each other in a manic free-for-all through Paris’s backwater streets, tunnels, and canals. Though this reissue, first published in 1980, may rank as only an average Westlake, that’s good enough for most readers.
January 15, 2021
Another posthumously reprinted over-the-top comic heist that Westlake, the universally acclaimed master of the subgenre, originally published in 1980. On his way out the door from the country of Yerbadoro, President Escobar Lynch plans to exit with the greater portion of the presidential castle he's occupied, which is to be disassembled and shipped stone by stone to the French countryside for reassembly on a lot he and his wife, Maria, have carefully selected. And that's not all he's taking: Some of those stones have been hollowed out so they can serve as receptacles for a fortune Lynch has plundered from his people. It seems only fair that someone else should steal his ill-gotten goods in turn, so beautiful Yerbadoroan insider Lida Perez engages master criminal Eustace Dench to engineer the heist, splitting the proceeds equally with her. Since it's impossible to tell in advance which stones are treasure troves and which are nothing but stones, Dench contracts with French con man Jean LeFraque and veteran German criminal Herman Muller to assemble teams that will be responsible for different phases of the intricate operation. What could possibly go wrong? As it happens, several noncomplications, from general ignorance of the caper by law enforcement to too few opportunities for individual team members to showcase their varied skills to lots of relatively innocent jostling among teammates competing for prominence with their more consequential double-crossing of each other, keep this from achieving the heights of Westlake's best work. What remains is the lazy, teasing mastery of a cat playing with a ball of exceptionally high-priced yarn.
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