I read the first Mitchell Tobin mystery, _Kinds of Love,
Kinds of Death_, over the weekend. The book is by Tucker Coe,
another pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake's. It was a good
book, with a former policeman who quit in disgrace called
upon to solve a mystery within "the organization."
Tobin struck me as a character very similar to Parker,
although he's on the side of right. He's a no-nonsense,
hard-nosed guy who insists that he won't do anything shady
when he's hired to find out who killed a crime boss' mistress
and stole some money, and he holds to this. Tobin is very
much in the mode of "ultra-realism" that Westlake used for
his protagonist in _The Ax_, which is about as close to a
how-to manual for committing murder as I've ever read, and
all the more chilling because of it.
I guess what I was thinking, after reading the Westlake posts
over the past couple of days, is that it must be really hard
to break out and write something out of character. Coe is
obviously in the same vein as Richard Stark. I've been buying
the Samuel Holt books recently--I'll have to see if they
depart sufficiently from the mold. The Westlake who wrote the
Dortmunder books is obviously a different guy, although these
books, the more I read them, seem to almost fit into the
"Stark lite" mode. Does any of that make sense?
Craig Larson Trinidad, CO
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