In the spring of 2005, Donald Westlake had lunch with his friend and former agent Henry Morrison. When he got home, he wrote Morrison a letter that reads like a mulled-over response to a particular line of questioning (and perhaps even some hectoring) on the part of Morrison. In it, Westlake offers a clear-eyed assessment of himself as a writer and a commercial property:
You may be right—in fact I’m sure you’re right—that opportunities have been missed in forwarding my career, particularly after The Ax but also at other nexi—can that be right?—here and there. Do I now try to recapture a moment and take a different fork in the road? Is that possible? Is it worth it? . . .
One reason The Ax didn’t change things, and Kahawa didn’t change things, and Humans didn’t change things, is that I am not consistent. Can you imagine Wodehouse writing any of those three? Can you imagine Jonathan Franzen writing the Dortmunder novels? No publisher can count on me, because I can’t help myself; I follow what interests me.
Therein lies the heart of Donald Westlake, the unifying thread that connects his hundred-plus books, which range from the hardest of hard-boiled to the gentlest of comic crime: each one was what he wanted to write at that moment.
Westlake made a living with his typewriter for nearly sixty years. And he hit the sweet spot: as he put it in an essay written in the late 1990s, “Since I was never a best-seller, no one’s expectations about my work were very high, but since I was prolific, I could turn out enough wordage to make a living.” Though he wrote two successful, long-running series—one as hard as can be, about the heister Parker, the other its mirror image comic counterpart, about the hapless crook John Dortmunder—he “managed to avoid the trap of being shackled to a series character, one of the many traps lying in wait for the unwary writer.” He wrote regularly about Parker and Dortmunder, but he never reached a point where he felt pressure to turn out yet another book about either. (Which is a problem that series writers each deal with in their own way: John D. MacDonald let Travis McGee’s outbreaks of self-loathing speak for his authorial frustrations, while Charles Willeford simply turned in a volume in his Hoke Moseley series that was unpublishable—because in it Moseley murdered his family.)
Instead, Westlake carefully rationed his meal ticket books, and in between he wrote about whatever came to mind. Told of a true story wherein a group of mercenaries stole a whole train full of coffee from Idi Amin and made it disappear, he turned out Kahawa, a fast-paced thriller in which he showed how that could be done. Handed a clipping about a man who killed his family and disappeared, he started wondering about the man’s next family, and wrote the screenplay for The Stepfather. Fascinated by the truly bizarre circumstances surrounding the removal of the island of Anguilla from the British Empire—and the tiny, almost bloodless war that the British fought, not to keep it, but to force it to go—he wrote a wonderful nonfiction oddity, Under an English Heaven.
If you were Donald Westlake’s agent, you never knew what the parcel on your desk with his return address might contain. You knew it would be good—as Lawrence Block put it, the man didn’t do chaff—but was it something you could easily categorize? Was it something you could pitch? Was it something that would sell?
Maybe. What you knew for sure was that, having gotten the idea, he wouldn’t have been able to shake it without writing the book.
***
Which brings us to Brothers Keepers. Originally published in 1975, and brought back into print this month for the first time in thirty years by Hard Case Crime, it’s about monks. And real estate. And love. And the question of religious vocation. There’s hardly even a crime in it—a spot of B&E, some carefully contained arson. Basically nothing that rises above the level of simple skulduggery, especially in the context of the fundamental crime that is Manhattan real estate development; the crimes in Brothers Keepers wouldn’t even merit a footnote in a story about the Trump Organization, for example. (Fortunately for Hard Case Crime, there is a young woman in a bikini, which justifies their usual bit of classic pulp–style cheesecake for the cover painting.)
So what is this book? The simplest answer is: It’s a Donald Westlake novel. And that means it’s the work of a man who was endlessly amused by people and their foibles, tried to be accepting of their failings, and had a streak of the romantic in him that, suppressed in his hard stuff, flowered occasionally in novels like this one. More than anything else, Brothers Keepers is gentle, even sweet. Well, that and funny.
It’s a Donald Westlake novel. And that means it’s the work of a man who was endlessly amused by people and their foibles, tried to be accepting of their failings, and had a streak of the romantic in him that, suppressed in his hard stuff, flowered occasionally in novels like this one.
It tells the story of Brother Benedict, a lay brother of the Crispinite Order of the Novum Mundum, who has for the past ten years lived in a monastery that, oddly (but wholly believably, in that New York way), is located on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd. Founded in the eighteenth century by Israel Zapatero, the order is dedicated to “contemplation and good works and meditation on the meaning of Earthly travel.” What that has turned out to mean in practice is capitalizing the the word “Travel” in their writing and their thoughts, and viewing Travel as such a vast, important undertaking that they don’t ever do it. As the book opens, the sixteen monks who reside within the monastery’s walls are happily living out their days separated from the action of 1970s Manhattan around them. “We rather enjoy the bustle and scurry of the world around us,” Benedict notes, as it gives more meaning to their quiet and meditation. That quiet makes up the majority of the brothers’ lives; the weekly high point, in terms of drama, for Brother Benedict is his walk (modest, but still in its way a form of Travel) on Saturday night to the newsstand on Lexington to get the Sunday Times to share with his fellows.
