NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.
After the excitement of last week, it’s back down to earth with a bump, with a review of a novel that I showcased as a Westlake Score on Existential Ennui all the way back in September 2010. First published in the US by Random House in 1966 and in the UK by Souvenir Press in 1967—which is the edition seen above—Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death was Donald E. Westlake’s first novel under the alias of Tucker Coe, under which moniker he would go on to pen a further four books over the next five years or so. All star disgraced former cop Mitchell Tobin, who, as the series opens, has been off the force for six months following an illicit affair which led to the death of his partner. Mitch’s wife, Kate, forgave him the affair (although he’s unsure if his thirteen-year old son, Bill, has), but his former colleagues haven’t forgiven him the death of his partner – and nor, for that matter has he forgiven himself, which is why he’s spent six months doing virtually nothing other than, latterly, building a wall around his backyard.
So when a representative of New York mobster Ernie Rembek turns up at Mitch’s house with a job offer, Mitch eventually—reluctantly—agrees—not because he has any interest in the job—which is to find out who within Rembek’s organization murdered Rembek’s mistress—but because Kate thinks it will be good for him to do something other than build his wall. And so, attended by Roger Kerrigan—”an observer from the corporation,” as Rembek puts it—Mitch sets about interviewing and eliminating suspects, in the process becoming a target for murder himself…
I must admit I was surprised by how good Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death is. Alongside the Parker novels—written, of course, under Westlake’s rather better-known nom de plume of Richard Stark—I’d suggest that Kinds of Love is one of the best books Westlake wrote in the 1960s: a restrained yet quietly gripping murder mystery that’s all the better for its sober, unshowy approach. Ordinarily my interest in mysteries is minimal—often as not I couldn’t care less “whodunnit”—but Kinds of Love transcends its mystery trappings by dint of its fascinating take on mob life, which Westlake depicts as unrelentingly unglamorous. To take just one example, during an interview with one of the mobster suspects, Frank Donner, it arises that Donner and his wife have separate bedrooms, a detail that Mitch finds suspicious. But the explanation proves so mundane it becomes even more believable: Donner’s wife admits with embarrassment that she snores.
For his part, Ernie Rembek is an unusual mob boss: he’s intelligent and cultured, at one point referencing G. K. Chesterton in relation to overlooking background players in any investigation (a sly nod from Westlake to an influence, there). But each of the gangsters is well-drawn, Westlake-via-Tobin appraising each of them dispassionately—appraising everything dispassionately, in fact—deploying the occasional simile to add color: noting how the glaring sun makes he and two other men lower their heads “like a trio of penitents,” or describing a body, “its arms stretched out ahead of it,” as “an acrobat still reaching for the trapeze.”
Of course, Mitch’s dispassion is a symptom of his lack of interest in pretty much everyone and everything—something that, conversely, serves to make him more interesting as a character—with the exception of his family and his wall, the latter of which he’s back to building by the close of the novel. “Mitch, didn’t it change anything?” Kate asks him of his investigation. “Change what?” is Tobin’s blunt response, suggesting he has a long way yet to travel over the subsequent novels.
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The Tobin character reminds me of Block’s Matt Scudder. Or the other way around, as Tobin was on the scene first. The only Coe I’ve read is A Jade in Aries, and that was a while back. I remember liking the book well enough, but frankly I find DEW’s Stark work the best writing he has to offer. If I’m not mistaken, the Coe books are the only novels where DEW ventured into the PI genre. Even if Tobin, like Scudder, was unofficial and unlicensed.
I don’t think DEW had a lot of love for the PI genre. I remember reading an article in The Armchair Detective, well before I started getting into DEW, where he joked about Chandler’s “Down These Mean Streets…” essay with William DeAndrea, and another chap–I think Jon Breen–who was interviewing DEW for the fanzine. I remember Ed Gorman was furious about it, and shot back with some vitriolic comments. Yet I remember DEW mentioning he liked Hammett quite a bit, who was mostly known for his PI novels.
