Bank Shot

Westlake is my main man--I love his writing. Periodically, I go back and reread his novels, some of which are under different pen names (notably, Richard Stark.)

His plots are amazing. Something always goes wrong for his quirky protagonists, and they struggle to reach their goals, only sometimes doing that successfully. Westlake's humor tickles me. If I was a laugh-out-loud kind of guy, I definitely would've laughed out loud. As it was, I smiled a lot.

Maybe it’s because the protagonist and her group of amateur sleuths in my series manage to make every mistake imaginable before they finally succeed in bringing the real killer to justice, that I am tickled pink by Donald E. Westlake’s cast of over-the-top-miscreants.

Starring in Bank Shot, Westlake’s zany characters are more like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Gang leader John Dortmunder and the most inept group of criminals ever to stumble and bumble their way through an ill-fated caper are a rollicking treat that combines fast-moving suspense with laugh-out-loud wit as they attempt to steal a temporarily… show more.

Every crime writer stands in awe of Donald Westlake, the king of the caper. In Bank Shot, the second novel in the Dortmunder series, the gang's target is a bank that's temporarily housed in a mobile home. As a graduate student in the 1970s, I did business with just such a bank. But it never occurred to me to hitch it to a truck and just drive away with it. That's the score Dortmunder's partner Kemp proposes. He guarantees it'll be a breeze. But Dortmunder, a chronically pessimistic ex-con "with a hangdog expression," worries the armed guards might be… show more.