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    The Dame: An Alan Grofield Novel
    The Dame: An Alan Grofield Novel
    The Dame: An Alan Grofield Novel
    Ebook208 pages3 hours

    The Dame: An Alan Grofield Novel

    By Richard Stark and Sarah Weinman

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An action-packed whodunit set in San Juan by the crime fiction master and author of Point Blank. “A book by this guy is a cause for happiness” (Stephen King).

    Part-time actor-thief Alan Grofield has had his share of odd gigs, including a number of dangerous heists with a certain ruthless criminal named Parker. But nothing has been as dangerous, or as mystifying, as when he somehow finds himself playing bodyguard to a rich, demanding woman who’s in the midst of divorcing a notorious mobster.

    Holed up in her isolated jungle villa, Grofield can’t help wondering how he got there. Then someone gets murdered at the house, and Grofield’s job gets a lot more complicated. The second Alan Grofield novel by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark The Dame is a rare Westlake take on a whodunit, features a cast of colorful characters and a suspenseful—and memorable—climax.

    This edition includes a new foreword by Sarah Weinman.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 1, 2012
    ISBN9780226770406
    The Dame: An Alan Grofield Novel

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    Reviews for The Dame

    3.5/5

    28 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Stark (aka Donald Westlake) is best known for his 'Parker' novels. 'The Damsel' is the first of four he wrote featuring Alan Grofield, one of Parker's occasional partners in crime.The action picks up after the events of 'The Handle.' Grofield is recuperating from a gunshot in Mexico when he meets up with a young American woman being pursued by generic thugs. They escape, he eventually gets her to explain her situation, and he tries to come up with a plan to help her. The structure is similar to the Stark uses with Parker: two acts setting up the action, a third act from the POV of the other players, and a final act wrapping things up. But Grofield is no Parker - he's less cold-blooded, more willing to lend a hand. And the story is not about pulling off a job so much as it is about Grofield rescuing the 'damsel' of the title.I don't find Grofield as interesting a character as Parker. But the action moves at a decent clip and the prose is typical of Stark. It's an interesting diversion, but not classic in the same way as the 'Parker' books are.
    • 4/5
      Here, Grofield has left Parker and other conspirators, after pulling off a casino heist on a small island off the Texas coast. Grofield has a suitcase filled with money, a bullet wound in his back, and is sleeping most of the time in a Mexico City hotel as he tries to recover from his wounds. In his fifth story window bounds a beautiful pair of tanned legs: Elly. After some witty reparte about how she is just in time to scratch his back, it turns out that Elly is involved in some political
      intrigue involving gangsters and assasinations and three or four tough guys are out to keep her from a rendevous in Acapulco.

      This was about a three hour read. It was a smooth, quick reading tale that had Grofield and Ellie on the run from a group of tough gangsters as they tried to figure out how to get through the only road to the coast. It's really not like the Parker novels, but it is an excellent series in its own right. Although the underlying political plot is a little bit goofy, the story is well told and was enjoyable to read.

      The relationship between Grofield and Elly is well paced and comical as they meet in his hotel room and both try to sell the other ridiculous stories about how they ended up there. She climbed out a sixth story window on a rope of bed sheets to escape an overprotective aunt and
      he got an arrow in his back when a woman's husband showed up unexpectedly. The truth about who they are and how they ended up there takes a while to come out, but eventually Grofield signs on as
      her escort through the Mexican mountains and jungles. All in all, a book well worth reading.
    • 2/5
      Grofield stops an AssassinationReview of the Blackstone Audio Inc. audiobook edition (May 2013) of the Macmillan paperback original (1967)Richard Stark was one of the many pseudonyms of the prolific crime author Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008), who wrote over 100 books. The Stark pseudonym was used primarily for the Parker novels and their spinoff series, the Grofield novels. The Parkers are a hardboiled noir series but the Grofields have more of a lighter touch, often with humorous banter.In The Damsel, Alan Grofield is still in Mexico and recovering from his injuries suffered during the Parker novel The Handle (1967). In his hotel, a 'damsel in distress' sneaks in through his window trying to escape her captors in an upper room. The two proceed to banter and lie to each other for an extended time about who they are, but Grofield eventually agrees to help her and the rest of the book has them travelling through Mexico to prevent an assassination. I liked the comic banter of the book but the actual plot seemed quite ridiculous. This is more of a buddie comedy / road trip romcom with a few perilous escapes and situations along the way. It is definitely not in the vein of the noir and hardboiled world of the Parker novels.Narrator R.C. Bray does a good job in all voices in this audiobook edition. The 4 Grofield books are all available for free on Audible Plus.Trivia and LinksThere is a brief plot summary of The Damsel and of all the Parker & Grofield books and adaptations at The Violent World of Parker website.Although The Damsel's 2013 Blackstone Audio Inc. audiobook edition shares the same cover art as the University of Chicago Press 2012 reprint, it does not include the Foreword by author Sarah Weinman.
    • 4/5
      The first of the four Alan Grofield books, though according to the foreward of this edition, Alan has seen action, in print, a total of eight times! This one picks up right after the Parker novel "The Handle" and finds Grofield still shot up in Mexico. Then, a woman drops in to the open window of the hotel Parker left him in, and the fun begins! There are gunmen, an American doctor, an American politician, a despot General from the country of Guerrero, and two sons who 'switch' fathers! A twisty plot with good fun and decent action! I liked it much better than Alan's Canadian adventure in "The Blackbird"! Though, with Stark at the helm, you never can lose!"Speaking of married," Grofield reminded her, "I still am."She shook her head. "Not till we cross the border," she said.

