We were delighted to get an email from Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai over the weekend, especially when he told us about the novel he’d lined up for April 2010: an unpublished manuscript from Donald E. Westlake called Memory. Ardai described the novel, which Westlake wrote in the 1960s, as “an experiment in moving out of the territory of pure crime fiction and into a darker and more serious literary realm on the border between noir and existentialism, where an act of violence set the plot in motion but the book was less concerned with working out the intricacies of a mystery plot than with exploring the impact of that crime on the lives of his characters.”
“It’s an ambitious and audacious and beautifully written book,” Ardai continued, “and his agent at the time apparently told him to stop screwing around with that litra-chur stuff and produce some more of those great crime novels for which he was rapidly building a reputation. So, away went Memory, into a drawer, and despite his good friend Lawrence Block (who had read it and remembered it as really excellent) imploring him to take it out again on and off for the next four decades, Don never did.” After Westlake’s death at the end of 2008, Block showed Ardai “the badly yellowed, in some places taped-together, typescript,” which runs over 100,000 words—and, Ardai reports, “I read it in one sitting. It’s that good—that well-written, that engrossing.”
And thus, after a bit of negotiation, Hard Case acquired the novel, which will be their first offering of 2010, following a three-month scheduled hiatus at the beginning of the year. In the meantime, there’s a short excerpt available online.