31 March, 2002: The Hot Rock
The Hot Rock is the flip side of Donald Westlake's Parker books; Westlake says as much in his introduction. The Hot Rock was originally conceived as a Parker novel, one in which the cold-blooded thief had to steal the same thing a half-dozen times. Westlake says he realized that Parker would just get frustrated and blow the hell out of the supporting cast, so he had to create a different protagonist: competent but cursed, funny, a schlemiel. Thus was John Dortmunder born. In The Hot Rock, Dortmunder and his crew steal the titular gem, a small African nation's treasured emerald which is on display in New York, time and time again, each theft more ludicrous than the last. It starts out in believable Parker territory and rapidly enters slapstick land (the capers include a helicopter raid on police headquarters and a train-mounted assault on a mental institution). It's interesting how little it takes to make the atmosphere of the Parker books, in which everyone is out for themselves and most people would as soon shoot you as look at you, bleed away. What's left might not be the same kind of gripping plunge into the world of a sociopath, but it's awfully fun. I bet that the movie adaption -- starring Robert Redford and providing a name to a Sleater-Kinney album -- is brilliant, because the book's combination of lunatic physical comedy set pieces and po-faced comic dialogue, seems tailor-made for the screen.