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Bad News Paperback – March 1, 2002
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrand Central Publishing
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2002
- Dimensions4.25 x 1 x 7 inches
- ISBN-100446610844
- ISBN-13978-0446610841
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Product details
- Publisher : Grand Central Publishing; Complete Numbers Starting with 1, 1st Ed edition (March 1, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0446610844
- ISBN-13 : 978-0446610841
- Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.25 x 1 x 7 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,453,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #166,391 in Mysteries (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

I think I'd best treat this as an interrogation, in which I am not certain of the intent or attitude of the interrogator.
I was born Donald Edwin Westlake on July 12th, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. My mother, Lillian, maiden name Bounds, mother's maiden name Fitzgerald, was all Irish. My father, Albert, his mother's maiden name being Tyrrell, was half Irish. (The English snuck in, as they will.) They were all green, and I was born on Orangeman's Day, which led to my first awareness of comedy as a consumer. I got over the unfortunate element of my birth long before my uncles did.
My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up. One of her beliefs was that people whose initials spelled something would be successful in life. That's why I went through grammar school as Dewdrip. However, my mother forgot Confirmation, when the obedient Catholic is burdened with yet another name. So she stuck Edmond in there, and told me that E was behind the E of Edwin, so I wasn't DEEW, I was DEW. Perhaps it helped.
I attended three colleges, all in New York State, none to much effect. Interposed amid this schooling was two and a half years in the United States Air Force, during which I also learned very little, except a few words in German. I was a sophomore in three colleges, finally made junior in Harpur College in Binghamton, NY, and left academe forever. However, I was eventually contacted by SUNY Binghamton, the big university that Harpur College had grown up to become. It was their theory that their ex-students who did not graduate were at times interesting, and worthy to be claimed as alumni. Among those she mentioned were cartoonist Art Spiegelman and dancer Bill T. Jones, a grandfaloon I was very happy to join, which I did when SUNY Binghamton gave me a doctorate in letters in June 1996. As a doctor, I accept no co-pay.
I have one sister, one wife and two ex-wives. (You can't have ex-sisters, but that's all right, I'm pleased with the one I have.) The sister was named by my mother Virginia, but my mother had doped out the question of Confirmation by then--Virigina's two and half years younger than me, still--and didn't give her a middle name. Her Confirmation name was Olga, the only thing my mother could find that would make VOW. The usual mother-daughter dynamic being in play, my sister immediately went out and married a man whose name started with B.
My wife, severally Abigail Westlake, Abby Adams Westlake and Abby Adams, which makes her three wives right there, is a writer, of non-fiction, frequently gardening, sometimes family history. Her two published books are An Uncommon Scold and The Gardener's Gripe Book.
Seven children lay parental claims on us. They have all reached drinking age, so they're on their own.
Having been born in Brooklyn, I was raised first in Yonkers and then in Albany, schooled in Plattsburgh and Troy and Binghamton, and at last found Manhattan. (At least I was looking in the right state.) Abby was born in Manhattan, which makes it easier. We retain a rope looped over a butt there, but for the last decade have spent most of our time on an ex-farm upstate. It is near nothing, which is the point. Our nearest neighbor on two sides is Coach Farm, producer of a fine goat cheese I've eaten as far away as San Francisco. They have 750 goats up there on their side of the hill. More importantly, they have put 770 acres abutting our land into the State Land Conservancy, so it cannot be built on. I recommend everybody have Miles and Lillian Cann and Coach Farm as their neighbors.
I knew I was a writer when I was eleven; it took the rest of the world about ten years to begin to agree. Up till then, my audience was mainly limited to my father, who was encouraging and helpful, and ultimately influential in an important way.
Neophyte writers are always told, "write what you know," but the fact is, kids don't know anything. A beginning writer doesn't write what he knows, he writes what he read in books or saw in movies. And that's the way it was with me. I wrote gangster stories, I wrote stories about cowboys, I wrote poems about prospecting-in Alaska, so I could rhyme with "cold"-I wrote the first chapters of all kinds of novels. The short stories I mailed off to magazines, and they mailed them back in the self-addressed, stamped envelopes I had provided. And in the middle of it all, my father asked me a question which, probably more than any other single thing, decided what kind of writer I was going to be.
I was about fourteen. I'd written a science-fiction about aliens from another planet who come to Earth and hire a husband-wife team of big-game hunters to help them collect examples of every animal on Earth for their zoo back on Alpha Centauri or wherever. At the end of the story, they kidnap the hero and heroine and take them away in the spaceship because they want examples of every animal on Earth.
Now, this was a perfectly usable story. It has been written and published dozens of times, frequently with Noah's Ark somewhere in the title, and my version was simply that story again, done with my sentences. I probably even thought I'd made it up.
So I showed it to my father. He read it and said one or two nice things about the dialogue or whatever, and then he said, "why did you write this story?"
