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361 Paperback – May 2, 2005
- Print length207 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHard Case Crime
- Publication dateMay 2, 2005
- Dimensions4.25 x 0.75 x 6.75 inches
- ISBN-100843953578
- ISBN-13978-0843953572
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About the Author
Many of his books have been made into movies; Westlake also wrote the screenplay for The Grifters, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
Product details
- Publisher : Hard Case Crime (May 2, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 207 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0843953578
- ISBN-13 : 978-0843953572
- Item Weight : 3.53 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.25 x 0.75 x 6.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,377,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,671 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Donald E. Westlake](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51thuJ5LmYL._SY600_.jpg)
I think I'd best treat this as an interrogation, in which I am not certain of the intent or attitude of the interrogator.
I was born Donald Edwin Westlake on July 12th, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. My mother, Lillian, maiden name Bounds, mother's maiden name Fitzgerald, was all Irish. My father, Albert, his mother's maiden name being Tyrrell, was half Irish. (The English snuck in, as they will.) They were all green, and I was born on Orangeman's Day, which led to my first awareness of comedy as a consumer. I got over the unfortunate element of my birth long before my uncles did.
My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up. One of her beliefs was that people whose initials spelled something would be successful in life. That's why I went through grammar school as Dewdrip. However, my mother forgot Confirmation, when the obedient Catholic is burdened with yet another name. So she stuck Edmond in there, and told me that E was behind the E of Edwin, so I wasn't DEEW, I was DEW. Perhaps it helped.
I attended three colleges, all in New York State, none to much effect. Interposed amid this schooling was two and a half years in the United States Air Force, during which I also learned very little, except a few words in German. I was a sophomore in three colleges, finally made junior in Harpur College in Binghamton, NY, and left academe forever. However, I was eventually contacted by SUNY Binghamton, the big university that Harpur College had grown up to become. It was their theory that their ex-students who did not graduate were at times interesting, and worthy to be claimed as alumni. Among those she mentioned were cartoonist Art Spiegelman and dancer Bill T. Jones, a grandfaloon I was very happy to join, which I did when SUNY Binghamton gave me a doctorate in letters in June 1996. As a doctor, I accept no co-pay.
I have one sister, one wife and two ex-wives. (You can't have ex-sisters, but that's all right, I'm pleased with the one I have.) The sister was named by my mother Virginia, but my mother had doped out the question of Confirmation by then--Virigina's two and half years younger than me, still--and didn't give her a middle name. Her Confirmation name was Olga, the only thing my mother could find that would make VOW. The usual mother-daughter dynamic being in play, my sister immediately went out and married a man whose name started with B.
My wife, severally Abigail Westlake, Abby Adams Westlake and Abby Adams, which makes her three wives right there, is a writer, of non-fiction, frequently gardening, sometimes family history. Her two published books are An Uncommon Scold and The Gardener's Gripe Book.
Seven children lay parental claims on us. They have all reached drinking age, so they're on their own.
Having been born in Brooklyn, I was raised first in Yonkers and then in Albany, schooled in Plattsburgh and Troy and Binghamton, and at last found Manhattan. (At least I was looking in the right state.) Abby was born in Manhattan, which makes it easier. We retain a rope looped over a butt there, but for the last decade have spent most of our time on an ex-farm upstate. It is near nothing, which is the point. Our nearest neighbor on two sides is Coach Farm, producer of a fine goat cheese I've eaten as far away as San Francisco. They have 750 goats up there on their side of the hill. More importantly, they have put 770 acres abutting our land into the State Land Conservancy, so it cannot be built on. I recommend everybody have Miles and Lillian Cann and Coach Farm as their neighbors.
I knew I was a writer when I was eleven; it took the rest of the world about ten years to begin to agree. Up till then, my audience was mainly limited to my father, who was encouraging and helpful, and ultimately influential in an important way.
Neophyte writers are always told, "write what you know," but the fact is, kids don't know anything. A beginning writer doesn't write what he knows, he writes what he read in books or saw in movies. And that's the way it was with me. I wrote gangster stories, I wrote stories about cowboys, I wrote poems about prospecting-in Alaska, so I could rhyme with "cold"-I wrote the first chapters of all kinds of novels. The short stories I mailed off to magazines, and they mailed them back in the self-addressed, stamped envelopes I had provided. And in the middle of it all, my father asked me a question which, probably more than any other single thing, decided what kind of writer I was going to be.
I was about fourteen. I'd written a science-fiction about aliens from another planet who come to Earth and hire a husband-wife team of big-game hunters to help them collect examples of every animal on Earth for their zoo back on Alpha Centauri or wherever. At the end of the story, they kidnap the hero and heroine and take them away in the spaceship because they want examples of every animal on Earth.
Now, this was a perfectly usable story. It has been written and published dozens of times, frequently with Noah's Ark somewhere in the title, and my version was simply that story again, done with my sentences. I probably even thought I'd made it up.
So I showed it to my father. He read it and said one or two nice things about the dialogue or whatever, and then he said, "why did you write this story?"
I didn't know what he meant. The true answer was that science-fiction magazines published that story with gonglike regularity and I wanted a story published somewhere. This truth was so implicit I didn't even have words to describe it, and therefore there was no way to understand the question.
So he asked it a different way: "What's the story about?" Well, it's about these people that get taken to be in a zoo on Alpha Centauri. "No, what's it about?" he said. "The old fairy tales that you read when you were a little boy, they all had a moral at the end. If you put a moral at the end of this story, what would it be?"
I didn't know. I didn't know what the moral was. I didn't know what the story was about.
