"Actor Sam Holt has packed in Packard, the TV detective he
played for several years to much acclaim and money. But success has had its
downside: Holt comes to recognize the stigma all actors can attest to after a
long run as one character; he is so closely identified with Packard that he
pretty much finds himself incapable of getting any work. Suddenly, though,
someone seems to have a new part for Holt: the role of Dead Body. Years of
having watched stuntdrivers do their stuff help Holt avoid becoming a
greasespot on the San Diego Freeway, but his Volvo will never play the
violin..."
The shelves of the mystery genre are filled with average,
ordinary people who decide to match wits with murderers. Some are housewives;
some are bakers, gardeners, old ladies (or old men) who discover in their latter
days they’re still useful as amateur detectives. Then we have run-of-the-mill kids’
everyday matching intellects with diabolical killers, as well. The Sam Holt series does fall into this category, as he’s
successful actor who becomes a private detective, but as it’s been pointed out
“these books were first published in the late 1980s” which “suggest that Samuel
Holt was treading relatively new ground at the time rather than following the
path of an exhausted trope.”
As Donald E. Westlake explains in his forward, the reason
he created Sam Holt was out of the idea that after being a successful
writer for decades, could he do it today, could he succeed or fail as a brand
new, untested author (which was hard then, harder today)? He is not the first author to do this (even though he
wrote many books under different names, as well), and he highlighted Stephen King as a sort of inspiration, who wrote a handful of novels as Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1982. So he talked to his
agent and together, they thought this would be a good idea. “We found a
publisher who agreed to keep the secret in return for a shorter-than-normal
advance for a four-book contract, and Samuel Holt was born,” he wrote.
Using John D. MacDonald as reference, Westlake said “when
he started Travis McGee,” he “wrote the first three books simultaneously,
because it was his first attempt at a series character and he wanted to be sure
the voice was consistent.” Westlake did the same thing with his Holt tales, and
happy with the outcome, outlined three more titles. However, it was not to be,
as when the first book was released in 1986, signs in the local bookstores
noted that Samuel Holt was actually Donald E. Westlake (the publisher had told
his sales staff this and instructed them to pass this information onto the
bookstores). With the pen named spoiled, Westlake reluctantly
fulfilled his four-book contract and shelved books five and six (who were still
only in outlined versions). They eventually went out-of- print but were finally reissued in 2006 by Felony & Mayhem, a New York based publisher of out-of-print classic mysteries.
One of Us is Wrong is a cleverly constructed novel that does not go where
I thought it would, but all the characters are likable. Holt is like 34-35
here, but Westlake writes him –at times- like he’s much older. The garish
reissue covers (can't find images of the original covers) paint him in that classic 1970s look with feathered hair and mustache –looking
like he stepped out of porn shoot more than a TV series (think David Soul from
Starsky & Hutch fame). There is definitely a different voice here writing, and had not the secret been spoiled, it would've been tough -I think- for anyone to realize Holt was Donald E. Westlake. It does not resemble his Parker or Dortmunder works, as well as his other serious and comic novels.
Also during this mid-1980s period, he was doing screenplays, as he would write the 1987 pilot episode for TV series Father Dowling Mysteries
(that I didn’t know), the 1987 film The Stepfather and, eventually, the 1990
screenplay for the Oscar nominated film The Grifters, based on the Jim Thompson
novel (he would also offer some help with the James Bond franchise in the 90s,
something already discussed with 2017 novel Forever and a Death). So much of
the business aspects that fill out the story, all the dealings with agents, writes, and producers, is based on those
experiences.
You can also tell that Westlake did not live in SoCal or
spend much time here, as well. Mainly, he calls the freeways by their names,
like the San Diego Freeway, which is known locally as The 405 (yes, we add the
“the”). While in the 1950s the local freeways were named after the places the
pass through or ended (they also carried multiple route numbers), by 1964, the
state simplified its highway numbering systems, ensuring that, with few
exceptions, each freeway would bear only one route number. Around the same
time, a flurry of new construction added unfamiliar freeway names to the
region's road maps. Drivers found it easier to learn new numbers like the 605
or the 91 rather than new names like the San Gabriel River Freeway or the
Redondo Beach Freeway. So, theoretically, Sam Holt would’ve called freeways by
those nicknames more than their true names. I’m not sure if Westlake did this
because he wanted the books to have a wider audience, or didn’t know, but with
a few exceptions, most native and transplanted residence calls all the freeways
by their numbers (hell, even Caltrans has stopped including those names on
their signage). The only exception is Route 1 here, and it only goes by it's name, Pacific Coast Highway, or just PCH.
