<<Mario,
What are Westlake's Levine stories and what "delightful
volume" have
they been collected in? I don't think I'm familiar with
those.>>
Abe Levine is a cop in Brooklyn. The volume in question is
called
"Levine" (Mysterious Press, 1984), and contains the
following
novelettes:
_The Best Friend Murder_ (1959)
_Come Back, Come Back_ (1960)
_The Feel of the Trigger_(1961)
_The Sound of Murder_ (1962)
_The Death of a Bum_ (1965)
_After I'm Gone_ (1984, a new one written especially for this
volume)
The first five novelettes are from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery
Magazine.
"In some ways, 1959 was for me a very good year....In 1959,
fired with
youth and freshness and enthusiasm, I churned out more work
than in any
other year of my life, and most of it found a market. When
the dust had
settled, it turned out that I had produced over half a
million published
words that year (we say nothing of the unpublished words) and
had become
a freelance writer.
....
Among that year's output were forty-six short stories and
novelettes, of
which twenty-seven were published. (That's about a third of
all the
short stories I've written over my entire life so far.)
....
[Then Westlake goes on for several pages explaining how he
conceived and
developed Abe Levine, and how he came to write a final story
twenty
years later.]
I highly recommend this collection of short procedurals.
Superb
characterization and atmosphere that rival Ed McBain.
Regards,
Mario Taboada
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