Provenance: A gift from the Housemates. They have been here a year, and in thanks, Anne tracked down a pristine copy of the Lovely Bride's Favorite Cookbook, the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1976. She had worn the previous version to tatters, the spine shattered and the pages held together with a thick rubber band. In addition, because I have been reading some Westlake, she hunted down this edition for me.
Review: Westlake is an impressive author. There is the funny Westlake that's on display here. There is the hard-boiled Westlake of the Parker stories. And here we see the action-adventure Westlake.
This is a lost manuscript found among the writers' papers, written sometime between 1997 and the author's death in 2008 (though probably towards the start of that period). Westlake had been contracted to write a treatment (an outline, effectively) for a new James Bond picture. The work came to nothing ultimately, but the author liked a lot of the component parts, and refashioned them into this book, published by his estate.
And while it is a very different book, the spirit of James Bond (the movie versions) hangs over it.
What was kept? The exotic locales, the master plan, the super science, the plucky young woman (a blonde scuba diver here, but Asian in the treatments). Bond himself is missing, replaced by more of a ensemble of characters, including a two-fisted engineer, the aforementioned young woman, a gay pair of environmental activists, and various members of police forces scattered across the southwestern Pacific.
Here's the summary: Richard Curtis (no relation) is multi-millionaire running on economic fumes. He lost most of his fortune when Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997, and has an outrageous plan for revenge. He intends to rob the banks in Hong Kong of their gold reserves, then pull down the buildings behind him in a way to cover his tracks. To do this he has an earthquake machine, created by two-fisted engineer George Manville, who is unaware of the plot. They are testing the earthquake machine on an abandoned atoll at the north end of the Great Barrier Reef. The Greenpeace-like activists arrive, and the plucky young woman puts on her scuba gear and swims towards the island, hoping to convince them to call off the test.
They don't, and the island is leveled. The plucky young woman is assumed dead, but is instead pulled out of the ocean by Curtis's yacht. She and the two-fisted engineer hook up and discover that millionaire is up to no good. They manage to escape and the rest of the book is various members of the group criss-crossing the South Seas (Sydney, the Outback, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) trying to discover what exactly the nefarious plot is and how to foil it.
But what is interesting (and very non-Bond) is that Westlake spends a lot of time inside Curtis's head. He's the secret protagonist here. He thinks nothing of the devastation he will unleash on the landfill islands of Hong Kong, but has to steel himself to kill (or at least order the deaths) of individuals like the plucky young woman and the two-fisted engineer. You can see every step he takes as he moves into full super-villaindom, and it is the most interesting thing to watch.
Its a genre tale, and there are some things that place it firmly within the genre. There are way too many cases of chance encounters and people being right there when they need to be (including a case where the environmentalists and the millionaire are on the SAME PLANE flying to Singapore). There are gay characters (yay) who are mostly tortured or killed (not so yay) because the leads can be threatened but never killed. And there are a lot of office meetings with various police agencies and lawyers as they attempt to prove that the evil millionaire is up to no good.
So how is it? Its better in many ways than a Bond film. It holds together for all its serendipitous plotting. And its a good thing to see it see the light after all these years. And yeah, its a lark, a genre peace, but shows the versatility of Donald Westlake.
More later,
