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Memory (Hard Case Crime) Mass Market Paperback – April 5, 2011
THE CONSQUENCES LASTED A LIFETIME
Hospitalized after a liaison with another man’s wife ends in violence, Paul Cole has just one goal: to rebuild his shattered life. But with his memory damaged, the police hounding him, and no way even to get home, Paul’s facing steep odds – and a bleak fate if he fails…
This final, never-before-published novel by three-time Edgar Award winner Donald E. Westlake is a noir masterpiece, a dark and painful portrait of a man’s struggle against merciless forces that threaten to strip him of his very identity.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHard Case Crime
- Publication dateApril 5, 2011
- Dimensions4.16 x 0.99 x 6.75 inches
- ISBN-100857683454
- ISBN-13978-0857683458
"All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
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Product details
- Publisher : Hard Case Crime (April 5, 2011)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0857683454
- ISBN-13 : 978-0857683458
- Item Weight : 6.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.16 x 0.99 x 6.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,129,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11,180 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- #92,585 in Crime Thrillers (Books)
- #526,301 in Genre Literature & Fiction
- 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)
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book compelling and masterful. They also describe the writing style as typical Westlake, but still masterful, with a tragic ending.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book compelling and alive in their hands. They also appreciate the invigorating plots, strong characterisation, and tragic ending.
"...It isn't now.It is a beautifully written, sensitive narrative, of a young man, Paul Cole, who was..." Read more
"...His writing comes alive in your hands, with invigorating plots, strong characterisation and underlying moral currents...." Read more
"...Instead, it is a challenging piece of literature, with existential overtones. If you simply like reading action stories, this is not for you...." Read more
"...So, if you like Westlake as a writer, per se, you may find this quite interesting and even worth reading. I certainly did...." Read more
Customers find the writing style masterful.
"...I found it depressing personally, not typical Westlake, but still masterful writing." Read more
"...It isn't now.It is a beautifully written, sensitive narrative, of a young man, Paul Cole, who was..." Read more
"...His writing comes alive in your hands, with invigorating plots, strong characterisation and underlying moral currents...." Read more
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Paul awakes with no memory after being assaulted with a chair by a cuckholded husband. After recovering in a hospital he is ushered out of town by an indignant detective who holds a low view of touring actors--which Paul happens to be. He lands in a small town where he finds a job, makes friends, becomes a kind of substitute son to his landlords, and even finds love. But he is haunted by his past, by who he "really" is. He finally decides to return to New York, guided by information in his wallet, to an apartment, friends, an agent, his acting profession, all of which he remembers only vaguely, as in a dream. What happens to him there and what he eventually decides to do next is heartbreaking.
In Memory, Donald Westlake has created a harrowing portrait of what it is to be lost, as a child is lost, without the resources that we depend on every day to find our way back. Written early in his career but not published (possibly because of its themes and denouement) Memory may be Westlake's masterpiece.
It is brilliant even so, hence 4 stars.
I found it depressing personally, not typical Westlake, but still masterful writing.
but it was written in the early 60's and Westlake was about 28 years old. It was not
published, at that time, as it was not considered commercial enough. It isn't now.
It is a beautifully written, sensitive narrative, of a young man, Paul Cole, who was
beaten physically and lost his memories of the past. He becomes his own investigator
as he follows the threads that lead to his old self.
His tools are few, as he leans heavily on his intuition and all of his senses, as he
reads the people and the situations he finds himself in. It is in its way a story of
courage and heroism. A person who makes the most of what he finds left of his
life.
I know others are frustrated as this is not what they expect at all, from this author.
That, and the fact that it is a Hard Case Crime publication. The illustration on the
cover also doesn't help.
This book will stay in your memory as there is not another like it.
Bottom line: I really wonder how this total yawn of a novel got published. Not recommended.
Donald E Westlake was a genius, may he rest in peace. His writing comes alive in your hands, with invigorating plots, strong characterisation and underlying moral currents. A freak of nature led to the discovery of this once forgotten and destined never-to-be-published masterpiece, and the world is a better place for its appearance.
A strongly recommended purchase and of course, essential reading for fans of the genre and American literature in general.
BFN Greggorio!
Top reviews from other countries
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On the surface it can seem as if nothing very interesting is happening; indeed, if you were to open the book anywhere at random and read a few pages then Cole might be just walking aimlessly around the streets, or having a mundane domestic interaction with his landlady, or listening to his workmates conversation in the pub, or watching an acting class, or...well, you get the idea. In themselves these episodes might seem trivial and uninteresting, but in context each of them is part of Cole's psychological journey, and his observations show how his self-awareness is increasing even as his memory continues to let him down. This is a subtle portrayal of determination and frustration by a master storyteller branching out temporarily from his comfort zone, which demonstrates why many of his crime novels - for example the Mitch Tobin books published under the pseudonym of Tucker Coe - are about so much more than just the mystery itself.
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Sadly, I didn’t like the book at all. Dull, slow and not the same style as his other novels. I gave it the benefit of the doubt up to page 196, then skipped to the end and was glad I did. If you enjoy slow, meandering, one note texts then this is the novel for you. Otherwise, try Slayground by the same author - pacey and entertaining.