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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780446617123
ISBN number: 0446617121
Label: Grand Central Publishing
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 360
Printing Date: March 01, 2006
Publishing house: Grand Central Publishing
Sale Popularity Level: 98384
Studio: Grand Central Publishing
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Hapless criminal John Dortmunder returns in another rollicking tale of disorganized crime from Grand Master of Mystery Donald E. Westlake. It's the score of a lifetime: easy acess to a lavish New York City apartment, hordes of valuables, and an absentee owner avoiding the lawyers of his unhappy ex-wives. But before they pull the job, Dortmunder's crew is startled to find their beloved gin joint, the OJ, in the clutches of the Mafia-who consider it perfect for a little fraud, courtesy of a nice big fire. For tactical and highly superstitious reasons, the fate of the OJ is even more important to the crew than the enormous score. Now, Dortmunder and his gang are determined to split their time, fighting the mob and robbing the rich simultaneously.
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Rated by buyers 
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Since Ed McBain's departure, I've been looking for a writer guaranteed to end a reading slump. I think I've found one. Actually the Dortmunder series and the 87th precinct have a lot in common. They're both humorous, they both rely on multiple characters and story lines, and both writers are deceptively adept prose masters.
The biggest difference between the two is that Westlake has us cheering for the crooks. In this one, Dortmunder's fence, Arnie Albright, has set the gang up to rob a venture capitalist, Preston Fairweather, who's hiding from his ex-wives in the Caribbean, making his Manhattan apartment easy pickings. The B-story involves the "Busting out" of the OJ Bar and Grill, Dortmunder's hangout. Busting out is maxing out the bar's credit line, then shutting the place down. Dortmunder and crew waylay the organized crime members behind it.
Certainly Dortmunder and his friends are amusing characters, but I found the minor ones more entertaining in this one. Two of them stand out. Preston Fairweather's ex-wives conspire to kidnap him and bring him back to the states to face litigation. In his endeavor to escape their clutches he meets a bone fisherman named Porfiro. The interplay between the two is hysterical. The second one is young Judson Blint who takes a job working for Tiny's girlfriend J.C. His resume is a pack of lies, which is why she hires him. She runs several scams, one of which is taking up too much of her time. Judson is hired to run the others while she's absorbed. Judson will end up being the most valuable member of the gang.
Like McBain whose literary efforts were written under the name Evan Hunter, Westlake can really turn a phrase when he wants to. This is Alan, Preston Fairweather's right-hand man being introduced to Pam Broussard, who is in the employ of the ex-wives: "He shook her hand, a cold hard thing like a falconer's glove." This subsequent example is from Preston Fairweather, describing the Caribbean: "The August sun, God's blood blister, hung midway down the sky."
I've read three Dortmunders now and it's always frustrating that Dortmunder never seems to score the big one, but it's also fascinating to see how he will be foiled this time.
Rated by buyers -
Many plots are like gravel pits, full of harsh points that don't fit together very well. Why? I don't know. Perhaps the authors just write without having the end in mind. Or perhaps some authors like messy, pointless plots. Every once in awhile I have the pleasure of reading a book where all of the elements work smoothly together taking me effortlessly and comfortably to unexpected and interesting places. Watch Your Back! is one of those books.
But that's not why you read Dortmunder novels. You want some laughs, some irony, work play, and some straightforward comedy. Watch Your Back! has the expected quota along those lines. Any Dortmunder story that begins with the regulars at the OJ Bar & Grill is bound to have a humorous tone throughout.
The book's theme is about what happens to people when they take on new roles in new places. Everyone is affected, but some change . . . and improve . . . while others stay the same.
As the book opens, Dortmunder and his gang of irregulars are without a scheme. But Arnie Albright, New York's most obnoxious but best paying fence, soon offers one.
It turns out that Arnie's family finally found him to be too obnoxious to stand and insisted he take a trip to Club Med in the Caribbean. While there, Arnie had met the wealthy and obnoxious (in a different way) Preston Fareweather (nominally a New Yorker but on the lam from the talons of his four ex-wives who are legally ganging up on him). Arnie learned that Fareweather has a penthouse in Manhattan full of treasures which he never visits and will probably never visit again. What could be a better set up?
When the gang gets together to plan the caper, there's a problem. The back room at the OJ Bar & Grill is off limits and Rollo, the bartender, warns Dortmunder off. Two creeps in a booth seem to be connected to the problem. Dortmunder tries holding his meeting at home and future meetings in the backroom of another bar, but it's not the same. So he decides to find out what's going on at the OJ Bar & Grill. What he learns sets him into unaccustomed action.
Meanwhile, we get to find out why Fareweather is so obnoxious and become acquainted with a young crook-in-training, Judson Blint, who wants to join the gang.
Before the story is over, the characters have even more surprises than you do as the reader. You come out ahead, though, because their problems become the source of your laughter.
Pick your spot and timing carefully!
Rated by buyers 
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The comic caper novel is a rare genre. Few do it well. Westlake does it magnificently. I laughed out loud, chuckled and guffawed my way through this book. It reads fast and is the appropriate bit of froth and fun to cleanse the palete.
Dortmunder and gang are immortal. My one (very minor) complaint is that I missed May -- I needed to know what was on sale at Bohack's!
