You Ain't Batman

On "Valdez is Coming" by Elmore Leonard and "Killy" by Donald E. Westlake

[Reminder: This is a kind of intermission post. I’ve read both writers before — many times, as you will see — I’m just taking a brief break from the restrictions I’ve set for myself for this project. Don’t get mad at me, I said I would probably do this from time to time.]

I. You’ve Looked at the Ground All Your Life

Author Read Before: Elmore Leonard
Books Previously Read: (deep breath) The Bounty Hunters, Hombre, Forty Lashes Less One, The Big Bounce, Mr. Majestyk, 52 Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man #89, The Switch, City Primeval, Gold Coast, Split Images, Cat Chaser, Stick, La Brava, Glitz, Touch, Freaky Deaky, Killshot, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, Pronto, Riding the Rap, Out of Sight, Tishomingo Blues, Mr. Paradise, The Hot Kid
Book Read: Valdez is Coming

My history with Elmore Leonard is a long and rocky one. Chances are pretty good that I read Get Shorty first, which is probably still his most famous novel, and a pretty good one it is, too, but as for superlatives I think are applicable to it, I think that’s about as far as I’m willing to go. Then Out of Sight, which I had some problems with (more on that, a little anyway, in a bit), and several others of that general era of his long career (80s and 90s, basically), usually with the same outcome: very enjoyable, always extremely engaging in their opening pages, and always with hiccups along the way to endings that were more or less satisfying, or sometimes not. I also felt his much-praised gift for dialogue could become mannered, to the point of even sounding a little tinny. I always enjoyed reading his stuff, but the over the moon reaction so many readers had to him (among whose number were Saul Bellow and Martin Amis) was mildly perplexing to me.

But then I started reading the really good ones. When my wife and I went to Las Vegas to get married, I took Killshot with me, and I thought at the time that it was so clearly one of his best novels that I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t talked about more (I still can’t understand it). Then Unknown Man #89 (which contains one of my favorite lines in any of Leonard’s novels, when the main character is told by the woman he’s attracted to she likes to paint whales, and he responds “I can see where those would be good to paint”), and City Primeval, and The Big Bounce (which introduces the character Mr. Majestyk, later promoted to a title character, but here, with that name, is just a supporting character who manages a motel), and the novel I still believe to be his masterpiece, Swag, from 1976, which has the best ending Leonard ever set down on paper, and one of my favorite endings to any novel, crime fiction or otherwise.

I think I may have lied before when I said Get Shorty was the first Leonard I read, because now I’m pretty sure I read Hombre first, but I’ll just proceed as if this is as good a way to transition into our main topic as any. As a reader, I’ve danced around Leonard’s Westerns (which he stopped writing when the market for them dried up) because I found The Bounty Hunters, Leonard’s very first novel, from 1953, almost unimaginably boring. Whatever faults I’ve detected in the man’s fiction over the years, the thought “This is fucking boring” only popped into my head that one time. It remains one of the longest pretty short novels I’ve ever read. And the other one I read, Forty Lashes Less One, while good, struck me as less a Western than a prison novel.

Anyway, I should probably mention here that despite what I’ve just said, I loved Hombre, and so was drawn to give his Western with the best title a spin. And if Hombre is his best Western (and this is arguable even to myself, as it’s been ages since I read the novel, and I’ve always been, and remain, perhaps unreasonably smitten with Martin Ritt’s film version — “You ask her if she’d eat dog now” fucking kills!), then Valdez is Coming is his most interesting (this comparison is obviously only applicable to the Leonard Westerns I’ve read, no comment is implied about the ones I haven’t, so back off with your “What’s wrong with Escape from Five Shadows?!” bullshit).

