The Classic Car Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
tion>
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY RICHARD A. LUPOFF
The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle & His Incredible Aether Flyer (with Steve Stiles)
Killer’s Dozen: Thirteen Mystery Tales
Lisa Kane: A Novel of Werewolves
Sacred Locomotive Flies
Sword of the Demon
THE LINDSEY & PLUM DETECTIVE SERIES
1. The Comic Book Killer
2. The Classic Car Killer
3. The Bessie Blue Killer
4. The Sepia Siren Killer
5. The Cover Girl Killer
6. The Silver Chariot Killer
7. The Radio Red Killer
8. The Emerald Cat Killer
9. One Murder at a Time: The Casebook of Lindsey & Plum
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1992, 2012 by Richard A. Lupoff
“Introduction” Copyright © 1992 by Donald E. Westlake
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For
Ken
Kathy
Tommy
Marla
Sean
Dylan
Sarah
INTRODUCTION, by Donald E. Westlake
There’s a step between a novel and a series, and it’s a tricky one, over which more than one person has stumbled. It’s known as the sequel. A novel can be anything from wonderful to horrific, and a series may contain highs and lows, but the sequel, the second book about the same characters in the same milieu, carries a heavy burden indeed: It must answer the question, “Can he do it again?”
I have been yoked to a few series, and it seems to me the best way to leap the second-book hurdle is not to do it on purpose. That is, not to start the first book with the idea that it’s a series. That way, if a second book comes along it does so not because you’ve already committed yourself to producing the damn thing, but because a story or theme or some other element just seems too perfectly matched to the characters and setting from that previous book, so that you can come at them fresh, you can make it new.
Well, it works for me. If you’ll forgive some personal history, that’s the way I backed into a series I still seem to be doing, so naturally I give myself high marks for the brilliance of having devised the method. Or, as someone once said, if it weren’t for hindsight I wouldn’t have any sight at all.
On the other hand, if I’d known I was creating series characters, I probably wouldn’t have named them Dortmunder and Kelp. One of them after a German beer, the other after seaweed. (When he was doing the screenplay for the film adaptation of the first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock, William Goldman kept shaking his head over those names, giving me pitying looks. After all, he names his characters things like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.)
In my defense, I have to point out that I’d written a lot of books over the years that hadn’t mitosed, so there was no particular reason to suppose that I would ever have to go back and rehire Dortmunder and Kelp after they’d finished stumbling and complaining their way through that first plot of mine. So what did it matter if I gave them absurd names, or saddled John Dortmunder with a stripper ex-wife who, in seven books and five short stories, has never once put in an appearance?
But then.… Ah, well. Then I drove past a bank on Route 23 in northern New Jersey that was being torn down with a new bank to be built on the same foundation, and in the interim the bank was operating out of a mobile home next door. I drove past this bank, to tell the truth, twice a week for nearly a year—I never said I was a quick study—before it suddenly occurred to me that an enterprising fellow could back a truck up to that bank and drive it away. And that I had just the guys for the job. Not being goaded by necessity, or a long-range plan, or in fact any plan at all, I could get together with those guys and have just as much fun as the first time.
A totally different chain of events led to the very first series I was ever indentured to. I had written a few novels, published in hardcover by Random House, and it seemed to me it would be nice to have something published as a paperback original. By Gold Medal, for preference. So I wrote a book about a professional thief, a revenge story full of tough stuff, and at the end the cops arrested the thief and that was that. I put a pen name on it—Richard, for Richard Widmark, whose performance in Kiss of Death encapsulated some of the flavor I was trying for, and Stark, because that’s what I wanted the language to be—and the first thing that happened was that Gold Medal turned it down. Then an editor at Pocket Books named Bucklyn Moon called and said, “Is there any way you can let Parker escape and give me three books a year about him?” Turned out, there was.
Well, that second book was simple to write; all I had to do was spend fifty thousand words cleaning up the loose ends I’d left in the first book, when I hadn’t known it was going to be a series. A lot of mean hard people were after Parker (not being a series character in the original conception, he hadn’t needed a first name, and never did get one), I mean in addition to the police, so the first thing I had to do was give him plastic surgery so none of his old friends would recognize him. Then there was money left unaccounted for, characters who hadn’t been fully resolved; general morning-after cleanup. In fact, books two through five of that series all come out of the same tidying process necessitated by the circumstances that book number one wasn’t going to be a series.
Then there was Mitch Tobin, an ex-cop driven by a sense of guilt. I deliberately set out to do a series that time, using yet another pen name, Tucker Coe, and Mitch survived five books before running down. The character slowly consumed himself, like a lit cigar in an ashtray. That’s what happens when you do it on purpose.
John D. MacDonald did the most clever series launch I know of, with Travis McGee. He wrote the first three books simultaneously, doing a chapter or two here, then a chapter or two over there, then a chapter or two down the hall, and then coming back. Which meant none of them was the sequel.
I don’t know what Dick Lupoff s plan was when he first shook hands with Hobart Lindsey and said, “You’re hired,” and I have no intention of asking. In the first place, writers usually don’t know why the hell they’re doing what they’re doing, and in the second place, if they do know, they’re almost always wrong. And in the third place, regardless of how little they know about their own intentions, they will answer the question, and at length. So, like academics everywhere, I’ll much prefer to study the Rosetta Stone at hand, without, if you don’t mind, any pesky interference from the author.
So here’s what I think. I think Dick Lupoff had been around mystery writers so long that he simply couldn’t hold out any longer and had to try his hand at one—like Charles Dickens hanging out with Wilkie Collins—but that he decided to surround himself, in this unknown territory, with a lot of familiar landscapes and artifacts. So the world his hero had to deal with was a world of fandom, nostalgia and pulp seriousness. (I don’t mean pulp seriousness like Race Williams being seriously irritated at the very presence of a butler in front of him, I mean the seriousness about pulp collectors and fans and dealers.) This was a world Dick knew, so Dick could spend the whole book explaining to his hero facts and anecdotes that Dick already found of interest.
And which would improve the hero.
Now, that’s pretty clever. The Comic Book Killer becomes a full-length recruiting pitch for Dick’s own personal interests. Hobart Lindsey is a dull person, more dead than alive, who comes to radiant life when exposed to things that interest Dick Lupoff. He’s humanized, sensitized, and made more attractive