Having moved to the west coast I gleefully anticipate Stan Murch's driving directions to bring back all the old memories of dealing with NYC traffic. (He is invariably right as to what is the quickest route, despite his mother's occassionally disagreements)
I also anticipate the technology delighted Andy Kelp's interaction with the reactionary Dortmunder. I await with baited breath Westlake's conversation between these two explaining the camera/ipod/phone and why that is a good thing.
The sub plot with the NJ mobsters taking over the OJ Bar and Grill is inspired. Frankly, that could have been expanded at the expense of the main story and I would have given this 5 stars instead of 4. Dortmunder's plane trip down to Florida was inspired!
So, enjoy -- shoplift some beer and pretzels from Bohack's (plus a salt shaker or two) and lean back and enjoy the wonderful pacing, plotting, dialogue and general craziness of the best gang of professional thieves who have the world's worst luck and yet manage to roll with the punches and never quite go home empty handed.
Rated by buyers -
Donald Westlake a gift for comic timing. It's the same kind of deadpan humour that you could have seen in an old Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton film, and yet it never degenerates into broad slapstick. The latest Dortmunder comic mystery is no exception. Westlake as always, crafts a villain so slimy, one Preston Fareweather, that you just want something - anything, to happen to him. And it does - John Dortmunder and his merry band of criminal misfits.
As you follow the misadventures of Dortmunder and crew from one catastrophe to another, you find yourself secretly rooting to just once, let them (actually the crooks !) score. Westlake really does prove with this loveable band of hapless bad guys, that while there is a certain amount of satisfaction and laughs along the way, they somehow just can't really make crime pay. In fact I've often wondered myself why they don't all just pack it in and find a nice steady job in a shoe store or flipping burgers. At the end of the day they'd probably be way ahead! But of course then we wouldn't have the pleasure of awaiting whatever calamity will befall them in Westlake's subsequent comic masterpiece.
Rated by buyers -
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells; streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question ... What rough beast is slouching toward the O.J. Bar & Grill?
Why, who else but John Dortmunder, discount-rack mastermind and Louis Napoleon of Crime? On the very first page of "Watch Your Back," Dortmunder enters the O.J. in a perfectly routine way to do what he routinely does, plan a crime. Tonight's proposed caper, though, evaporates before it can even start. (Routine, again, for even if Dortmunder should hear the mermaids singing, each to each, I do not think they will sing to him.) With no crime to plan, it hardly seems worthwhile to stay, so Dortmunder slouches home.
But the subsequent time he steps into the O.J., he meets something unthinkable--change!
"What was going on? Was it a wake around here? Nobody wore a grey armband, but the faces on the regulars were long enough. They, all of the them, men and the women's auxiliary, too, were hunched over their drinks with that thousand-yard stare that suggests therapy is no longer an option. In short, the place looked exactly like that section of the socialist realist mural where the workers have been utterly shafted by the plutocrats. Dortmunder looked up, half-expecting to see top hats and cigars in the gloom up there, but nothing."
This disturbing discovery leads by a series of incremental steps including, but not limited to a sojourn at Club Med, an alimony exile, a bust-out, a fence transformed, a younger son attempting to achieve sucess in the family business, a cabal of ex-wives, a serial betrayer betrayed, and a big-money score with unforeseen result--an all-too routine thing for Dortmunder, alas--that lead the low-rent mastermind and his seedy associates ... to a couple of guys stealing a pig. All this, mind you, with an inevitability even Sophocles or Euripides might envy.
And it's funny, too.
I find myself reading quite a few mysteries these days; it beats measuring out my life with coffee spoons. Oh, they are satisfactory enough, not "Hamlet," nor are meant to be. The average practitioner of the mystery novel form is, well, average. Prose lying between the covers of most mysteries is deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious and meticulous; full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; at times, indeed, almost ridiculous-- But occasionally there is a writer who can write, really write, someone who has mastered the tools of the profession, rhetoric, dialogue, plot development, pacing, characterization--in short, all the things banished from literary fiction during our lifetimes. Donald E. Westlake is just such a writer. In spades.
For proof that Westlake is much more than just a journeyman wordsmith, consider how he puts these thoughts of a bright young man happily embarked on a new career:
"If everything he did didn't happen to be breaking some law or another--mail fraud, misuse of bulk rate, identity theft of the endorsements, plagiarism, sale of inappropriate material to minors, on and on--all of this activity would be very like a job. But it was better than a job. It was a world, a world he'd always believed had to exist somewhere, but hadn't known where to find. So it had found him."
Or these of a not quite so young man less happy with his job choice, one sentence in a breathless, agitated, sub-clausal hurry:
"From the moment Preston phoned him, a little after midnight, waking him from what he had to admit was in any case a troubled sleep, Alan found that Thursday, the nineteenth of August, was the most hellish day of his entire life, as well as the longest, and only partly because so much of the day consisted of travel, which in addition to the normal irritations implicit in the very word 'travel,' was chockablock with extra aggravations, due both to the unforeseen nature of the travel involved and to its abnormalities--leaving a Club Med on a week day, for instance, just to begin with."
I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. And every new Westlake I shall read, even as in the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
Five stars ... and a peach for Tom Elliott.
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