As a writer, I both love and hate reading books by Donald Westlake. I love reading them because they are so well written, entertaining, and usually very funny—the man was the best at the craft. I also hate reading those books for the very same reasons, pure jealousy. We’ve written about Westlake’s work before, and this won’t be the last time we talk about the Patron Saint of the Hardboiled Heist novel.
His writing seems so effortless; it’s like watching an outstanding athlete make everything look so easy. Also, I’m going to call this a “review” but it’s really just a recommendation. Buy this or any Donald Westlake, Richard Stark, or Tucker Coe book you find, you won’t be disappointed. (Full disclosure, that link takes you to our online bookstore, we get a small cut of whatever you buy).
Hard Case Crime and Donald Westlake
Hard Case Crime also seem to be big fans of Westlake, this is their 10th book of his to be published, along with another one under Westlake’s more famous pseudonym, Richard Stark’s, Lemons Never Lie.
Castle in the Air will be in bookstores this March, but you can pre-order it here if you like. We were fortunate enough to get our hands on a copy in January and I couldn’t put the thing down.
Robbing Castles
The book reads like Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job, with international characters making up the team of burglars who plan to steal an entire castle. If that sounds far-fetched, Westlake has written similar heist stories, like The Score where they rob a whole damn town in North Dakota.
Westlake is at his best writing heist stories, and if you like the Parker novels you’ll like this one. It has all the hallmarks of a Parker novel with the hilarity of a Dortmunder book. Well, since the Dortmunder books can be described as funny and less hard boiled Parker books, this is more like a Dortmunder book than a Parker book but you get my meaning.
The story takes you to London, Rome, Paris, Venice, and one of my favorite scenes; The Lederhosen Inn in the Black Forest where one of the characters, Otto, picks the pockets of a beer hall filled with passed out drunks who look like “the result of a gas attack.”
Originally published in 1980 there are moments that seem dated, but they are few and far between, and that’s expected from a book forty years old. For the most part, it is a breezy, entertaining ride.
The story has a lot of twists, turns, and doublecrosses but my favorite part is the dialogue, which is hilarious. The lost in translation scenes with the career criminals talking to each other in different languages are hilarious.
This book is great, I’m giving it 5 out of 5 handguns.
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