After reading how much of an influence Peter Rabe was on DEW, I bought some Rabe novels for my Kindle, and I’m highly impressed. It’s unfortunate Rabe never got the money and acclaim that lesser writers achieved. I can see why DEW loves his work.
On the evidence of Kinds of Love, I wouldn’t say the Tobin books are quite up there with the Parkers, Dave. But this one was very, very good, and I’m definitely going to stick with the series. Over in the comments on the version of this post on EE, Chris mentioned that Hammett’s Nick Charles character was an inspiration for Tobin, which tallies with your memory of Westlake liking Hammett. As I say in the post, I don’t usually care for whodunnits, and that goes for PI stories too, so I’m with Westlake on that one. I’d rather read a story from a criminal’s perspective (or an espionage tale), but Tobin, although he’s not, strictly speaking, a PI, is an interesting character in his own right, and clearly a creation Westlake had a lot of time for; that comes through in the writing.
Glad you’ve got into Peter Rabe! You’ll like some of the posts I have coming up then: I have a hell of a lot of Rabe paperbacks to blog about, when I’ll be writing about what Westlake made of each one.
Westlake’s admiration for Hammett can not be overstated, and Hammett invented the hardboiled private investigator, for all intents and purposes. Most of Westlake’s work under his own name, at least through the early 70’s, involves some kind of mystery the hero has to solve. He created at least three detectives that he featured in multiple stories, though mainly through pseudonyms. Tobin is the greatest, the least comventional, and not quite exactly a detective. He is trained as one, and he serves informally and under some duress as one, but he has no PI license in the first four, and once he does have one, he uses it to get a job as a security guard.
I think he just felt very wary of the cliches inherent to that subgenre, and he thought it had given rise to a lot of repetition, something a writer who produces as much work as him needs to watch out for.
And I have to say, it seems pointless to me to say Stark is better than Westlake. Leaving aside the fact that Stark WAS Westlake, if he had only written about Parker and Grofield, two characters who are essentially incapable of significant change (and who clearly don’t want to change), his literary reputation would be much diminished, and justly so. The essence of Donald Westlake is versatility, mutability. Parker and Dortmunder are finished works before we meet them, but the fascination of the Tobins is that he is changing brfore our eyes, gradually emerging from his brick chrysalis.
Did I forget to type ‘hardboiled” in front of private investigator? Nope. Nor did I say Hammett invented detective fiction. Excellent. I hate mistakes. Except when others make them. ;)
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/race.html
The trick, of course, was to create a character who was hardboiled AND a detective, in equal measure. And Hammett was the first to do that. For all intents and purposes.
Chris, I agree with everything you wrote, except one fact you had wrong. And please don’t take this as busting your chops, OK? I’m just mentioning this because it’s factually wrong. Hammett didn’t invent the Private Investigator, for all intents and purposes. The Private Eye, which most agree is a literary
descendant of Fennimore’s Natty Bumpo, was already well-established by the time Hammett began writing his Continental Op stories. I believe, and I’m winging this, that Race Williams by Carroll John Daly was the first popular Private Eye. But the first literary Private Eye was Martin Hewitt created by Arthur Morrison in 1894. (I knew the Race Williams factoid, but had to check on Martin Hewitt.)
Most people confuse the issue because most people consider Sam Spade the progenitor of today’s huge array of PIs. I find it amusing an Englishmen created the first actual PI, since so much of my huge record collection consists of English musicians. Bowie (especially his Berlin trilogy), Eno, Roxy Music (mainly the first few albums), John Cale (although Cale is actually Welsh), etc. If I had to pin down my favorite genre of music, which would be incredibly hard since I love so many genres of music, it would possibly be Art Rock, which was an English invention.
Also, many people do not realize Raymond Chandler, although he lived most of his life in the USA, was an Englishman.
Dave:
To be fair (and, hey, you guys play nice while I’m sort-of away!), Chris didn’t say Hammett invented the PI. He said he invented the hardboiled P.I. An important distinction.
