The Best Caper Story Ever
Something Old: Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture, by Victor L. Whitechurch.
Something New: Too Many Crooks, by Donald Westlake
Victor L. Whitechurch was a canon whose hobby was railroads and trains. He was an amateur expert on the subject, and when he started writing detective stories in the 1890’s, he made his character a railways expert too.
That character, Thorpe Hazell, was a train-loving vegetarian exercise fanatic, nearly always stopping in the middle of an investigation to eat boiled rice and perform aerobics, which made for a very eccentric character in the 19th Century. The mysteries he solves are all intriguing, with genuine clues and interesting detection. But one stands out as his supreme achievement.
“Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture” is the story of the aftermath of a caper crime. In this case, thieves have stolen a valuable painting from a train — by stealing not just the picture but the railway car it was on too. No problem, you may be thinking to yourself. They probably decoupled the last car and shunted it off the line. But the car they took was in the middle of the train, fifth from the front and back. And the train never stopped moving between stations! At one station there were nine cars on the train, at the next there were only eight, and no one was any wiser until they went looking for the painting.
Hazell is called in to find out how it could have been done, and it’s one of the finest problems ever posed in detective fiction, with a fiendishly inventive solution. You can get it in the collection Thrilling Stories of the Railway, or in Sayers’ Omnibus of Crime. Both are readily available on www.abebooks.com.
Donald Westlake is one of the greatest living mystery writers. He’s won three Edgars, written several bestsellers, and he revitalized the comic mystery back in the 1960’s with his con man stories. He writes a bunch of different series, but my favorites are his Dortmunder caper novels and short stories.
Dortmunder, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is a crook. In each of the books he’s in, he somehow gets the idea for a grand theft, such as stealing an entire classic car collection, or recovering money from someone else’s bank heist that had been buried and then submerged under a lake when a new reservoir was created. At first the ideas seem slightly outlandish, but still feasible, and then Westlake adroitly adds layers of lunacy to the larceny until the whole thing is bursting with outrageousness. They are among the very few crime novels that are laugh-out-loud funny.
Westlake had a collection out last year, called Thieves’ Dozen. All but one feature Fred Dortmunder in a variety of capers. All but a few are outstanding. One of those few is “Too Many Thieves”, which goes beyond outstanding. In this story Dortmunder decides to rob a bank by tunneling directly into the bank vault. To say that things go wrong from the moment they break the surface would be accurate, but wouldn’t prepare you for the joy you’ll get from the ingenuity, humor, and reverses along the way. Buy it, get it, read it.
It’s the finest caper story ever written by Westlake, which makes it the finest caper story ever written — a certain story by Victor L. Whitechurch notwithstanding.
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(Bonus Bookfling: Westlake Trivia question: for which Westlake novel – published pseudonymously — did Lawrence Block provide a back-cover blurb that let the savvy reader know it was actually a Westlake book? Answer tomorrow.)