The novel opens with a group of men, led by Frank Tanner — convicted criminal, now businessman running guns into Mexico — converging on a beat-up shack in the middle of a pasture, where a black man named Orlando Rincon is holed up with his wife, a pregnant Lapin Indian. Tanner believes that Rincon is a man named Johnson, and he believes Johnson murdered his friend. Among the men present to ostensibly arrest Rincon is a deputy named Bob Valdez, who sees trouble in the way Tanner and his men are approaching this situation. Though, due to a power imbalance, Valdez leans towards deferring to Tanner, he ultimately takes it upon himself to try and avoid bloodshed if he can, and walks down the hill where Tanner’s posse are set up, to the pasture, and the house. There he begins speaking with Rincon, who insists he’s killed no one. And things might have worked out, except Rincon is startled when he sees Tanner’s men approaching behind Valdez — and unbeknownst to Valdez. Believing Valdez to be nothing but a decoy, Rincon turns his gun on the deputy, who has no choice then to shoot the innocent man down. When Tanner arrives on the scene, he announces that this man is not, in fact, Johnson. R. L. Davis, one of Tanner’s sniveling toadies who even Tanner doesn’t like or respect, says to Valdez “Constable… You went and killed the wrong coon.”

Rincon’s pregnant wife now a widow, through no fault of hers, let alone Rincon’s, Valdez reasons she is owed money. He attempts to broach the subject with Tanner twice — once, his life is very explicitly threatened as a result, and the second time he’s beaten, tied to a massive wooden cross, and left to somehow wander home, or to safety, in the baking sun. He’s badly injured, but ultimately freed (by whom is a question answered much later in the novel). After an interim spent preparing for what’s to come, Valdez heads back to Tanner’s camp. One of Tanner’s lookout men, a Mexican (this is the only way he’s referred to, but hold on), sees him, and the two men meet. Valdez tells the Mexican why he wants to talk to Tanner, the Mexican says it won’t work, it won’t matter, but he’ll pass it on if it’s so important. Then, when riding away, the Mexican turns in his horse, gun drawn, and Valdez unloads on him with both barrels of a shotgun. It is to this man, dying but not dead, that Valdez says that his message for Tanner is “Tell him Valdez is coming.”

But here’s the other thing. The dying man is put on his horse and sent back to Tanner’s camp, where he’s just barely able to pass on the message. And here Leonard does something remarkable: he lets us into this man’s head as he dies, how he feels, what he thinks about:

The man laying on his back dying, with the wet stain of his blood on the platform now — thinking that this shouldn’t have happened to him because of the life in him an hour ago and because of the way he saw himself, aware of himself alive and never thinking of himself dying — looked up at the sky and didn’t have to close the light from his eyes… He saw the open sky above him and that was all there was to see. But the sky wasn’t something to look at. If he wasn’t on the hill tonight he would be in the adobe that was in the cantina, with the oil smoke and the women coming in, lighting a cigar as he looked at them and feeling his belly beneath his gun belts full of beef and tortillas with his hand on the curve of her shoulder, touching her neck and feeling strands of her hair between his fingers. But he had done it the wrong way… He should have thought more about the way the man stood at the wall and watched them shoot at him. He should have remembered the way the man got up with the cross on his back and was kicked down and got up again and walked away. Look — someone should have said to him, or he should have told himself — the man wears three guns and hangs a Remington from his saddle. What kind of man is that? And then he thought, You should know when you’re going to die. It should be something in your life you plan. It shouldn’t happen but it’s happening. He tried to raise his left arm but could not. He had no feeling in his left side, from his chest into his legs. His side was hanging open and draining his life as he looked at the sky. He said to himself, What is the sky to me? He said to himself, What are you doing here alone?

That character, known only as the Mexican, is on-stage, as it were, for a total of maybe four pages. Maybe five. Valdez is Coming is not Elmore Leonard’s best novel, but if he ever wrote anything as spine-tingling, as human and as awful in its humanity, as that passage, I have yet to read it.