The truth was, of course, that the story wasn't about anything. It was a very modest little trick, like a connect-the-dots thing on a restaurant place mat. There's nothing particularly wrong with connect-the-dots things, and there's nothing particularly wrong with this constructivist kind of writing, a little story or a great big fat novel with nothing and nobody in it except this machine that turns over and at the end this jack-in-the-box pops out. There's nothing wrong with that.
But it isn't what I thought I wanted to be. So that question of my father's wriggled right down into my brain like a worm, and for quite a while it took the fun out of things. I'd be sitting there writing a story about mobsters having a shootout in a nightclub office-straight out of some recent movie-and the worm would whisper: Why are you writing this story?
Naturally, I didn't want to listen, but I had no real choice in the matter. The question kept coming, and I had to try to figure out some way to answer it, and so, slowly and gradually, I began to find out what I was doing. And ultimately I refined the question itself down to this: What does this story mean to me that I should spend my valuable time creating it?
And that's how I began to become a writer.
- Ancram, NY (2001)
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Some of Westlake's writing here is classic noir, including a funny scene with a glass eye. I also loved Kelly's visit with a reporter who lived in "the kind of house sea captains are suppose to retire in." Throughout, Westlake shows a real feel for language and an attention to detail. Unfortunately, Ray Kelly is a weak main character about whom we know relatively little. His speedy transformation from average son to a revenge-seeking missile was abrupt, although Westlake tries to explain it via a mid-novel plot twist. Noir doesn't have to be believable to be good, but it certainly helps. I'd rate "361" as mid-pack among the nine novels I've read so far in the Hard Case Crime series. Which is still pretty damned good.
Note: This review is of the Kindle version, although I also own the paperback. As always, Hard Case Crime has done an amazing job transforming the novel into e-format. I found no noticeable errors, and the text is highly readable. The cover by Richard B. Farrell is beautiful on the Kindle Fire in full color; obviously, the non-color version on the Kindle Keyboard is disappointing in comparison.
Even considering that 361 was one of his early works, it was just mediocre (How can others give this 4 or 5-stars?).
Again, I criticize even these great authors for their clothing descriptions of one and all, even minor characters appearing only one uneventful time.
Tell me why this wasteful diversion is seen by so many as so necessary.
Lastly, there were quite a few formatting errors in the e-book version of this reprint.
Good thing I hadn't bought a copy, but as is my wont, I read a library copy.
Originally written in 1962, "361" is vintage pulp fiction, a minor classic from Don Westlake, one of the masters of the hardboiled crime novel. Written in the vein of Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, and Earle Stanley Gardner, Westlake takes the reader on a no-nonsense odyssey of revenge as Kelly pieces together the jigsaw of the father's life he never knew. Ray, now teamed up with brother Bill, chain-smoke their way from hotel room to hotel room, washing down the smoke with "Old Mr. Boston" straight from the bottle as they track down dad's assasins. As the mystery not surprisingly leads to the mob, one wonders if perhaps Mario Puzo didn't take inspiration from "361" in writing his classic "The Godfather".
Writing styles and culture have changed considerably in the past forty years; one of the hidden jewels in reading early works of Westlake and his ilk is the refreshing peek back into life before political correctness mania. But whether you read it for the plot twists and turns, the hard, unadorned prose served cold, or simply as a nostalgic walk down fiction's memory lane, "361" is prime pulp fiction, a quick thrill to savor and enjoy.
While I was a wee bit dissatisfied with the ending, the majority of the book was intense and kept me reading!
I loved the overall vintage feel of it.
There's a certain level of despair in just about every character interaction - but it fits the story and the theme.
Enjoyed this!
This was a book I chose but never dreamed I'd stay with it. The subject was revenge and the mob, but from a side of the mob rather than directly in it. Ray Kelly's entire family had been wiped out. He woke in the hospital covered in scars and missing an eye. Healing took time and as he healed the vengeance inside him grew.
Then a plan began to emerge. a plan that would take him to his biological father. A king pin in the mob who had recently been released from prison. The dots started to connect and Ray was the connection to each dot.
This was once of the most fantastic stories of revenge I have ever listened to or read. I highly recommend this book. L.J. Ganser was the reader who brought Ray Kelly's deep seeded feelings to life. I listened to this book all night and never slept a wink.
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To begin with the whole theme of the novel is "how far a man will go when everything he loves is taken from him". What it actually meant was "watch a guy go to the movies, buy 100s of deck of cards (why the hell doesn't he just keep them?), and drive around New York until he eventually decides to get revenge". It's not until like 150 pages into this 207 page novel that you actually find out who the hell the main character has to hunt down. And no, there's no in depth plotting revenge or thrilling information hunting. It's him and his brother cruising New York to different hotels, going to the library, grabbing food, and watching a movie.
The writing is dated, which I'm normally fine with but my God is it terrible. My favourite line was "We cried like a couple of women, and kept punching each other to prove we were men". It's laughably bad to imagine two full grown men hugging each other crying but also punching each other because heaven forbid they show emotion. The way Westlake drones about the main characters day is so long and boring I fail to see why he even bothered to include it except to pad out the length. Not to mention the part in the novel where he decides to help a guy start a mob war in exchange to get information on the people who killed his dad. Westlake apparently thought it was absolutely important to include the main character WAITING SEVERAL WEEKS DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to get to the point where he gets the information. Why even include that? I don't care about how we gets up, grabs breakfast, checks his messages, goes back to the hotel, smokes and drinks, and goes back to bed. It's not clever or brooding it's boring as hell and does nothing to show how revenge can be obsessive or why he wants to hunt the people down.
I DO NOT recommend this book. It's blurb is so false in its advertising of how exciting and action pack it is. It's a slow, mind numbingly dull book that shambles along till it gets to where it needs to go and even fails at the finish line once it gets there.