    Book preview

    The Dame - Richard Stark

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

    Copyright © 1969 by Richard Stark

    Foreword © 2012 by Sarah Weinman

    All rights reserved.

    University of Chicago Press edition 2012

    Printed in the United States of America

    21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12      1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77039-0 (paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-226-77039-7 (paper)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77040-6 (e-book)

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Stark, Richard, 1933–2008.

    The dame : an Alan Grofield novel/Richard Stark; with a new foreword by Sarah Weinman.

    p. cm.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77039-0 (paperback : alkaline paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-226-77039-7 (paperback : alkaline paper)

    I. Title.

    PS3573.E9D355 2012

    813’54–DC23

    2011033424

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    The Dame

    An Alan Grofield Novel

    Richard Stark

    WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY SARAH WEINMAN

    The University of Chicago Press

    PRAISE FOR THE DAME & RICHARD STARK

    Nobody tops Stark in his objective portrayals of a world of total amorality.

    New York Times

    As elegantly and unfussily written as you’d expect.

    NICK JONES, Existential Ennui (blog)

    Guess that’s just the inexorable pull of the man like Westlake and the Parker universe: once you’re hooked, you’ll read anything even remotely Parker-related.

    NICK JONES, Existential Ennui (blog)

    A pleasure . . . Westlake’s ability to construct an action story filled with unforeseen twists and quadruple-crosses is unparalleled.

    San Francisco Chronicle

    A book by this guy is cause for happiness.

    STEPHEN KING

    Energy and imagination light up virtually every page, as does some of the best hard-boiled prose ever to grace the noir genre.

    Publishers Weekly

    Brilliant... Donald E. Westlake (aka Richard Stark) knows how to freeze the blood.

    TERRENCE RAFFERTY, GQ

    One of the best craftsmen now crafting stories.

    GEORGE F. WILL

    Marvelous. . . . Nearly half a century into his writing career, Westlake remains superb.

    Entertainment Weekly

    Thoroughly successful. Rough, macho stuff, but it is tight and exciting.

    London Standard

    Stark’s momentum is such that the more matter he throws into the hopper the faster the gears turn. The books are machines that all but read themselves. You can read the entire series and not once have to invest in a bookmark.

    LUC SANTE

    Crime fiction stripped down—as it was meant to be. . . . Oh, how the pages keep turning.

    Philadelphia Inquirer

    GROFIELD NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

    The Damsel

    The Dame

    The Blackbird

    The Sour Lemon Score

    PARKER NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

    The Hunter (Payback)

    The Man with the Getaway Face

    The Outfit

    The Mourner

    The Score

    The Jugger

    The Seventh

    The Handle

    The Rare Coin Score

    The Green Eagle Score

    The Black Ice Score

    The Sour Lemon Score

    Deadly Edge

    Slayground

    Plunder Squad

    Butcher’s Moon

    Comeback

    Backflash

    Flashfire

    Firebreak

    Breakout

    Nobody Runs Forever

    Ask the Parrot

    Dirty Money

    Information about the complete list of Richard Stark books published by the University of Chicago Press—and electronic editions of them—can be found on our website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/.

    to PARKER

    Contents

    Foreword

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    FOREWORD

    IF YOU are brand new to the works of Richard Stark, my advice would be to put down this book for a while and acquaint yourself first with the many other noir crime novels featuring Stark’s main man Parker, that merciless and iconic antihero. Once you’re finished working your way through those small masterpieces, you’ll be ready to tackle these three entertaining tales (as well as a fourth) starring Parker’s quick-witted, dapper companion in heisting, Alan Grofield.