As far as the plot goes, Valdez’s message having been delivered, this all eventually leads to Valdez kidnapping Tanner’s curiously indifferent fiancee (only in a kind of technical sense), Gay Erin (hell of a name, I know), widow of the man Tanner believed was murdered by Rincon/Johnson. This, in turn, leads to one of the novel’s more sigh-inducing developments, which is a romantic relationship between Gay and Valdez. It’s not that this doesn’t fit with some of Leonard’s themes — by the time the dying Mexican wondered about what kind of man Valdez is, the reader knows that he is a man who has experienced, and dealt out, a lot of violence in his life, in the military and as a constable, but that was only one version of Bob Valdez, and that there is a second one, a man seeking a gentler life (and very late in the book, this Bob Valdez eventually is come to be referred to as Roberto Valdez). And Gay, very unhappy with her dead husband — a violent drunk, in another of Elmore Leonard’s attempts to battle his own alcoholism on the page, with Gay seeing Valdez drink once from a bottle before re-corking it and wondering aloud that she’s “never seen a man take just one drink” — and no happier with Tanner is looking for something similar. Yet despite all that, their blossoming romance reads to me as Leonard fulfilling what he may have considered an obligation to the genre, or rather, to the market (some may regard these as the same obligation, but I do not). In any event, it is communicated to Tanner that he can have his woman back if Tanner gives the Lapin Indian woman money. Instead of capitulating, which we all knew he wouldn’t, Tanner sends his men out on the hunt for Valdez and Gay. This, in turn, leads to Valdez picking off Tanner’s men one by one.

There are other tropes, specific to Leonard, to be found in Valdez is Coming. One of his most reliable is to have a trio, or duo, of villains, who contrast with each other, usually on levels of intelligence. Think of the disgusting rich rapist versus the hippie terrorists in Freaky Deaky, or Louis and Melanie versus Ordell in Rum Punch. Here, there’s Tanner as the boss, and R. L. Davis as a basically useless man trying to get in good with him, and a man known mostly as “the segundo“ (that is until the final pages of the novel, when his full name is revealed) — he’s the smart one. He knows that Tanner is a fool to go after Valdez just because Valdez took Tanner’s woman — get another woman, is the segundo’s thinking. They’re supposed to be making money across the border right now. While quietly stewing on a typical display of overconfidence from Tanner, the segundo thinks:

Maybe [Valdez] had luck — there was such a thing as luck — but God in heaven he knew how to shoot his guns. It would be something to face him, the segundo was thinking. It would be good to talk to him sometime, if this had not happened and if he met the man, to have a drink of mescal with him, or if they were together using their guns against someone else.

Because, like the Mexican Valdez killed, the segundo was there to witness Valdez unbowed before two onslaughts, of mockery and intimidation and violence, against him from him and the rest of Tanner’s men. In that first onslaught, the reader is given the answer to the dead Mexican’s question “What kind of man is that?” As he suffered through it, Valdez thought:

What can you do? he was saying to the segundo. You can kill me. Or one of them can kill me not meaning to. But what else can you do to me? You want me to get down on my knees? You don’t have enough bullets, man, and you know it.

The ending of Valdez is Coming offers a kind of satisfaction not typical to the kind of novel it broadly belongs to, and, indeed, may not be satisfying to some. It was not entirely satisfying to me, either, though a great last line punches up the impact quite a bit. So Valdez is Coming is one of those Elmore Leonard novels: entertaining, engaging, a little bit disappointing, and, occasionally, absolutely brilliant.

II. A Bunch of Cheap Cowardly Lies

Author Read Before: Donald E. Westlake
Books Previously Read: (deeper breath) 361, God Save the Mark, Cops and Robbers, Kahawa, A Likely Story, One of Us is Wrong, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, Trust Me on This, Sacred Monster, Humans, The Ax, The Hook, Levine, The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, The Outfit, The Mourner, The Score, The Jugger, The Seventh, The Handle, The Rare Coin Score, The Green Eagle Score, The Black Ice Score, The Sour Lemon Score, Deadly Edge, Slayground, Plunder Squad, Butcher’s Moon, Comeback, Backflash, Flashfire, Firebreak, Breakout, Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, Dirty Money
Book Read: Killy

