Books: The Fugitive Pigeon By Donald E. Westlake (1965)

“Charlie Poole is an apathetic young man who’s perfectly content to run a neighborhood bar in Canarsie, New York. The bar is owned by Charlie’s Uncle Al, who’s a mid-level gangster. Occasionally, Charlie has to hold a package at the bar for somebody until it’s picked up later, and while he suspects this has something to do with his uncle’s criminal activities, he never asks for details. He doesn’t want to know. But then late one night as he’s about to close up, two strangers come in, and Charlie quickly realizes that they’re hit men sent there to kill him. He has no idea why anybody would send killers after him, but when he manages to escape with his life, he decides that he’d better figure it out in a hurry, because the two assassins are still on his trail. This is the beginning of a whirlwind three days in which Charlie tries to find out who wants him dead and why, an investigation complicated by the fact that he has to keep dodging the two hit men. Along the way he runs into a murder (for which he’s blamed, naturally) and a beautiful young woman (for whom he falls, naturally).”

The Fugitive Pigeon was sort of a watershed moment in Donald E. Westalke’s writing career. After publishing some heavy crime fiction novels, this one became his first comic caper. According to the Westlake Review site, Pigeon started out as a serious mystery/thriller “involving a young man in a dangerous situation with organized crime, much like two of his earlier novels for Random House, and as Westlake put it, “’It’s been coming out funny.’” Told to “curb his comedic impulse” by Henry Morrison, who worked at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, due to American humor not translating well overseas, Westlake eventually ignored that advice. Lucky for him, The Fugitive Pigeon went on to outsell his previous serious-minded Random House mysteries by roughly a two-to-one margin. And thus this set up everything that came after, as he vacillated between some serious crime thrillers and some laugh-out-loud humorous capers. Also, the book was originally entitled The Dead Nephew, “but it got changed to The Fugitive Pigeon, because Lee Wright, Westlake’s talented but quirky editor at Random House, didn’t like titles with the word ‘dead’ in them.”

There is not much in the way of slapstick humor that would show up in Westlake’s later works, but The Fugitive Pigeon is still a fast paced thriller/mystery. It’s a tightly plotted, linear first-person narrative that unravels like a traditional whodunit. It’s fun, and sometimes funny, book that also marked a huge transitional shift in Westlake’s publishing career. It proved to the publishers that a writer is not always the sum of his or her parts, that they don’t have to be stuck in one genre –or for Westlake- the same genre, but could write both serious and comedic tales.