Books: Who Stole Sassi Manoon By Donald E. Westlake (1969)

“Who Stole Sassi Manoon? That was the question rocking Montego Bay Film Festival. You might ask Kelly Bram Nicholas IV, a twenty-five year old mad scientist and inventor of the sea-going computer STARNAP. Or Jigger Jackson, the girl who wants to be a movie star so badly she’d sell somebody else’s body. Or Major ffor-Linton and Miss Adelaide Rushby, who may or may not be English eccentrics. Or You might as Sassi herself –but she may not be able to tell you.” 

Apparently, this started out as a screenplay –which sort of explains some things. But when things fell through, Westlake adapted the screenplay into a novel and it doesn’t work, if only because Westlake is a novelist not who is not really deft at turning his own screenplay into a novel. Yes, he adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters into a brilliant, Oscar nominated screenplay and wrote a few others, but with Who Stole Sassi Manoon, this one may have not been a great screenplay to begin with, and so in prose, you see a lot of its weaknesses.

So certainly not the best Westlake caper, yet it has your typical Westlake set-up with some amateur, clueless, bumbling guys who want to kidnap and ransom off a movie star, and who generally think they have an air tight plan. Until things go wrong. The STARNAP machine –while never explained on how it works, why it works, -is interesting device, but I’m not sure Westlake thought this through (same with the island in the middle of the ocean they end up towards the end –not sure how and why it’s there and how it gets fresh water for the multiple bathrooms). Kelly, Robbie, and Frank are not violent (they could be early designs on Dortmunder and his crew which was a few years off when this book was released), and they can be funny and the set-up, while a bit long-ish, is actually good, but it’s betrayed by a convoluted ending.

Still, there are well-written passages in the book, with Westlake taking another swipe at the movie industry –despite needing their money. And there some ideas that will get revisited –and done better- in later books, but all told, a caper novel you could pass on from this prolific writer.