    Grofield, who first appeared in The Score (1964), isn’t exactly Watson to Parker’s Holmes—the very idea is discombobulating—but like Conan Doyle’s go-to narrator, Grofield himself leads a double professional life. I’m an actor, he explains in The Damsel (1967), and it’s impossible to make ends meet these days as an actor in the legitimate theater. Unless you’re willing to peddle your integrity to the movie and television people, there’s nothing to it. . . . Do you realize that in my peak year so far I earned a measly thirty-seven hundred dollars from acting?

    For Alan Grofield, you see, has principles, at least applied to artistic pursuits. No movies or television. His greatest love is the theater, and he channels this love by way of summer stock, operating a small troupe in the Midwest. Is it a living? Hardly. Which is why he turns to more illicit means of funding his theatrical enterprises. Early on in The Dame (1969), Grofield describes his origin story in criminal enterprise: he started off nervous his first time, since this whole heist business seemed so alien to his day-to-day life. But two jobs later, he’d graduated from amateur to pro, and by the time we meet him in The Score, Grofield is well-seasoned to the point where a hard man like Parker, wary and distrustful in the best of times, doesn’t think twice about turning to him for the tightest of tight spots.

    Alan Grofield appeared in print a grand total of eight times—four times as Parker’s adjunct, and four times on his own. As a sidekick, Grofield’s bon vivant nature emerged in snippets, but he never overshadowed Parker. If anything, Stark seemed to underplay Grofield such that he lit up the page almost by accident—his wit, skirt chasing, and Shakespeare quotes offering a welcome break from Parker’s tough, stoic worldview. On his own, however, Grofield is both more present and more enigmatic, almost as if Westlake viewed him as a perpetual experiment.

    Grofield was a lab rat for Westlake, who liked to experiment with tone—veering, somewhat wildly, between dark violence, witty banter, and absurdist humor—and plot. (Westlake commented that Lemons Never Lie [1971] was a way for him to experiment with a narrative arc featuring multiple bounces moving higher and higher, instead of the more common parabolic plot curve.) At the same time, the Grofield novels provide a transition between the hard-edged Parker series and the more avuncular, humor-laden books Westlake published under his own name.

    * * *

    The Damsel opens when a girl climbs in Grofield’s fifth-floor hotel window. He’s in Mexico, coming back from the near-dead after events described in The Handle (a Parker novel from 1966), with a bag of money he hasn’t, on account of his infirm status, gotten around to spending. His first spoken line in The Damsel is typical of Grofield’s wit and weakness for women: If you’re my fairy godmother, I want my back scratched. After pages of witty banter, Grofield will see his itch relieved, and much more, from young Main Line lass Elly Fitzgerald. What emerges is a mix of romantic comedy and adventure that echoed Westlake’s earliest ventures into humorous crime novels like The Fugitive Pigeon (1965) and The Spy in the Ointment (1966), published just a year before the first Grofield novel.

    In The Damsel, Westlake takes some time out from traveling Mexican highways filled with action-centered plotting to enjoy a little social satire. Here the author, under the cover of Grofield’s critical eye, astutely zeroes in on the community class system of the charming Mexican city San Miguel de Allende, comparing it to Greenwich Village, of all places:

    Along Macdougal and Eighth Streets the same faces could be found in all the tourist traps: the tourists themselves, looking embarrassed and irritable, and the unwashed, shaven youngsters living around here while going through their artistic phase, looking both older and younger than their years. Both the tourists and the youngsters were self-conscious, and neither could cover it all the way.

    But here there was a third kind of person, too. Around San Miguel there was a colony of retired people from the State, living on pensions. A thousand dollars a year was damn good money on the local economy, so these retired people could live in a climate as good as Florida or California, but at a fraction of the price. Their presence somehow made both the tourists and the youngsters look even more foolish than usual, as though somehow or other they’d been exposed as frauds. (58)

    Greenwich Village was a location Westlake knew well; he lived there for decades, keeping an apartment in the neighborhood even after he moved upstate. But comparing such seemingly disparate places allows the author to zero in on specific types, see through their chosen facades for the ridiculousness underneath and show how human behavior remains static, even common, no matter where one is. This section is a classic example of Westlake’s economy with sentences; so little says so much about so many people.

    Observation and travelogue take twin top billing in The Dame, perhaps because Westlake doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the plot, a cross between a locked-room mystery and a strung-out caper. From the very first, Grofield wonders what exactly he’s doing there. The book opens with Grofield, not knowing what it was all about; a little later he thinks, here he was in the middle of somebody else’s story. To take a simile from his second profession, he had been miscast (38). It should come as no surprise that one character cries out accusingly at Grofield, God damn it, all you want to do is die a smart-ass! (177). The net result is that, despite acts of bravery and saving people’s lives, Grofield’s character flaws seem unduly magnified, albeit in the way that makes the reader stay for the wild ride until the end.

