I caught part of the movie The Hot Rock the other day on AMC, as much as I could stand before the incessant commercials drove me away. It's a virtually forgotten jewel heist caper from 1972, directed by the underrated Peter Yates and with a fine cast including Robert Redford, George Segal, Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel. The plot seemed involving enough, but the main attraction was the lineup of weirdo characters spouting great, quotable dialogue.
The Hot Rock was scripted by William Goldman, a hotshot screenwriter in the seventies, and as the author of The Princess Bride, no stranger to quotable dialogue himself. But this had a funkier feel than what one would expect from Goldman, and I assumed much of the dialogue was taken from the source novel by Donald Westlake. But how to find out?
I've never read any Westlake--well, correction; I've read several of the novels he writes under the name Richard Stark, which are tougher and meaner than what he writes under his own name. Generally, Westlake's books are lighthearted capers--like The Hot Rock--and Stark's are pulpier and noirish. Anyway, the Stark books are great, and it seemed stupid that I'd never read any Westlake, and I knew most of his books (including The Hot Rock) are still in print, so I decided a trip to a local book store was in order.
A stop at Borders revealed only one Westlake book. (No Richard Stark at all.) No better luck at Barnes & Noble or Half Price Books. I checked to see if they had anything by two other favorites, George V. Higgins or Ross Macdonald. Borders and Barnes & Noble had nothing by either, though Half Price Books at least had a lot of Macdonald, including and Sleeping Beauty and The Chill, two of his best.
This situation is just pathetic. Bazillions of copies of crap by the likes of David Baldacci and Mary Higgins Clark, but nothing by the guys who are the architects of the modern crime thriller. Macdonald especially was a writer of serious intent, who used the mystery genre as a prism through which to view a society in decline. He needs to be read now more than ever, but if you shop at a chain book store, you'd never even know he existed.