As so often happens with those of us who don’t live in seclusion, one day the Times brings devastating news: Ada Louise Huxtable mentions in her architecture column that the monastery, and all the buildings on its block, are in the process of being sold to a developer who plans to put up a high-rise office building on the site. This discovery launches the monks on a crash course in New York real estate and contract law; it launches Benedict, at the same time, into extensive Travel—and thereby into an unexpected romance that leads him to question his very vocation. Will the monks get to stay? Will Benedict chose the world or the cloister? The tone of the book is so light that the answer to the first question never deeply troubles us. This is not a book that will end with the monks becoming an itinerant mendicant order. The latter, though, is far from obvious, and in resolving it Westlake shows that he takes seriously the idea of Benedict’s vocation. From a world of structure and calm, Benedict finds himself thrust into a realm of almost infinite possibilities, with all the temptations and terror that implies. His journey through it, while never presented with the seriousness of a proper dark night of the soul, is handled with grace, care, and a convincing understanding of the rewards and costs of seclusion and devotion.
The concept of Brothers Keepers is surprising, the plot—if all but crime free—just complicated enough to engage us. But none of that is why we read Westlake’s lighter fare. We read it because he is funny. And the novel is funny, delightfully so, full of wit rooted in character and wordplay. It’s less a laugh-out-loud book than one peppered satisfactorily with moments of wry amusement like the following. Asked if he could recommend Veiled for the Lord, the fourteen-volume novel on the life of St. Jude the Obscure written by a long-deceased member of their order, Brother Oliver replies, “Not wholeheartedly.” Talking of a romantic rival, Benedict has this exchange with the woman they’re both interested in:
“And I don’t like his mustache.”
“Neither do I.”
I looked fully at her, and she was smiling, but the smile was friendly now and not patronizing. “It’s a very weak mustache,” I said.
“It suits him,” she said.
“That’s the problem.”
“So it is.”
Westlake isn’t above reaching for a proper groaner, either. As Benedict walks with Brother Oliver down Fifth Avenue, he notes the Time-Life Building, the RCA Building, the Standard Oil Building, the U. S. Rubber Building, and the Solinex Building:
“What a lot of Buildings there are.”
“It’s an edifice complex,” Brother Oliver explained.
I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
At another point, Brother Oliver argues with an agent for the owner of the building, Dan Flattery, saying that he wants to go make his case directly, only to be told that “Flattery will get you nowhere.” Oliver later asks another brother about the banks involved in the potential sale:
Brother Jerome hiked up his sleeves and lowered his brows. “Um,” he said, “Douchery.”
Brother Oliver said, “What?”
“That’s it,” said Brother Clemence. “Fiduciary Federal Trust.”
You can see there the fun Westlake has with language, the lamest of puns included. That attention to language enlivens the prose throughout, with Westlake taking particular pleasure in crafting similes. Two floundering boxers are “circling one another like a binary star.” A pleasant surprise leaves Brother Oliver showing “the stunned joy of a miser who’s been hit on the head by a gold bar.” A scroll that keeps rolling back up as the brothers are trying to read it has to be held down “like a sailor having his leg amputated in a pirate movie.” A brother’s voice sounds “muffled all at once, as though he were talking into a turtleneck sweater.”
***
The best moment in the book rests in Westlake’s appreciation not of his own language but of our shared cultural history: a verbal duel between Brother Oliver and the developer in which the pair trade quotations from Scripture.
“My days,” he said, “are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. Let’s get down to business.”
I’m sure Brother Oliver was as taken aback as I was. The imagery, in Dwarfmann’s ratty style of speech, seemed wildly inappropriate. Then Brother Oliver said, in distinct astonishment, “Was that from Job?”
“Chapter seven, verse six,” Dwarfmann snapped. “Come, come, if you have something to say to me, say it. Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.”
“I don’t know the Apocrypha,” Brother Oliver said.
Dwarfmann gave him a thin smile. “You know it well enough to recognize it. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter two, verse five.”
“Then I can only cite One Thessalonians,” Brother Oliver said. “Chapter five, verse fourteen. Be patient toward all men.”
“Let us run with patience,” Dwarfmann or somebody said, “the race that is set before us.”
“I don’t believe,” Brother Oliver told him, “that was quite the implication of that verse in its original context.”
The skirmish continues for two more pages. I knew that, as Brother Benedict notes, quoting Shakespeare, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” I didn’t know that Westlake could; his virtuosity in this exchange calls to mind Wodehouse’s regular deployment of the Bible for comedic effect.
All this comes together in Brothers Keepers to create a novel that is feather-light and fun, never less than engaging and entertaining. Did it make Westlake’s agent jump for joy when it hit his desk in 1975? Did it make sense as a book to follow two of his best series novels, the Parker novel Butcher’s Moon and the Dortmunder novel Jimmy the Kid, both published the year before? Did it further his career?
Doubtful. Yet more than forty years later, I’m glad that Brother Benedict and his fellow monks popped into Westlake’s head and refused to leave by any route other than the typewriter.
When writing letters, Westlake would often add a postscript, primarily as a chance to squeeze in one last bit of wit. So here’s one: According to Lawrence Block, Westlake considered calling the novel The Felonious Monks. Ever a stickler, he decided against it, because the monks aren’t criminal. Ever an opportunist, he found a way to sneak the phrase into the book anyway.
