NBM: Joe Gores, Robert Parker, and Elmore Leonard, to name at least three, are writing detective series for TV. Do you have any inclination to answer them with a nice robbers series?
Westlake: You couldn’t have a criminal All in the Family on TV. Television is still in the old Hays office days. I’ve done a whole bunch of things for television. Luckily, almost none of it has been on the air.
NBM: Why do you say “luckily”?
Westlake: Television is much worse than movies.
NBM: Is it the minor leagues?
Westlake: It isn’t even that. It’s the Peter Principle run rampant. You’re dealing with a network. The people in the offices are dumb; they’re just dumb. I could do a paragraph on it, but it would wind up with dumb. The people I’ve dealt with, whether a good movie or a bad movie, were dumb. In the movies, you’ve got lively, intelligent, hard-driving people, because they tend to be entrepreneurs. Whereas in the networks they tend to be employees, and all they’re interested in is protecting themselves. A great dullness comes out. I’ve had conversations with people that were just beyond belief. I wouldn’t know how to write it that funny. Just one example: A few years ago, I was asked to do a TV movie, what they call a “back door pilot,” a two-hour movie, and if it works, then they would make a one-hour television series from it, but at least they get the movie on the air. The idea was an overly tough and mean cop who’s gone too far, has been reassigned to juvenile probation in the South Bronx. He has to work with a group of eleven- or twelve-year-old kids who already have felony convictions behind them. They are the toughest kids you’ve ever seen, and he’s the toughest cop they’ve ever seen, and they are his charges. The first thing they do is try to hire a hit man to kill him. That was their way: “Dirty Harry meets the Dead End Kids in the South Bronx.” So we had meetings and I said, “Are you sure you want it this tough and mean?” “Yes, yes.” So I did character sketches of the kids and a story outline. When the kids can’t get rid of the cop, they decide to make him a hero. They find a person who has been murdered and help the cop solve the crime in order to get him back in the police force’s good graces, so he will be transferred back where he belongs.
I was working for an independent production company — entrepreneur — and when I got the first draft of the story done, we went over to the network and sat down with executives. Over two and a half hours they kept backing away from every hard-nosed concept in the whole thing. At one point this executive said, “Now this one kid we’ve got here who is a very quick runner”—he is a very quick runner because his specialty is gold chains; he pulls them off women’s necks. The executive said, “I’m not necessarily saying he could be in training for the Olympics, but, maybe if you don’t like that, you know, so we can show there’s some hope for rehabilitation, maybe since he can run so fast, he could get a delivery job after school, working for the neighborhood florist” — in the South Bronx! The producer and I looked at each other and we didn’t say anything to him because there’s no point in it. But afterward, we asked each other, “Is this guy touched?” Delivering for a florist? In the South Bronx? The last flower was eaten in 1947.
NBM: Did you ever have the impulse to give them exactly what they wanted, their just deserts?
Westlake: Well, it’s hard. I tried it with that one. I think they were going to go forward until the screen actors’ strike came along. There’s a sort of a pace to these things. The project went along for eight or nine months, then a new project was launched, so that was the end of it. As I described it to someone at the time, I tried to give them as much of what they want and as little of what I don’t want as possible. It didn’t work. That’s hard to do. It’s hard, writing down. If you know it works this way, it’s hard to write how you know it doesn’t work. I don’t know how to explain that better.
NBM: You’ve been very critical in the past of the publishing industry and particularly the way publishers have handled paperbacks and mystery writers in general. Do you see publishers getting any better at what they do, or worse?
Westlake: It’s an ongoing problem, the corporate mentality again. More and more publishers are simply an element in CBS, or an element in Warner’s. There’s an individual responsibility lacking. When Viking was Tom Guinzburg and Random House was Bennett Cerf and Knopf was Knopf and Scribner was Scribner, then there was somebody who, in the first place, had a personal stake in the books he published. Either because he edited them or had his name on them. As Viking becomes a subsidiary of Penguin, and Random House becomes one-quarter of one percent of Newhouse, there’s nobody who has that same feeling. You’ve got people whose primary job is to keep their job — or find a better one. There’s no commitment. There are fewer and fewer entrepreneurs.
NBM: So your feeling is that the future of quality publishing lies with middle-size publishers who are big enough to be effective and yet small enough to escape being takeover targets?
Westlake: Yes. The primary aim of mainstream publishing now is blockbusters. Like the movies — going for blockbusters. You have to have the one great big hit. They do combination hard-cover/paperback deals up front because the auctions got to be too terrifying. Some publishers now do only four or six or eight books a year. Until they bought Dutton, NAL just published a few hard-cover books a year, and they were exclusively those they felt they could make into blockbusters. Years ago, I said the same thing about the movies. Most of the movies then were earning twelve million dollars, and two movies a year were earning sixty million dollars. If, as a result, you try not to make a twelve-million-dollar movie but aim for a sixty-million-dollar movie, then you are gearing the industry entirely to make movies for people who don’t go to movies. It’s the twelve-million-dollar movies that arc being seen by the people who go to movies. Book publishing is doing the same thing. They are gearing the industry to sell books to people who don’t other-wise buy books. Something is left out and I’m not sure what it is, but it’s crazy. Still, it is the pond I swim in.
NBM: So what comes next for you?
Westlake: Oh, more.
Donald E. Westlake
Commentary on Good Behavior
I do not have a series character.
There’s this fellow, John Dortmunder, who keeps getting in trouble and looking to me to get him back out again, but that’s no fault of mine. I only actually employed him once, in a story of the frustration attendant on having to steal the same emerald over and over and over, taking Dortmunder on when my first choice for the job, a fellow named Parker, refused it as being beneath his dignify. I have had other seasonal employees, who have done their stint to our mutual satisfaction and sloped off about their own affairs, usually with either a nice girlfriend or a suitcase full of untraceable cash as a farewell bonus, but Dortmunder keeps coming back. I’m not sure anymore who’s employing whom around here.
The problem is, Dortmunder’s difficulties just aren’t appropriate to anyone else I can think of. When a bank temporarily housed in a mobile home needed to be rolled away and robbed at leisure, whom else could I have called on for the job? When it was necessary to model a kidnapping on a published thriller written by Parker’s usual employer, Richard Stark (now, he bad a series character), Dortmunder’s was in fact the only bid. A roundelay of fake and real thefts of real and fake paintings was also Dortmunder’s MO and no other’s, as was the situation in which he’d inadvertently filched a ruby so valuable and so historically important that not only was every man’s hand turned against him but also every woman’s and child’s hand, and most of their feet. In a briefer outing, a cultured gentleman who wished advice from a career criminal in how to retrieve a work of art from an ex-wife just had to be tutored by Dortmunder.