The Cutie [Mass Market Paperback]

In the first chapter of "The Cutie", Hard Case Crime's reprint of a very early Donald Westlake novel, we're introduced to a heroin addict accused of murder, a morally gray mob fixer with a dancer girlfriend, and an overly earnest copy. In less interesting hands, the cop would have been the hero of this piece. In Westlake's hands, the cop drops out about halfway through the novel -- not due to death or disgrace, but simply because I think Westlake just felt the other players were far more interesting.

The protagonist is Clay, mob fixer and right-hand man to a Manhattan circa 1960 version of Tony Soprano. He narrates the novel with alternating purposes: first, he's trying to prove to his boss that the heroin-addled murder suspect was actually framed, and second, he's trying to justify his career choice to his dancer girlfriend. Both mysteries have interesting resolutions, and like any great mystery, the final chapter raises new questions just as interesting as the ones it answered.

Westlake's writing is crisp and tense, with only the occasional slip into bad pulp (such as when he describes Manhattan's air as having halitosis). Clay drives all over New York City, from Riverdale to the Lower East Side to an abandoned subway station under 95th Street. The characters with whom he interacts are mostly minor mob figures or hangers-on, many with hidden agendas and dark secrets, and even the heroin addicts come across as faintly sympathetic. However, threaded throughout is Clay's questioning the morality of his own lifestyle, and the choice he makes in the final pages is nicely contrasted against the book's kicker ending.

One nice little easter egg is that one of "The Cutie"'s key characters shares a name with an early Westlake pseudonym. Coming out as a grace note to his career just a few weeks after his death, "Cutie" is a nice monument to Westlake's legacy.

Mavis St. Paul has been murdered, and Billy-Billy Cantell, a stuttering dope user/seller is the prime suspect, mostly because he was found at the scene of the crime with the gun in his hand. Only there's no way he could've done it. His friend and colleague Clay believes this and, following order from their boss, gangster Ed Ganolese, is trying to clear his name because the police aren't interested in another suspect.

But Billy-Billy has disappeared, and the police are getting too involved in Ganolese's operation, so Clay (who creates "accidents" for people who cross Ganolese) has to play amateur detective and discover who the "cutie" (as Ganolese refers to him) is that killed Mavis and framed Billy-Billy, apparently just to sabotage Ganolese's outfit.

Will Clay find out who did it? Will he get any sleep? Will his girlfriend Ella leave when she finds out what Clay does for a living?

The Cutie is a reprinting of Donald E. Westlake's debut novel under his own name. (He had previously published so-called "sex novels" under a pseudonym.) As The Mercenaries (its original title), it was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for that year (it did not win, but the author would eventually win multiple times for other books).

The Cutie was always Westlake's preferred title, and it's actually more appropriate once you read the book. The funny thing is that the girl on the cover is not the "cutie" of the book, but she is the only one referred to as "mercenary."

For a debut novel, Westlake's familiar style is already apparent: a semihumorous approach, clever plotting, and an engaging mix of smart and dumb characters. (And I have to imagine that, before Westlake, nobody else was combining those things in just that way.) It's reassuring to know that the author emerged fully formed from the literary womb. In fact, it's only in later portions that The Cutie shows signs of inexperience -- even as one character practically confesses before our eyes, Westlake tries to force us down the wrong path by having Clay continually remind us who the "only" suspects are. When the solution is finally revealed, it's actually a relief.

On top of this, however, the author offers an ending that reinforces the notion (spoken throughout) that emotion has no place in business. I never saw it coming. Westlake fans will undoubtedly enjoy this reprinting of yet another early novel by Hard Case Crime. And fans of the author's Dortmunder series will appreciate that Westlake already has a character stealing a car with M.D. plates.

What if Parker wanted to justify himself to us? Well, he wouldn't be Parker, of course. But what if there was a time when Parker wasn't Parker yet, was a young guy who had fallen into his way of life and still had doubts about what he was doing? Then he'd be something like Clay, the protagonist of The Cutie, who clearly enjoys the power of being a cold bastard for a Vito Genovese-like mobster but wants to feel good about himself too... and, like Parker, prizes the orderliness of a well-run criminal enterprise, and is ruthless when it comes to restoring the equilibrium disturbed by other, less reliable criminals. (Note that "Clay" is a descriptor applied to Parker more than a few times.)

Westlake's first crime novel is a slightly naive youthful work-- his insights into how the dirty world works have a young man's lack of subtlety (the whole mob-political understructure of New York seems to consist of three guys who we're told are all powerful), and draw too much on old movies at times (all those fish tanks, straight out of General Sternwood's orchid room). From here to the abstraction of The Hunter in two years is a pretty spectacular stylistic leap. But The Cutie clips right along, and Clay is an engaging character who may not seem entirely consistently realized, but the contradictions are part of what make him interesting. You can see nearly all of Westlake in embryonic form here (Clay's running self-justification will recall The Ax's narrator as well). And as with another early work Hard Case has reprinted, 361, you can't help but feel that Mario Puzo took a look at these books before conjuring up a mob family that seemed like a real family with familial issues and relationships, not just a standard set of Hollywood gangsters. If 361 is the first draft of Michael's story of accepting his gangster patrimony, Clay is just as plainly the model for Tom Hagen.