Review: The Readymade Thief

The Readymade Thief by Augustus Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy of this from the author for review.

This is one of those impossible reviews because I’d have to get into huge chunks of third act plot to talk about the parts I found the most intriguing so I don’t want to spoil it, but on the other hand I suspect that this is the kind of book where a lot of readers are going to think it’s one thing and be pissed off when it turns out to be another so providing some warning seems to be in order.

It’s a real pickle we got here, folks.

Let’s start with the basic plot which is about an introverted teenage girl named Lee who thinks of herself as being completely invisible and unremarkable except for her talent for shoplifting. Lee’s life is derailed when she’s falsely accused of a crime, and eventually she ends hiding among the homeless on the streets of Philadelphia. (That Bruce Springsteen reference was not intentional.) Eventually she finds shelter in an old building dubbed the Crystal Castle run by a strange group of people that Lee soon grows to distrust. When Lee ends up on their bad side she once again finds herself on the run and caught up in a conspiracy centered around the works of French artist Marcel Duchamp.

That description makes it sound like this is just The Da Vinci Code, but that really sells the book short and would be misleading because while this definitely has elements of a conspiracy thriller it’s closer to being serious Lit-A-Chur than a genre book even though it also has some sci-fi elements to it. Plus, it’s not terrible. So it’s probably better to compare it to Night Film which is another book that blends some solid real-world thriller aspects with a general tone of uncertainty that makes you scratch your head a lot while reading because you’re pleasantly baffled.

The writing is deceptively straight-forward. There’s no real lines that blew me away in and off themselves, but where Rose excels is in creating haunting imagery. Whether it’s an abandoned aquarium at night or a rave in an old missile silo with an inflatable clown head by the entrance or a guy in old-timey clothes riding an antique bicycle down the street you really see these things, and they all combine to help create the aura of mystery that hangs over everything. He also does a very good job of breaking down the visual aspects of Duchamp’s work which ties into his philosophy about the observation of art.

Since it isn’t a straight line thriller that’s as concerned with atmosphere as plot there are some points where I found myself wishing that things would move along and that Lee didn’t spend quite as much time on the run and in hiding as she does. There’s one sub-plot in particular that didn’t seem to go much of anywhere other than to provide Lee with one skill that’s critical for her a couple of key points. And in fairness the sense of desperation Lee has is built by these extended periods of her in survival mode.

While I enjoyed this quite a bit I also think it’s going to be a real Love-It or Hate-It book that will be impossible to predict how another person might react to. It’s general WTF tone for much of the book leaves a reader on uncertain footing and that’s not everybody’s cup of tea, and the payoff is only going to appeal to some folks, not all. Still, it checked off a lot of boxes for me, and it’s one of the more unique and original things I’ve read in a while despite it’s basic familiarity of starting out as a conspiracy thriller. It’s an intriguing debut novel, and I’ll be looking for more work from Augustus Rose.


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Review: Forever and a Death

Forever and a Death by Donald E. Westlake
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Westlake...Donald Westlake.

This is one of the more intriguing back stories to a novel being released years after an author’s death that you’ll ever hear. Back in the ‘90s Donald Westlake worked up an outline to a James Bond movie that would have been the follow up to Goldeneye, but for various Hollywood reasons the studio went in a different direction. Westlake then reworked those basic ideas into a novel he stuck in a drawer that Hard Case Crime is now publishing almost ten years after his death.

The book focuses on a dastardly plot put in motion by Richard Curtis who made a fortune in Hong Kong when the British ruled it, but who was pushed out in the cold when the Chinese took over in 1997. An engineer named George Manville has been helping Curtis by developing a brilliant technique to clear land, but he doesn’t realize Curtis’ true intentions for his work until an accident involving a young woman diver working for an environmental group brings his plan to light.

Once you know the background it’s very easy to pick out the elements that could have been used in a Bond flick. A powerful man with an elaborate scheme is the most obvious piece, and he employs a couple of henchmen in the book who you could certainly see as the heavies going against 007. The characters move through several countries like Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong over the course of the book. There’s even a segment where Manville is held hostage in very posh circumstances instead of being handcuffed to a chair or just killed outright which is another very Bondian thing.

However, it’s also clear that Westlake was working very hard not to get sued because there’s actually no James Bond character in this. Manville seems like he might be the guy for a while, but over the course of the book it turns into more of an ensemble story with multiple characters playing important roles. So while it seems like he thought his general idea was good enough to use on it’s own he didn’t go the cheap and obvious route of just creating a knock-off version of Bond to use as the hero.

There’s also a great afterwords by Jeff Kleeman who was the production company executive and Westlake fan who brought him onto the Bond project originally. He provides a very interesting account of the whole story as well as why it didn’t come to pass which was mainly due to nervousness about basing a story on the Hong Kong handover which had some tricky political ramifications. Maybe the most interesting bit of trivia that comes out of it is that Donald Westlake apparently was actually in a Bond movie once as an extra riding in a car during a chase scene in Live & Let Die which filmed in New York back in the early ‘70s.

Overall, it’s a pretty entertaining story although it’s far from my favorite thing that I’ve read by him. Westlake couldn’t quite bring himself to go all in on his comic book premise, and the rest of the book reads more like one of his standard novels so it’s got a bit of an odd tone to it. Kleeman points out in the afterwards that it seems like if the story had shifted a bit in one direction it could be a Parker novel, or if Westlake had gone a slightly different way it could also be one of his Dortmunder farces.

That keeps it from being one of Westlake’s best books, but it’s certainly an entertaining curiosity and well worth a look for any fans of his work or the Bond franchise.

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