Donald Westlake: Kahawa

My gratitude goes, first and foremost, to Dean Fraser, who shared his experience and expertise to a wonderful degree. Les Alexander created the necessary environments with unflagging optimism, and Rich Barber, Knox Burger, and Gary Salt usefully shared their enthusiasm and professionalism.

I can best express my gratitude to some individuals by not spelling out their names. My friend T.E.M. of the railway ( who introduced me to M. F. Hill’s The Permanent Way ) was patient, helpful, and amusing. J.M. of the Coffee Board provided tea and information. In Grosvenor Square, R.B. was charming and insightful, while C.M. provided anecdotes and lovely copper nugget.

I was in Los Angeles, meeting with some other people on some other business entirely, and when I got back to the hotel, there was a message from Les Alexander, in New York. I had known Les as a friend for some years, and while we had talked about working together on something or other, it had never happened. At that time, he was a book packager and sometime television producer; he is now a film producer. I was and am a novelist with a minor in screenwriting.

When I returned Les’s call, he was boyishly excited. He had a true story, he said, that would make the basis for a great novel. I told him, as I tell everyone in such circumstances, “I’ll listen, but I won’t give you an answer today. I’ll call you tomorrow. I don’t want to make a mistake and be locked into something I don’t really want to do, or locked out of something it turns out I did want to do.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “A group of white mercenaries, in Uganda, while it was under Idi Amin, stole a railroad train a mile long, full of coffee, and made it disappear.”

“Forget the twenty-four hours,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

So it began as a caper. I’ve written capers, before and since, both serious (novels about a professional thief named Parker, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark) and comic (the Dortmunder series), so I feel I know a bit about the form. (It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name.)

One thing I know about the caper is that it helps if the job is outrageous in one way or another. Once, for instance, before the government started paying by check, Parker stole the entire payroll from a United States Air Force base. Dortmunder, not to be outdone, has made off with a complete bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home.

And what could be more outrageous than to steal a mile-long train from the dread Idi Amin, and make it disappear ? This is going to be fun, I thought.

Then I started the research. Please permit me at this point to say a strong word against research. I hate it. My feeling is, the whole point of going into the fiction racket was so I could make it all up. We get enough facts in real life; that’s the way I see it.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way anybody else sees it. If you get a fact wrong in a novel, I have found, people will write you letters full of the most grating kinds of sarcasm and superiority. Of course, not all facts are equally holy among readers. Should you get a detail about a gun or a car wrong, the weight of mail will drive the postman into the sidewalk, but if you get the population of Altoona, Pa., wrong, you probably won’t hear from many people at all; three or four. So if I were to write a novel set in Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin Dada, and if I cared about the health of my mailperson, I had to do some research.

And here’s the other thing I hate about research. Once I actually start it, I get lost in it. Research is my own personal Sargasso Sea. It’s exactly like entering one of our civilization’s mental attics, a quotation book or thesaurus or large dictionary, looking for just one thing, and being found in there three days later by search parties, seated on the dusty floor, intently reading.

That’s what happened this time. I had current events to research (Idi Amin, and how he got where he got, and what it meant) as well as history (the European exploration/invasion of Central Africa, and what followed), so there was much to get lost in. The end was reached when I found myself halfway through a one-thousand-two-hundred-page book called The Permanent Way , by M. F. Hill, which was the official history of the building of the railroad upon which my coffee train would travel half a century later. “That’s it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. As soon as I finish the other six hundred pages of this book, I’m going to work.”

The Permanent Way , and other books, were interesting and useful, but one book, called Uganda Holocaust , by Dan Wooding and Ray Barnett, published by Zondervan, changed both me and the novel I was going to write; for the better, I think.

It seems that some Christian evangelical sects set great store by “giving witness,” which is to say, speaking about and airing and publicizing great works of charity or martyrdom or goodness, done in Christ’s name. It also seems that Idi Amin’s primary goal during his years in power was to eliminate Christianity from Uganda, a large if unworthy task, since Uganda’s sixteen million people were seventy-five percent Christian. Amin’s onslaught resulted in over five hundred thousand Christian martyrs, people who went to their deaths not because they were political or rebellious or dangerous, but only because they were professed Christians. This was the largest and most extensive Christian martyrdom since Rome before Constantine. How’s that for a distinction?

The instant Amin was driven from Uganda, Wooding and Barnett flew in with tape recorders to take witness from the survivors, and published the results in Uganda Holocaust , a book that not only made me horribly familiar with the inner workings of the State Research Bureau, but also changed the character of the story I would tell. As I told my wife at the time, “I can’t dance on all those graves.”

So it was still a caper, but now it was something else as well, something more and, I think, deeper. My own emotions of pity and rage and contempt were entwined with the story, though I knew better than to let them take over. But they were there, spicing the stew.

And altering the book in more ways than one. As you know, in our country “sexandviolence” is one word, and piously we recoil from its depiction; sure. In Kahawa , though, both sex and violence had to play a stronger part than usual in my novels, because the material demanded it. I would never throw in what is called gratuitous sexandviolence, because I have too much respect for story. If a word, one single word, distracts the reader from the story I’m trying to tell, out with it. Since both sex and violence can be distracting, I usually depict them sparingly, trying mostly to get my effects by allusion and implication. Not so in Kahawa; the book demanded a stronger approach.

Of course, when it was published, I got complaining letters, and their general tenor was, “I’ve always liked your books, and so has my teenage son/daughter, but how can I show him/her this book with all this graphic sex in it?” Five hundred thousand dead; bodies hacked and mutilated and tortured and debased and destroyed; corridors running with blood; and nobody complained about the violence. They complained about the sex. Ah, such wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties.

My research was not limited to books; my wife and I also went to Kenya, and to London, to see some of the locations and talk with some of the people. (We did not go into Uganda, merely looked at it across Lake Victoria, since this was 1980, Amin was barely three years out of power, and Uganda was still in a state of anarchy. Trips to Uganda at that time were mostly one way.)