God knows when I first heard of Donald E. Westlake, but at some point in my early exploration of crime fiction, his name would keep popping up, either in reference to his popular series of comic caper novels about the bumbling thief Dortmunder (I assume he’s bumbling, I still haven’t read any of those, humorous crime novels not really being my thing), or, more compellingly, his other major novel series, the powerfully dark, hardboiled books about the cold-eyed, cold-hearted sociopathic thief named Parker. These were written under the name Richard Stark, one of Westlake’s many pseudonyms. At the time I first learned of them, and for many years afterwards, these novels — the first, The Hunter, was published in 1962; the last, Dirty Money, in 2008, the year Westlake died at age 75, on New Year’s Eve — were out of print (at least the first 16, out of 24, were), and very hard to come by. I’d picked up a random few here and there, including two that I found in a used bookstore in Ireland, of all places, and one, Butcher’s Moon, the last of the original run before Westlake took a long break from the character, in some forgotten thrift store. But that was it, for a long time. Since the series was reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, I have bought and read them all, and in fact the title of this Substack, A Rip in the Picture, is taken from the opening paragraph of the tenth Parker novel, The Green Eagle Score.

Anyway, all of this is to say that it took me a little while to become the Westlake fan I am today. The first of his novels I read, Kahawa, which is more of an adventure novel than a work of crime fiction, and Westlake’s personal favorite of his own books, was a bit of a disappointment. Since that’s not the Westlake book under discussion today, all I’ll say is that my main problem, at least that I remember, was the death of a character, a good and decent man, whose murder is more or less brushed off, even by the woman who loved him the most, not because she was some sort of devious femme fatale, but because, as I saw it, Westlake needed to kill the guy off, but didn’t want the tone to become too grim. This despite the fact that the plot involves the vile barbarism of the Idi Amin dictatorship (as it happens, I had a similar problem with Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight and the death of a character, who, by the way, survives in Steven Soderbergh’s film version, a choice that turned out to be a wise one).

But then I read The Ax. And shortly thereafter, I read The Hook. These are thematically linked but otherwise standalone, late career Westlake novels that are each, in my view, no-fooling masterpieces, both working with the chilling idea that most people who commit murder — or, if not most, than a number large enough to be terrifying — spend the majority of their lives before committing such an evil act either believing themselves incapable of such a thing, until faced with a bad situation that they think they can only escape by killing another human being; or quietly knowing they are capable of murder, and then, for one reason or another, go ahead and commit it. Whichever the case, the realization afterwards that not only can they do it, but they can live with it, is the ultimate horror. For us, not them. It was Westlake, as well as another favorite crime writer, Charles Willeford, that put that chilling understanding in my head. It’s crime fiction as horror fiction.

All of which is somewhat, though not entirely, relevant, when discussing Killy, Westlake’s fourth novel. This is one of Westlake’s vaguely political novels, or politics-adjacent novels, if you prefer. But like all novels that can be described that way, it is ultimately about something else entirely. Or, maybe not entirely.

Our narrator is Paul Standish, a college student studying economics. His school has a six-month-learn/six-months-on-the-job system going (I’ve never heard of such a thing, either), and as the story opens, Paul is meeting with Walter Killy, representative of the American Alliance of Machinists & Skilled Trade union. Walter is going to take Paul to Wittburg, NY, from where a man named Charles Hamilton, employee of the McIntyre Shoe Co., has written to the AAMST for guidance on how to join their union. So the two hop in the car.

I got my first real look at Wittburg the next morning, when we went out for breakfast. Walter had given me the vital statistics, that the town had a population of not quite nine thousand, thirty-five hundred of whom worked in the McIntyre Shoe Company plant. The other fifty-five hundred served as the plumbers, doctors, carpenters, grocers, wives, teachers, and delivery boys for the first thirty-five hundred. The shoe factory, therefore, was the only possible reason for the town’s existence.

