Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Forever and a Death is not to be confused with a novelization, which is a fleshing out of a movie’s screenplay without traveling too far from any of its elements. Don has taken a place, an event and a McGuffin and created an entirely new story and characters around them. His treatments and this book share the same germ of inspiration, but they take it in completely different directions. It’s a wonderful exercise in seeing how the same core idea can be imagined two different ways.

It’s impossible for me not to wonder if there are certain aspects of the book — beyond the central device — that are Bond-influenced. For example, Manville bears an uncanny resemblance to Michael Wilson, the Bond producer. Michael physically resembles Westlake’s descriptions of Manville, and Michael has an engineering background, something every Bond writer is aware of because Michael takes an engineer’s approach to dissecting story and action sequences, in the same way that Manville approaches solving the problem of the gun’s safety mechanism when facing down deadly enemies on Richard Curtis’s yacht. Then again, I can also see Manville as an alter ego for Don, who also had an engineer’s head for plot, whether it be the conception of the soliton device or any number of his exceptional heist ideas. Either way, how wonderful to have a pulpy action novel where engineering solves both guns and sex.

So, what do the book and Don’s treatments have in common? In both, the villain is a wealthy and powerful businessman with a worldwide construction company who had earlier married into a Hong Kong family. He’s created a device that can produce a destructive soliton wave, which he first tests on an island in the Coral Sea that had been a Japanese observation post in WWII. The test is in service of being able to rebuild the island as a resort.

There’s an environmental watch group boat that tries to stop the test and one of its members (a female Chinese agent in the treatments, an impetuous American girl in the book) dives into the water, is knocked unconscious by the blast, and is brought aboard the villain’s boat. Though it’s only in Don’s treatment you’ll get to find Bond murmuring as he witnesses the soliton reshaping the island, “Shaken not stirred.”

The villain has a compound in a remote part of Australia where Bond and Manville are treated as both guests and prisoners. As part of their escape, both end up hanging on to the metal framework of the garage door (an idea Don lifted from one of his own Richard Stark novels!).

The villain’s plot is to rob Hong Kong’s banks and then level the city as an act of revenge (in the treatments it’s a revenge against China as they are about to receive Hong Kong in the handover, whereas the book takes place after the handover). Figuring out which Hong Kong construction site is being used; the workers barricading it against the police, resulting in a giant firefight; a radio-operated submarine to carry looted gold out through flooded tunnels; these elements can all be found in both the novel and at least some of Don’s work on the film.

In Don’s final treatment, the submarine isn’t used; rather Don came up with a method where the gold is ground up, turned into a slurry with seawater and pumped out into a waiting barge where it piles up like sand. There’s a climactic fight between Bond and the villain with the hill of gold sand rising around them. In a moment thematically reminiscent of the book’s final pages, the villain is buried by the still-descending gold as Bond says, “Too rich for him, I think.”

For a Westlake fan, Forever and a Death is a rewarding book. And that’s true whether you know about the Bond connection or not. Westlake’s quiet craftsmanship is on display with every sentence. Ten degrees to the right and any given sequence could be in a Parker book, ten degrees to the left and it could be in a Dortmunder story. (Take the set piece on the yacht where Manville and Kim have to escape three killers. The killers could be from a Parker story; Manville having to defend himself with a pepper mill could easily be a Dortmunder moment.) It’s a beautiful illustration of how carefully Don calibrated language and tone, and how he found humor in his plots without sacrificing suspense.

There are wonderful inside jokes for Westlake aficionados, like Manville learning how to be tough by reading a novel titled Payback (the title of Mel Gibson’s film adaptation of Westlake’s first Parker novel, The Hunter ). And of course Don’s love of food and travel is evident throughout. It’s a novel in which much of the joy is in how wonderfully Don’s thought through the small details.

Which is not to say that there aren’t frustrations. The reader begins by expecting that Manville is going to drive the story and then he’s suddenly offstage for a large fraction of it, emerging as no more than an ensemble player by the end. The book switches from a traditional action-hero story to a fragmented structure more akin to Don’s Dancing Aztecs .

I can understand why Don abandoned Manville as his lead midway through the book. While I love Manville’s evolution from meek to hard-boiled engineer, as characters go, well, he’s no James Bond. (No doubt deliberately so — Don clearly wanted the novel to be its own work, not a “Bond novel” or a pastiche of one, and in that he succeeded.)

And I wonder whether Don might never have felt fully in his element writing a do-gooder hero, whether Manville or Bond. If you think about it, in Don’s most memorable novels his protagonists, whether it be Parker, Dortmunder or the leads of standalone novels like The Ax , are all on the wrong side of the law. They initiate actions whose reverberations propel the story. With this in mind, it’s no surprise, perhaps, that it’s the villain of Forever and a Death , Richard Curtis, who emerges as the book’s most interesting and richly developed character, and whose devastating end gives the book its unforgettable final scene.

There are wonderful things in Don’s treatments I wish I could have seen on screen. For example, when Bond first meets with M he’s discomforted to learn there’s a new 003. They recycle the numbers?!? M explains that since 00s never live for long, it’s simplest to recycle the nine digits. Bond reflects on how strange it is to realize that one day there will be another 007 and, of course, another M too. It’s a tour de force moment that underlines the danger of what Bond is about to do, makes a meta-reference to all the actors past and future who will be Bond, and generates a melancholy emotion during a scene that’s usually very dry.

But if he’d gone to script Don would have been writing a story that would then have been tossed around and reshaped by many others. It would have become more conventional Bond and less Westlake. As an executive, conventional Bond enlivened by Westlake is a dream. But as a Westlake fan, pure Westlake is still the best Westlake. So, while I still wonder what a Donald Westlake Bond screenplay might have yielded, I cherish the book.

With the publication of Forever and a Death my quest is complete. As a teenager I’d been in search of a Westlake book, then the man, then a film collaboration; and now he’s brought me full circle, back to finding a Westlake book, and one I never imagined could have existed. A book that is filled with uniquely Westlake-ian pleasures and makes me appreciate and understand his work in ways I never had before.

In our attempts to make a movie together, I worked with Don one more time after Bond 18 . I convinced him to adapt a series of detective novels by Steven Saylor set in ancient Rome. Don did a superb job and the movie would have been made if not for Gladiator coming along first and stealing its thunder.