Books: One of Us Is Wrong By Samuel Holt (1986/2006)

"Actor Sam Holt has packed in Packard, the TV detective he played for several years to much acclaim and money. But success has had its downside: Holt comes to recognize the stigma all actors can attest to after a long run as one character; he is so closely identified with Packard that he pretty much finds himself incapable of getting any work. Suddenly, though, someone seems to have a new part for Holt: the role of Dead Body. Years of having watched stuntdrivers do their stuff help Holt avoid becoming a greasespot on the San Diego Freeway, but his Volvo will never play the violin..."

The shelves of the mystery genre are filled with average, ordinary people who decide to match wits with murderers. Some are housewives; some are bakers, gardeners, old ladies (or old men) who discover in their latter days they’re still useful as amateur detectives. Then we have run-of-the-mill kids’ everyday matching intellects with diabolical killers, as well. The Sam Holt series does fall into this category, as he’s successful actor who becomes a private detective, but as it’s been pointed out “these books were first published in the late 1980s” which “suggest that Samuel Holt was treading relatively new ground at the time rather than following the path of an exhausted trope.” 

As Donald E. Westlake explains in his forward, the reason he created Sam Holt was out of the idea that after being a successful writer for decades, could he do it today, could he succeed or fail as a brand new, untested author (which was hard then, harder today)? He is not the first author to do this (even though he wrote many books under different names, as well), and he highlighted Stephen King as a sort of inspiration, who wrote a handful of novels as Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1982. So he talked to his agent and together, they thought this would be a good idea. “We found a publisher who agreed to keep the secret in return for a shorter-than-normal advance for a four-book contract, and Samuel Holt was born,” he wrote.

Using John D. MacDonald as reference, Westlake said “when he started Travis McGee,” he “wrote the first three books simultaneously, because it was his first attempt at a series character and he wanted to be sure the voice was consistent.” Westlake did the same thing with his Holt tales, and happy with the outcome, outlined three more titles. However, it was not to be, as when the first book was released in 1986, signs in the local bookstores noted that Samuel Holt was actually Donald E. Westlake (the publisher had told his sales staff this and instructed them to pass this information onto the bookstores). With the pen named spoiled, Westlake reluctantly fulfilled his four-book contract and shelved books five and six (who were still only in outlined versions). They eventually went out-of- print but were finally reissued in 2006 by Felony & Mayhem, a New York based publisher of out-of-print classic mysteries. 

One of Us is Wrong is a cleverly constructed novel that does not go where I thought it would, but all the characters are likable. Holt is like 34-35 here, but Westlake writes him –at times- like he’s much older. The garish reissue covers (can't find images of the original covers) paint him in that classic 1970s look with feathered hair and mustache –looking like he stepped out of porn shoot more than a TV series (think David Soul from Starsky & Hutch fame). There is definitely a different voice here writing, and had not the secret been spoiled, it would've been tough -I think- for anyone to realize Holt was Donald E. Westlake. It does not resemble his Parker or Dortmunder works, as well as his other serious and comic novels.

Also during this mid-1980s period, he was doing screenplays, as he would write the 1987 pilot episode for TV series Father Dowling Mysteries (that I didn’t know), the 1987 film The Stepfather and, eventually, the 1990 screenplay for the Oscar nominated film The Grifters, based on the Jim Thompson novel (he would also offer some help with the James Bond franchise in the 90s, something already discussed with 2017 novel Forever and a Death). So much of the business aspects that fill out the story, all the dealings with agents, writes, and producers, is based on those experiences.

You can also tell that Westlake did not live in SoCal or spend much time here, as well. Mainly, he calls the freeways by their names, like the San Diego Freeway, which is known locally as The 405 (yes, we add the “the”). While in the 1950s the local freeways were named after the places the pass through or ended (they also carried multiple route numbers), by 1964, the state simplified its highway numbering systems, ensuring that, with few exceptions, each freeway would bear only one route number. Around the same time, a flurry of new construction added unfamiliar freeway names to the region's road maps. Drivers found it easier to learn new numbers like the 605 or the 91 rather than new names like the San Gabriel River Freeway or the Redondo Beach Freeway. So, theoretically, Sam Holt would’ve called freeways by those nicknames more than their true names. I’m not sure if Westlake did this because he wanted the books to have a wider audience, or didn’t know, but with a few exceptions, most native and transplanted residence calls all the freeways by their numbers (hell, even Caltrans has stopped including those names on their signage). The only exception is Route 1 here, and it only goes by it's name, Pacific Coast Highway, or just PCH.