Books: The Busy Body By Donald E. Westlake (1966)

“The corpse isn’t anybody special—a low-level drug courier—but it has been so long since the organization’s last grand funeral that Nick Rovito decides to give the departed a big send-off. He pays for a huge church, a procession of Cadillacs, and an ocean of flowers, and enjoys the affair until he learns the dead man is going to his grave wearing the blue suit. Rovito summons Engel, his right-hand man, and tells him to get a shovel. Inside the lining of the blue suit jacket is $250,000 worth of uncut heroin, smuggled back from Baltimore the day the courier died. When Engel’s shovel strikes coffin, he braces himself for the encounter with the dead man. But the coffin is empty, the heroin gone, and Engel has no choice but to track down the missing body or face his boss’s wrath.” 

Like a lot of Westlake’s stories –both the serious noir and the caper comedies- it eventually becomes a detective novel, as much as anything else. And Westlake’s specialty is that they’re written frequently from the criminal’s point of view. While Al Engel may not be hardened crime lord, he works for them, so he becomes guilty by association.

The Busy Body –one of his earliest in the “nephew” genre he created- borrows themes from The Fugitive Pigeon, which I mentioned in my take on that book, had been Westlake’s first really big seller for Random House, and which ironically, outsold the Parker novels by a 2 to 1 margin. Here the tale is bit tighter, the humor less forced, but it’s still a bit weak. The plot is still a bit complex, built like a detective novel with Engel trying to find a body, please his boss Nick, and running into more complications than he ever dreamed of –including, eventually, being sought for murder by Nick’s goons and the hapless police.

I don’t really love the book, mostly because all the characters are just reworked clichés. None appear to have a soul, or any real empathy (much like the characters in his Richard Stark written Parker novels). Even Engel comes off a bit cold in the end –but there is a part of me that understands him when it comes to his relationship with his mother. I could see him escaping to California to get away from her.

There was a film version of this book released in 1967, produced and directed by William Castle, a well know filmmaker who churned out a few competent B-movies quickly and on budget. This led him to independently produce and direct thrillers, which, despite their low budgets, were effectively promoted by using gimmicks, such as 3D. He was also the producer for Rosemary's Baby. It featured Richard Pryor's film debut, but I hear it's horrible.