I didn't know what he meant. The true answer was that science-fiction magazines published that story with gonglike regularity and I wanted a story published somewhere. This truth was so implicit I didn't even have words to describe it, and therefore there was no way to understand the question.
So he asked it a different way: "What's the story about?" Well, it's about these people that get taken to be in a zoo on Alpha Centauri. "No, what's it about?" he said. "The old fairy tales that you read when you were a little boy, they all had a moral at the end. If you put a moral at the end of this story, what would it be?"
I didn't know. I didn't know what the moral was. I didn't know what the story was about.
The truth was, of course, that the story wasn't about anything. It was a very modest little trick, like a connect-the-dots thing on a restaurant place mat. There's nothing particularly wrong with connect-the-dots things, and there's nothing particularly wrong with this constructivist kind of writing, a little story or a great big fat novel with nothing and nobody in it except this machine that turns over and at the end this jack-in-the-box pops out. There's nothing wrong with that.
But it isn't what I thought I wanted to be. So that question of my father's wriggled right down into my brain like a worm, and for quite a while it took the fun out of things. I'd be sitting there writing a story about mobsters having a shootout in a nightclub office-straight out of some recent movie-and the worm would whisper: Why are you writing this story?
Naturally, I didn't want to listen, but I had no real choice in the matter. The question kept coming, and I had to try to figure out some way to answer it, and so, slowly and gradually, I began to find out what I was doing. And ultimately I refined the question itself down to this: What does this story mean to me that I should spend my valuable time creating it?
And that's how I began to become a writer.
- Ancram, NY (2001)
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Things always seem to go wrong whenever Dortmunder plans the perfect crime. And rest assured, as you might expect author, Donald E. Westlake, has invented new and side-splitting ways for things to go wrong during this visitation. John Dortmunder is your basic professional (or unprofessional) breaking and entering artist, a.k.a. burglar. So how does your basic burglar end up in the middle of con caper digging up the remains of a long dead Native American, a.k.a. Indian?
Well, it's probably because he didn't get the thousand bucks for the cameras he was stealing from the Speedshop before he got locked in the optical department. And that all takes place in the first few pages of this new page-turner.
Dortmunder fans will really enjoy this new adventure. And yes, there is the mandatory visit to O. J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue where the discussion of "the regulars" centers on the names of Santa's reindeer and the seven dwarfs. If you're not a fan, get this book and you soon will be!
As for author, Donald E. Westlake (a.k.a. John B. Allan, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, Timothy J. Culver, Morgan J. Cunningham, Samuel Holt and Richard Stark), I've been a fan for almost as long as he's been writing - which is almost, but not quite as long I I've been reading. The bad news about Bad News is I read it too fast and now I'll have to wait five years for the next Dortmunder!
Donald Westlake is a wonderful writer, in my opinion. Read all of his books!
This is the tale of a Simple Plan, like all the other Dortmunder books; it's just that in this case, the plan belongs to some other folks. At first. After a while, though, Tiny, Andy, and John are in, and most of the original group is naked in the back of various long-haul semis. The plot turns and dips just as you'd expect from a Westlake book, and it's great fun to be along for the roller coaster ride.
There's a few things missing from Bad News, though. The first one is the humor. Oh, sure, it's in there, but not to the extent of the other books, many of which it's impossible to read without risking laughter-related abdominal injuries. Bad News has a few laugh-out-loud moments and a lot of quick smiles, and then it's over. So, not bad, but - not quite what a longtime fan of the series fantasizes about in Dortmunder hiatuses.
The other notable absence from Bad News: the support crew. Stan and Murch's Mom make quick appearances, and Anne Marie shows up again, but beyond that, well, no unbalanced lockmen, no behatted extra drivers, no former vice presidents of various nations, none of those folks. I, at least, missed these people, and wish there'd been a bit more room in the book for them. They're replaced by Fitzroy (who reminds me of a certain character in The Princess Bride), Irwin (standard issue), and Little Feather. Frankly, I'd rather have the regular guys.
Finally, for a hardcover book, my copy is rather poorly bound. I buy hardcovers because I expect to read and read and read them - which I probably will with this book, flaws and all - and I doubt this one will stand the test of time. After one read through, treating it very kindly, the spine is already starting to show symptoms of wear and creakiness, and some of the page groups don't look very firmly set, with gaps and so forth. There's also a certain ineffable feeling of cheapness about the book's production; the paper is lower quality than I'd want, there's no spine overlay, it's all just a bit - shoddy feeling. First editions, especially of this series, deserve better treatment than this.
All in all, though, Bad News is still a book worth reading, a book worth having, and certainly a book far better than those available in this genre in the non-Dortmunder years. But those who are wondering whether to buy it in hardback or softcover, know this: I wish I'd waited to buy it in paperback. I could've saved the fourteen bucks for the next Dortmunder novel. (Let it come soon!)






