Long Island Sound, 1962

Hard Case Crime publishes Memory, a trunk novel from Donald E.Westlake, in a few short days. It’s likely the last “new” Westlake book we’ll see in a bookstore.

Much as I enjoy and admire the Parker books, I wish he had published more hardboiled stuff under the Westlake name. I’m re-reading 361, first published in 1962; here’s a place and a time, in a few short sentences:

The last mile and a half was private road, blacktop. McArdle shared it with two other millionaires, and his place was last of the three, where the road made a hangman’s knot. There was a birdbath inside the loop, and a Negro with a power mower....He never quite looked at us, and he never quite looked away.

....