Books: Bad News By Donald E. Westlake (2001)

"When a little solo heist for a measly thousand bucks' worth of cameras goes belly up, Dortmunder, just trying to make ends meet (oddly, there is no explanation as to where all the thousands of dollars he made off of Max Fairbanks from What’s the Worst that Could Happen? has absconded to), joins Andy Kelp in switching coffins in the dead of night in a Queens cemetery for reasons Fitzroy Guilderpost and his co-conspirators Irwin Gabel and Little Feather Redcorn decline to elaborate on—until Dortmunder confiscates their guns and genially insists. The scam? To prove via DNA typing that Vegas showgirl Little Feather is the last surviving member of the Pottaknobbee tribe, hence entitled to a third of the proceeds of the Silver Chasm Gambling Casino, jointly run by the Oshkawas and the Kiotas. The two casino managers, blithely engaged in skimming millions from their fellow tribe members, dislike this idea so heartily that they counter it with a second grave robbery that's foiled by a tombstone switch engineered by Dortmunder but complicated by 24/7 cemetery surveillance, necessitating still another robbery, this one at a historic mansion on the Delaware Water Gap."

First, out of the gate, Bad News is a pretty funny book, especially the opening bit with John talking his way out of a failed robbery (which would have made a great short story in it of itself). I would argue the first quarter of the book is laugh out loud funny, as well (Thanksgiving dinner was a hoot). But why was it a John Dortmunder novel? At best, he and his team are peripheral to the story, as they become involved in an already hatched caper involving a former Las Vegas showgirl and blackjack dealer, Little Feather Redcorn, Fitzroy Guilderpost and Irwin Gabel as they try to scam some unscrupulous Native American owners of a casino in upstate New York. A good portion of the book deals with these three, with John, Tiny, and Andy sort of helping out after the fact. Even Dortmunder, at one point, wonders why he is there. 

But it was five years after the last book, so maybe Westlake (who a few years earlier had also finally returned to his Parker universe after a twenty-year hiatus) felt the need to release a tenth Dortmunder title and he shoehorned him into this already clever –if not original- tale. Writers -often prolific ones like Westlake- will tell you they have many ideas, write many pages of something and then run into a roadblock and then shelve it until they can figure out which way to go. Perhaps this is what happened with Bad News -or he found an affinity for the other characters like Little Feather so he wrote more about her. Still. the false heir idea is well played here, and Little Feather is tough, but still likeable. But as I approach the final four books in the series, I hope this theme of John and his gang coming late to the party does not become permanent trope.