A small South American republic has decided to capitalize
on its national symbol: a prized gold statue of a dancing Aztec priest. The
president asks a sculptor to make sixteen copies of it for sale abroad. The
sculptor replaces the original with one of his fakes, and ships the real one to
New York City for an under-the-table sale to a museum. The statues travel to
America spread out among five crates, labeled to ensure that delivery goes as
planned. But it doesn’t work. Asked to pick up the crate marked “E” at the
airport, delivery man Jerry Manelli, confused by his client’s Spanish accent,
takes crate “A” instead. The statue disappears into the city, leading him on a
baffling chase, which—if he comes up with the wrong Aztec—could cost him his
life.
After reading more up on Donald E. Westlake, many of his
fans consider Dancing Aztecs to be his comic masterpiece, as we get swept up in a very intricately-plotted
“mystery” tale that is really, really laugh-out loud funny. There are more mix-ups, more plot
twists, more odd-ball New York characters than you shake a stick at here, as
well as some brilliant wry observations from not only the huge cast of characters,
but Westlake’s deadpan narrative tone as well, as he inserts, here and there, some
amusing and wickedly droll exposition dumps about his beloved New York City and weirdos that occupy it.
There are a few great chapter opening lectures,
with one about New York (“Greater New York is in someways like a house.
Manhattan is the living room, with the TV and the stereo and the good
furniture, where guests are entertained. Brooklyn and Queens are the bedrooms
where the family sleeps, and the Bronx is the attic, full of inflammable crap
that nobody has any use for. Staten Island is the backyard, and Long Island is
the detached garage, so filled up with paint cans, workbenches, and a motorboat
that you can’t even get the car in there anymore..”)
and one about the three kinds of hangovers (“There are hangovers that are green
and wet and slimy…”) which ends with “Those are the three kinds of
hangovers, and Pedro had all three of them."
This is a delightfully humorous novel, even if it
contains some cringe worthy comments and characters like the two Black ghetto
kids that are actually written in jive talk (that took me aback some). The N word also gets thrown around (to
be fair, Westlake uses that word a lot in his comic novels) and gays get called
the F word, but either you’re going to get offended and upset or just accept that the whole
plot is very silly (and mostly unbelievable) to begin with –because, never mind that the Aztecs aren’t from South
Americans or that by weight of the gold statue would tell everyone that it isn't
plaster- and just know that Westlake is a skilled enough writer to get the
reader past all that.
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