The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

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.

And now it’s happened again. This time, when life took one of those unfortunate little turns, Dortmunder made a deal with some nearby nuns — I’m just telling you what he told me — where they’d keep him out of the clutches of the law if he would go on a sort of quest for them. Once he’d figured out how to make the quest show a potential profit, he rounded up the usual accomplices.

The O. J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan is where the Dortmunder gang (as in “aft agley”) makes its meets.