And one I felt sure you would note. But ‘invent’ is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. I mean, people still argue about who invented the airplane, or moving pictures. Poe is widely credited as the originator of the detective genre, but you can find earlier examples–just nowhere near as seminal. Something took root with the first Dupin story. In the same way, Hammett, who certainly had competitors for page space in Black Mask and other pulp magazines of the period, created a style so vivid and iand original as to inspire a new genre within the genre. If you love that kind of story, everything is Before Hammett or After Hammett. And there is dammed little you can point to before him, and none of it really seems to put all the pieces together in just the right way. Sometimes creating something new really just amounts to seeing untapped potential in what’s already there.
BTW–play nice? With whom? :|
I think he means play nice with me, Chris. Referring to our epic battle of words. Which I sincerely hope is past history.
I hear what you’re saying, but I think Hammett was probably the first truly talented of the PI writers, but Race Williams is indeed a hardboiled dick and appeared well before the Op. I checked that out on Google. But Hammett definitely paved the way for countless imitators. From all evidence, the Race Williams adventures were quite badly written.
Hammett was probably the model that Chandler and the rest based their creations on. I’m no expert on Hammett, I respect what he did for the genre but I’ve found plenty of writers whom I think were/are more talented than he, and Chandler as well. I probably respect Hammett the man, and his principaled stand against the McCarthy-blacklisters, than I value Hammett the writer.
DEW wrote an interesting preface to a PI novel that I used to have; I can’t remember the name of the book the PI was a fat guy named Wilson. The preface expounded on his ideas about PI lit in general.
I, myself, have sold or given away a lot of the PI lit I had collected. It doesn’t do it for me anymore. I find a hard time swallowing the fairy-tale endings and idiotic Super-hero goings-on. The SPenser clones were rampant in the 80’s and it was a dismal time for Hardboiled crime lit.
I had the privilege of riidng with Mike a couple of years ago when he joined our team for Bike MS up in Skagit County (you can add his work to raise money to fight MS to the many, many reasons that our world is diminished without him in it). I didn’t know him well, but sure did like what I knew. Very nice guy. Very strong rider. As the father of two and a regular bicycle commuter who is a less skilled and weaker rider than Mike was (a high bar, btw), this tragedy certainly gives me serious pause. My heart aches for his family and friends. You are and will be missed in so many ways Mike.
Chris, sorry about that. I actually never read a Race Williams adventure, so I can’t say whether or not he is a Hardboiled PI. I imagined him to be a tough, two fisted kinda PI, but he may indeed be a softboiled sissy;-) lol
Trent: Well, now Chris has directly responded to a comment I made, and you did not shower a wrath of thunder on him, which I take to mean we are all free to answer and reply to each other. I know you asked us both to ignore each other, but it seems damned silly that grown men can’t communicate with each other without it breaking down into vitriolic nonsense. So I sincerely hope we can all get along and converse about what unites us: our love of Westlake.
Chris, I look forward to discussing the Great One with you, sir, if you are inclined to put aside our past beefs. I give you my word that I will read every letter of your posts and try to make sure I don’t misconstrue anything as I admittedly did a few times in the past. But please be advised twenty years of Beer and Bongs has undoubtedly killed more than a few brain cells in the process;-) lol I hope EVERYBODY can get along, specifically with me, because my ego simply can’t process the fact that anyone wouldn’t think I’m as incredible as I imagine myself to be;-) lol
Oh, OK. Point conceded. Race Williams was more of a thug/adventure hero, is what I presume you’re saying from the provided link? I have no problem with that. I can’t argue the point even if I wanted to because I’ve never read a Race Williams adventure in my life;-) lol
But I have no problem accepting Hammett created the first hardboiled literary detective.
When you think about it, weren’t characters like Boston Blackie and what’s the other dude…? Uggh. Memory malfunction. The Eagle, the Hawk, something birdlike… But there were a slew of tough guy adventurers that predate the Op but I can see your point that they wouldn’t be considered detectives in the classic sense.
Thanks for the heads-up, Chris.:-)
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