When Donald E. Westlake died on New Year’s Eve 2008, he left behind a body of work spanning nearly fifty years. Though he wrote many comedic crime thrillers, (What's the Worst That Could Happen?, The Hot Rock), he is also (under the pseudonym Richard Stark), the creator of one of the toughest hardboiled series ever, featuring his anti-hero known only as Parker. With the unveiling of his final unpublished novel, Memory , his range and depth as a writer are only deepened.
Westlake’s agent apparently told him the book was “too literary” and not what publishers wanted from him when he wrote it in the early sixties, and while it is a departure from what his dedicated readers might expect as far as plot and tone, it’s also a strong and rather haunting coda for one of the most influential crime authors of his generation.
Paul Cole is a cocky young actor working in a touring stage production and he’s brought a married woman along with him. When her husband has tracked them down, he bursts in on their congress and attacks Paul, hitting him over the head and causing him to lose some of his memory.
As time goes on, he finds that instead of improving, his memory is deteriorating. Whole chunks of him are falling away. And that’s the horror of it. Paul doesn’t know who he is. Whether in his relationships with women or peers or things as simple as choices in the music he listens to, he suspects that he is not living up to his former self.
Desperate to reclaim his old life, he gradually makes his way home to New York City, by bus, no easy feat with recall as fuzzy as his. Paul writes himself instructions in notes that, when he reads them later, alternately help and frustrate him, what did I mean by that? He needs routine, but is afraid of making the wrong one, different habits than he used to have. He believes that if he can just do the things he used to, mimic his previous existence, that something will click and his memory and identity will be recovered.
But beyond the trouble of being an actor with no memory, (think of the protagonist of Memento with a blank distant past to boot), he is a man without anchor, second guessing every choice and quickly exhausting the good will of his former friends and colleagues, losing them one at a time to circumstances beyond his control.
Then there are the police. Paul is not the only one interested in the details of his recent history. They haul him in for disturbing Q&A sessions off the street or from his residence, and wherever he goes, he is troubled by the residue of suspicion and guilt coating his past.
Paul's struggle to correctly identify himself and project that identity to the world around him grinds away at him, pitting his mind against his body and the refracted glimpses of who he used to be against his nature and basic humanity.
In the previous post, I tried to describe the aesthetics of noir, but you might as well just read the final pages of Westlake's final gift to us, I couldn't do it better.
What's your favorite Westlake/Stark book?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
