Call Me a Cab

Afterword

The story goes that Donald Westlake once wrestled with the question, What would a caper novel be without any crime in it? The result was his novel Brothers Keepers, about a group of monks in New York City fighting to keep their centuries-old monastery from being demolished to make room for a high-rise. It’s a wonderful novel and we reprinted it in Hard Case Crime a couple of years back. There’s a tiny bit of crime in the book, but only a tiny bit: a stolen lease, a fire set to cover the thief’s tracks, a punch or two thrown that might count as assault if you squint. Don was originally planning to title the book The Felonious Monks, which is a great title, but he couldn’t, because the monks in the story turned out not to be felonious. Sometimes that’s what happens. Your characters surprise you, and if you’re a great writer, you go with it, you let them lead the way. From an email Don wrote to a friend: “I have to tell you a teeny thing about the genesis of Brothers Keepers... I started it and introduced the [monks] and realized I liked them too much to lead them into a life of crime. So, to begin with, there went the title. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s see what a caper novel looks like without the caper.’ Turned out to be a love story; who knew.”

Also turns out that wasn’t Don’s first experiment along these lines.

Who knows what story he thought he was going to tell when he first got Katharine Scott into Tom Fletcher’s taxi one day in the late 1970s. Maybe he thought they’d encounter gangsters or bank robbers on their journey west to Los Angeles; maybe he was imagining a Bonnie-and-Clyde crime spree. But what happened instead was, they fell in love. Who knew?

So: there’s no crime in this book. (That one speeding incident hardly counts. Even if the police put in a cameo appearance.) But just as Brothers Keepers is a caper novel in spite of its minimal criminal content, this one is a suspense novel through and through. Don, ever the ingenious experimenter with form, found an answer to the question, Can you have a suspense novel without any crime in it? And the answer is a resounding yes. We’re on the edge of our seats the whole ride, as the miles tick down and Katharine’s moment of decision comes into focus. Will she or won’t she? What will she decide and how will she decide, and will these two kids, who clearly deserve happiness and deserve each other, manage to not get torn apart by the inexorable pull of matrimony and respectability and doing what’s expected?

Don’s first stab at Call Me a Cab was 215 pages long in type-script and ended pretty much the way you just read, but it started differently:

Ironically, opening with the narrator saying it’s not his story put the focus more on him than if he’d just shut up and let Katharine take center stage from the start. So somewhere along the way, on a subsequent trip the manuscript took through his typewriter, Don made that change. He also added something like 50 more pages to the book. The entire sequence where the cab breaks down and Tom and Katharine meet the Chasens — some of the very best stuff in the book — wasn’t in the book to begin with.

It also wasn’t in the abridged novelette-length version of the book that ran as a feature in Redbook magazine, which is the only place any portion of this book has ever appeared before. But a lot of things were missing from the Redbook version. Every few pages lost a paragraph or two, every few paragraphs lost a sentence or two, every few sentences lost a word or two — it’s what happens when you compress a book down into a magazine piece. Still, Tom and Katharine had their debut, even if abridged too far, and you’d think their full-length adventure would have followed. But no. The manuscript sat on a shelf for the next four decades, waiting for someone to give it a chance.

Part of the reason may have been that in his later revisions Don experimented with alternate paths to the destination: in one draft, he had Katharine and Tom fall into bed together at the Hilyerds and wake up regretting it. It may have been a consummation devoutly to be wished, but it changed the book’s climax (you’ll pardon the expression) in ways that weren’t entirely satisfying. He also experimented with Barry not making an appearance in the book at all — we drive all the way to L.A., but the book ends outside Barry’s house, without the man showing his handsome face and without giving Katharine the opportunity to speak her piece to him.

This version — the version you just read — incorporates the best elements from each draft, and I want to thank Abby Westlake and Stephen Moore (one of Don’s agents of long standing) for turning up all the manuscripts and other materials they were able to provide. Editing unpublished work from an author who’s no longer with us is always a challenge, requiring humility and care. I feel fortunate to have had years to work with Don and learn about his preferences when it came to editorial matters, not to mention the privilege of editing three previous unpublished novels of his (Memory, The Comedy is Finished, and Forever and a Death — every one of them a great read). I hope you’ll agree that this last lost book of Don’s — and I do think it’s the last one, though I’ve been wrong about that before — is a wonderful final gift from an author we all love and miss so much.

For a child of the 1970s like yours truly, the book is a glorious time capsule full of things that no longer exist, starting with payphones and Checker cabs. For a novel of its time, it’s a refreshingly strong feminist portrayal of a determined woman taking control of her life and making her own choices. It’s also the only book I know that contains literal borscht-belt comedy. (“His clothing was still all burgundy and white, with white patent leather shoes. As we went by, I leaned down and said to him, ‘You wear that outfit in the Belmore Cafeteria, they’ll think you’re the soup of the day.’ ”)

And if you’re wondering what the book is doing in a line called Hard Case Crime when it’s got no crime in it, my answer is, sometimes you have to allow yourself to travel off the beaten path and follow the road where it leads you. A change of scenery can do a world of good. And seeing as how it’s February as we’re publishing this, perhaps love was on our minds.

After all, though they may revoke my noir editor credentials for saying this, Saint Valentine’s Day is not only for massacres.

Charles Ardai

February 2022