What's So Funny?

WHAT'S SO FUNNY: Donald Westlake: Warner: 2007: Mystery/Humor: 359pp.

“What’s So Funny?” is the perfect name for Donald Westlake’s latest caper starring, who else, hapless criminal mastermind John Dortmunder, because practically every sentence in this book is a punch line. Westlake is one of the few writers I know whose powers have increased with age (he is 73). Not even Elmore Leonard does dialogue better than Westlake, and Westlake mostly leaves out the curse words. In “What’s So Funny?” Dortmunder is muscled into an impossible job by an ex-cop who has incriminating photos of him at the scene of a heist. Turns out the cop’s employer is the son of a First World War G.I. who helped lift (in more ways than one) a gold chess set from a port warehouse in Murmansk, the proceeds to be divided among all the soldiers in the unit when they got back to the States. But the guy who was supposed to do the cashing in took the set and disappeared. Mr. Hemlow wants Dortmunder to liberate the set from the underground vault of a bank building, as revenge for his father’s loss. Hilarity follows, as Dortmunder enlists the star-crossed gang from the OJ in his lost cause. Stir in Mr. Hemlow’s lawyer granddaughter, a documentary filmmaker who sets his glittering eyes on the prize, and Mrs. Livia Northwood Wheeler, imperious self-absorbed heir to the chess set fortune, and a secret devotee of low-life night-life and you have a story that will have you snorting milk before the first chapter is out. “What’s So Funny?” is a perfect beach book but don’t wait until summertime to read it.