Books: Call Me a Cab By Donald E. Westlake (2022)

 

“Tom Fletcher is driving his dad’s taxi cab in New York.  There he meets Katherine Scott, who is heading to Los Angeles to meet her plastic surgeon fiancée. The only thing is, she’s unsure if she wants to marry him, but cannot find a real reason not to marry him. So half-way to Kennedy Airport, Scott decides the best way to solve this problem is to convince Tom Fletcher to drive her across the continental United States, to Los Angeles.”

What we get here then is great character driven story as Katherine, apparently a brilliant landscape architect, tries to figure out why she’s reluctant to marry Barry. We also get a tale of botany, biology, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, geography, and topography, along with a bit of class inequality. But like all adventures, it’s the events along the way that are more fun than the destination. Written somewhere around 1977-78, Westlake’s keen observation skill, his ability to create wonderfully three-dimensional characters, makes this a very enjoyable tale. There is some great set pieces and even better conversations (My Dinner with Andre, except set in a taxi) here and all of it, surprisingly, very page turning.

In the afterword of Call Me a Cab, Charles Ardai, an entrepreneur, businessperson, and writer of award winning crime fiction and mysteries and who is the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a popular line of pulp-style paperback crime novels, who knew Westlake very well, has said that the prolific writer tried to write a caper novel where no crime takes place. Westlake’s first effort was Brother’s Keepers, a tale about a group of monks in New York City fighting to keep their century old monastery from being knocked down. While there is a tiny bit of crime in the book, it’s a solid, funny tale of people with limited resources up against progress. Later –or maybe sooner- Westlake began Call Me a Cab. Ardai says that it’s possible the book began as a caper novel, but maybe this was another attempt to write a book with no crime. In the end, it becomes a love story.

“Don’s first stab at Call Me a Cab,” Ardai notes, “was a 215 pages long in typescript and ended pretty much the way you just read. It also seems clear that somewhere along the line, Westlake decide to make Katherine Scott more the lead than Tom Fletcher. Through several revisions, the book gained some 50 pages (the entire sequence with the Chasens –and the one of funniest and best bits in the book). Ardai notes that while going through to assemble this novel, Westlake tried several different ideas and scenarios. So much like he did on Forever and a Death (he also edited Westlake’s Memory and The Comedy is Finished), Ardai took the material provided by Westlake’s widow, Abby and a longtime agent of Don’s, Stephen Moore, and hopefully crafted a book that Westlake would’ve liked (as always, editing the works of authors long gone is often a complicated job, if only because you never know if this was the way the writer intended to finish it).