After setting up an appointment to meet with Hamilton, the two are able to relax. Until the next morning, that is, when the police bust down Walter and Paul’s rooms at the local motel, beat them, cuff them, and arrest them for, it turns out, the murder of Charles Hamilton. At this point in the story, Paul and Walter are separated, which means that, Paul, being the narrator, has, with one brief exception, no contact with the title character for the vast majority of the novel’s 215 pages. But the novel ain’t called Paul, is it. It’s not Standish by Donald E. Westlake.

One problem I have with Killy, and it’s a small one, is the plot can become rather convoluted, in a way not always typical of crime fiction, as opposed to mystery fiction, if you get my distinction. Because in all honestly, Killy really is a mystery novel, in that way distinct from crime fiction that we were just talking about, but a mystery novel that in ways is quite psychologically more in tune with crime fiction. If you see what it is that I mean.

I say part of that because the thought of trying to summarize enough of, or at least as much as I normally do of, plot mechanics leaves me enervated more than it usually does, and that “usually” is pretty goddamned usual. Which, on top of that, would delay me, quite unnecessarily so, from writing about what is interesting about Killy. Now, first of all, that name, you’re ashamed but you thought it was going to be about a hitman, didn’t you? Yeah, me too. But you take that name, with lots of references by Paul about the kind of guy Walter Killy is (he’s the kind of guy you can borrow money from, we are at one point assured), and then you almost entirely remove him from the story (though he’s obviously frequently referred to, Paul’s ultimate goal, after he, but not Walter, is released from jail, being to free Walter) then you start to wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe could be any number of things, many of them a bit on the easy side — he may not be a hitman, but perhaps he is the true villain, what kind of a name is that to have?

Well, what that other shoe is, is what makes Killy something more than a perfectly fine and competent mystery novel. Though in fairness to the rest of it, it really does have some terrific stuff in there. For example, in Killy, as in Valdez is Coming, there is a late blossoming romance, which when introduced — it’s Paul with the granddaughter of a second man who’s been murdered — seems absurd exactly in the way of the market (or is it genre?) obligations referred to earlier: you can’t have a crime and/or mystery novel in which a man and a woman don’t at least kiss. And while I’d say that on some level that is what this is, it’s not entirely, and, anyway, Westlake does a wonderful job of disguising it. So the short version is, Paul has sex with her mere hours after her grandfather, with whom she lived, was murdered:

Brutal? Unfeeling? No, inevitable. In the sight of death, our first thought must always be of our own continued existence; only later can we afford sympathy or grief for him whose existence has ended. Besides which, such promptings and urges would hardly have formed part of her conscious thinking.

No, Alice was not to be blamed. Her emotions had been ripped to pieces, and she had striven, without conscious plan or design, to somehow make them whole again. But what about me? What was my excuse?

I needed one, I’ll say that much.

That’s great, isn’t it? Westlake was a master of that kind of plainspoken prose-as-poetry.

And that’s what ultimately gives Killy its energy: what kind of person is Paul Standish? We’re finding that there’s something going on with him, but what is it? Well, I won’t spoil it, it’s the kind of idea that raises, or rather shifts, the novel into the area not of politics-adjacent fiction, upon which I earlier insisted Killy was, into the area of actually political fiction. Depending, I suppose, on how you want to look at it. When you look at how your attitudes towards the various characters, and what these changes may or may not imply about the, once again implied, politics of these characters, where does that put you? Then again, you can look at Killy this way: one set of villains betrayed their beliefs; another set of villains, which can be associated with politics opposite those of the previously mentioned villains, seem to have no moral stance to speak of. Or, and I’ll admit, as politically homeless as I feel these days, and by “these days” I mean roughly half my life, my preferred take is that the novel’s ostensible politics are a facade, and Westlake is playing a much grimmer game. None of it matters, we’re all hypocrites, we’re all liars, we all relish in the suffering of our enemies, all we want is to win. All any of us wants, is to win.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, 2025. For more details about this project, please read this post.