    Even Grofield’s afterthought of a love interest can’t escape from comic flourish on the part of the author, thanks to her very name, Pat Chelm: her surname is a pejorative term amongst Jews, used to denote the most foolish of a town full of fools, whose antics are so steeped in stupidity that to mock them is to do them a service. What kind of private joke Stark was engaging here is anyone’s guess, but one possible clue lies in how oddly, and badly, women are treated in the Grofield novels. One must make allowances for prefeminist attitudes, but Grofield’s cavalier and sometimes contempt-laden relationships with women strike a more off-key note than, say, Parker’s. Parker is cruel to everyone, regardless of gender; he can objectify a CEO or a mob boss as easily as a dame. Grofield’s attitude towards women is somehow less palatable. In The Dame, for example, he ridicules Pat Chelm while she’s making a painful confession:

    I had an abortion. I was seventeen.

    She meant Look-how-young-I-was, but Grofield didn’t take it that way. You’re twenty-two now, aren’t you? he said.

    Yes.

    Isn’t it time you got over it? (122)

    The lackadaisical loopiness of The Dame gives way to something a little harsher in The Blackbird. Its opening chapter is more or less the same as the Parker masterpiece Slayground (the scheduling quirks of publishing meant that even though the books may have been written roughly around the same time, The Blackbird was published in 1969, two years before Slayground). But here Stark follows Grofield’s path up north to Quebec City’s sumptuous Chateau Frontenac Hotel and a province jittery with dissident behavior. Stark didn’t spell it out—the setting, despite political overtones, seems more rooted in past vacationing by the author—but the province, and eventually the country, would be gripped by the actions of a breakaway group called the FLQ that advocated, violently, for Quebec’s separation from the rest of the English-speaking country.

    He is, however, fairly resourceful in The Blackbird. Finding himself locked in a basement, Grofield escapes through common sense and some degree of ingenuity, as Stark describes in typically matter-of-fact fashion, with the help of available tools and a good sense of spatial memory. He also digs deep to find his inner Parker, a surprising turn made more so, because Grofield spent the past two and a half books not taking himself terribly seriously—and as a result, the reader, lulled into relaxation, is shocked out of it.

    Grofield’s recaptured killer instinct serves him well in Lemons Never Lie (1971), which brings him back to his original, Parker-level noir roots. Further experiments in comedic tone and literary playfulness emerged thereafter under the Westlake name—for example, one of the Dortmunder novels, Jimmy the Kid, even patterned its plot after a fictional Parker novel. Ironically, in introducing Dort-munder, Westlake pulled one last rabbit out of his hat with respect to Grofield, using his name as the alter for one of Dortmunder’s cronies in crime, the charming ladies’ man Alan Greenwood. (Trent Reynolds, who maintains the Violent World of Parker fan website, looks on Greenwood’s appropriation of Grofield as a parody of the original. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it’s another nice touch of self-reference from a writer who clearly enjoyed it.)

    Grofield would appear only one more time, in Butcher’s Moon, which seemed to put the Stark pseudonym on ice for good. Grofield had served his purpose as a means of distinguishing between Westlake and Stark; it was as if the actor, having adopted so many different guises in playing both theatrical and criminal roles, represented Westlake’s own experiments with multiple styles. Consider, too, that after 1974, Westlake used fewer pseudonyms—just Samuel Holt in the 1980s and Judson Jack Carmichael in the 1990s—than earlier in his career, when Westlake published as Tucker Coe, Alan Marsh, and Curt Clark, among many other names. Dortmunder provided the final break between the comedic Westlake and the noirish Stark, but Grofield, unwittingly, helped force the Stark pseudonym underground for more than twenty years until his (and Parker’s) triumphant return in the late 1990s, never to leave until Westlake himself shuffled off of this mortal coil.

    Sarah Weinman

    1

    GROFIELD, not knowing what it was all about, got off the plane and walked through the sun into the main terminal building. He was at Isla Verde International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with sunshine and sea breezes sweeping through the open walls.

    He got his suitcase and went down a flight of steps to the circular counter of the car-rental agency. I’m supposed to pick up a car here, he told a clerk with a ferocious mustache. The name’s Wilcox. That was the name the letter had told him to use.

    The clerk pointed a triumphant finger at Grofield’s forehead. "Yes, sir! You been expected. He was beside himself with joy. He bustled away, bustled back again, and plunked a set of keys on the counter. Everything’s taken care of, sir. You’ll find all the paperwork in the glove

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