Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he’d started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool.
–from Plunder Squad
The reference above is to A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel epic of English life in the twentieth century. Anthony Powell was one of Donald Westlake’s favorite authors and someone he considered a key influence on his own writing. In addition to the name drop in Plunder Squad, Westlake mentioned him in several interviews.
The twelve volumes in A Dance to the Music of Time are being released as e-books from our friends at University of Chicago Press, home of the Parker novels. And, for the month of December, you can download the first book in the series, A Question of Upbringing, for free.
This is a great opportunity to explore a writer and work that had tremendous influence on Donald Westlake, and to check out a series that was (collectively) selected as one of the best 100 novels by both Modern Library and Time.
A Question of Upbringing is available directly from University of Chicago Press and other sellers of e-books. It’s only free during December, so you’d best get on it.
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You get to the free e-book of A Question of Upbringing on the Chicago site (epub, Adobe Digital Edition) via this link http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html All the Chicago volumes of Dance to the Music of Timne are listed here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/powell/ and they are all 30% off in the month of December.
Hi we want to sign our son, Max, up for some classes he just tenrud 2 in October. When will the 2 year old classes be held? Obvioulsy for the Winter III session. Thank you!!!
Trent,
Sorry for the bad link. This one should work.
What I love about the reference in Plunder Squad is the characters mentioned: Sir Magnus Donners is a fabulously wealthy titan of industry with a barely concealed penchant for S&M, while Widmerpool is one of the most odious characters in fiction. In a piece for the New York Review of Books from the mid-’90s, Christopher Hitchens called him “Powell’s grotesque antihero and Everyman, Kenneth Widmerpool. The shortest way of capturing the essence of this grotesquely fascinating and repellent figure might be to say that he is a monster of arrogance and conceit, but entirely wanting in pride. Bullying to those below him, servile and fawning to those set in authority, entirely without wit or introspection, he is that type of tirelessly ambitious, sexless, and charmless mediocrity that poisons institutional life, family life, and political life.”
It makes me laugh every time I encounter Sternberg to think that he finds himself drawn to Widmerpool.
Thanks, Dean and Levi! I’ve edited the post to reflect the correct link.
Hmm, my comment last week on this post has not appeared, so let’s try this again.
I had mentioned that Westlake was not the only crime writer fond of Anthony Powell. Bill James used “A Dance for the Music of Time” as a kind of model (though not stylistically) for his great Harpur & Iles series. He also wrote an academic study of Powell.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com
These topics are so confnsiug but this helped me get the job done.