Sand in the Machinery

By Christopher Porterfield

HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER

by DONALD D. WESTLAKE

275 pages. Evans. $6.95.

On the TV screen, the cops are closing in for the final shootout. With seconds to spare, they bear down on the bad guys' hideaway, pull up to the curb, and . . .

But wait. What if there had been no parking space? What then?

For Crime Novelist Donald E. Westlake, musing in front of the tube a decade ago, that was no idle question. At the time, Westlake was known mainly as a promising heir to the tough, taut Hammett-Chandler tradition. But suddenly he glimpsed the comic potential of tossing the sand of petty frustrations and human fallibility into the well-oiled machinery of the thriller. Nonviolent, Runyonesque crooks could become the victims, and everyday life the culprit. Getaway cars could stall, crucial phone numbers could slip the mind, a paralyzing snowstorm could fall on the day of a planned bank heist.

Jail Tunnel. The results, starting with Westlake's The Fugitive Pigeon in 1965, have brought new life to a neglected subgenre: the caper novel. In The Spy in the Ointment (1966), a typographical error on an FBI list caused a pacifist to become mixed up with bomb-throwing subversives. In The Hot Rock (1970), a raffish foursome engineered several fiendishly clever jewel thefts in search of a rare emerald that turned out never to be where it was supposed to be. In Bank Shot (1972), a suburban bank temporarily operating out of a mobile home was robbed by a gang that simply hauled it away.

On the strength of such engaging fancies, Brooklyn-born Westlake, 41, a softspoken, owlish ectomorph who resembles most of his protagonists, has slipped into the front rank of popular crime writers. Especially in Hollywood, where his plots seem like readymade movie scenarios--so readymade, in fact, that with Cops and Robbers (1972) Westlake reversed the usual sequence and wrote the movie script first, then turned it into a novel.

With Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, Westlake returns to the usual sequence, though readers may still think they discern film sprockets running down the sides of the pages. The hero, Harry Kuent, is a practical joker, one of whose pranks has spectacularly misfired and landed him in prison. There he falls in with a group of cons who have access to a secret tunnel--not to escape by, but to use for a sort of shore leave to the neighboring town, where under assumed names they set up households, open charge accounts and join local bowling teams. Only after Harry Kuent is initiated into the tunnel club does he learn that the cons plan to rob the town banks, using their ostensible confinement in prison as an alibi.

The misadventures by which Harry keeps himself more or less honest are not quite up to Westlake's zaniest inventions, but just the thing to turn to while those TV cops are finding parking spaces.

sbChristopher Porterfield

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