The Road to Ruin, by Donald E. Westlake

Friday, November 12, 2004

The Road to Ruin is Donald E. Westlake's eleventh comic caper featuring wayward thief John Dortmunder, "someone whose slouching shoulders and hangdog expression would show in their best light in a police lineup."

If he's a thief, especially one who has been convicted before, does it really matter that he clearly looks the part? The answer is yes because in The Road to Ruin, he is trying to pass himself off as a butler. Both Dortmunder -- aka the butler Rumsey -- and his wealthy employer, Monroe Hall, who has recently narrowly escaped a jail term for Enron-style behavior, expect him to behave like a proper British, Stephen Fry-playing-Jeeves butler, but the clothing, in Dortmunder/Rumsey's case, an expensive, baggy, black suit and gunboat shoes, don't quite make the man. After Dortmunder/Rumsey faces Monroe Hall's contempt when he fails to realize he is expected to polish the master's shoes, he finally begins to understand why no one had wanted to work for Hall. But the fact that no one wants to work for Hall provides the opportunity to be hired that Dortmunder/Rumsey and his cronies need if they are going to swipe Hall's collection of cars. The trouble is that Hall has trod on so many toes that Dortmunder's group isn't the only one seeking to turn Hall into a cash cow.

The Road to Ruin is almost a comedy of errors. It is certainly very entertaining and a refreshing break from mystery stories where the plot revolves around the death of an innocent victim. There are no deaths in The Road to Ruin and there are no innocents, although some criminals are more sympathetic than others and when Monroe Hall gets what's coming to him, the person closest to an innocent character (although even she was guilty of helping Hall in his swindles), the first wife who looks like a second, the one person who stuck by him when everyone else considered him a pariah, is the one to suffer, sort of.

The Road to Ruin
by Donald E. Westlake
Mysterious Press
April 2004
343 pages

Friday, November 12, 2004