“Kirby Galway may be a
low-level marijuana smuggler in Belize, but the man has a dream—to make lots
and lots of money. So when a local official offers him a back-jungle tract of
land he swears would make a perfect cattle ranch, Kirby jumps at the
opportunity. Unfortunately, he lands himself in a swamp—that he now owns. Kirby
begins selling homemade “artifacts” from his property to American museums and
witless tourists, even building a fake ancient temple and recruiting a tribe of
Mayan Indians who know a good scam when they see one. But his cash-cow paradise
soon attracts the attention of two snooping New York reporters, a beautiful
archaeologist from UCLA, and a troop of Guatemalan guerillas just itching to
shoot somebody. Kirby is going to have to talk fast, move faster, and pull out
every dirty trick he knows if he’s going to get out of this alive.”
Westlake’s High Adventure
certainly has a lot of what the writer was known for. It is a crime novel,
because crimes are committed, people die, and there is some adventure high
adventure (please don’t be fooled by Tor Books odd attempt to deceive readers
into thinking they’re getting an Indiana Jones rip-off, with this cover) both
high and otherwise, and it also features things Westlake has done in his comic
capers, but overall, this book seems hard to pigeon hole. I mean, yes there is
a serious side to it, also some laugh-out loud parts and a bit of social
commentary as well, but a lot has changed in publishing over the last twenty
years, but back then, those same publishers still like their writers to stay in
one lane. Westlake, at times, deviated and this book (and a few others I’ve yet
to read) proved that when it came to crime novels and comic crime novels, it
wasn’t always going to be a black and white genre.
The genesis of this novel,
also, appears to be when Westlake and his wife visited Belize in 1984 (he wrote
an article for the New York Times):
“Being not quite an island,
and not quite Central America, and not quite a regular tourist stop, gives Belize
certain charms and advantages. Pre-Columbian Mayan temples and cities are an
afternoon's drive from white sand Caribbean beaches. Dense mysterious rain
forest and jungle gives way to flat farmland - sugar in the north, citrus crops
in the south - and pastures where little white birds stand proudly on the backs
of the grazing cattle. Decent accommodations can be found in most of the
country, but you will never be in a tourist ghetto, cut off from the life
around you, lost in a mob of sightseers.”
A lot of what he saw then was
put into this book, including the culture clash between
American profiteers and Central American natives. The question of which Central
American historical sites and icons are to be preserved and which don't really
matter in the big picture seem to be the main focus of this book. The drama is
in the conflict between the bad guys and the good guys of both cultures.
It’s not all travelogues, because it’s also a very funny book –the restaurant scene
alone is worth tracking down this book for- and the caper works through most of
the book, and Westlake has the talent to easily blend the lighthearted with some
suspense. Like a lot of his work, especially the comic ones, it also features
his patented group of men and women who are smart, dumb and somewhere in-between,
in an adventure where everyone thinks that the other characters are something or
someone they are not.
As the Westlake Review wrote: “It’s
one of his foreign adventure books, and those are never his absolute best
books, but they’re something he enjoyed doing, because he was interested in the
world around him, in different cultures, different races, different modes of
identity. “
Fun book.
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