The Cutie – Donald E. Westlake, 1960 ★★½

Even Bad Guys Get the Blues

Straightforward mystery or crime fiction? I go back and forth with this one. The plot centers on a murder, a series of them as it unfolds, with mysterious phone calls and lengthy interrogations that double as exposition. Your standard mystery, basically.

But what it really is about is the life of a criminal, a hoodlum who thinks he’s in the driver’s seat until things start going wrong. As a character study, The Cutie is involving, full-on crime fiction. Yet most of the way through, it is tied to this formulaic mystery that leaves too many holes.

Our protagonist, Clay, works as a top operative for Manhattan gang boss Ed Ganolese. One night, at home with his latest girlfriend, the doorbell rings. It’s Billy-Billy Cantell, a junkie who claims the police are after him for murdering a woman he swears he doesn’t know.

Clay believes him: “Billy-Billy doesn’t have the strength to kill time,” he tells the cops who show up at his door not long after. By this time, Billy-Billy has fled into the muggy summer night. Ganolese orders Clay to find him, bring him back alive, and catch the “cutie” who set him up.

Different parts of New York City are described as the novel progresses, including Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riverdale in the Bronx, and Greenwich Village (above): "Outside was the city, and it had halitosis," Westlake writes. "The air was hot and damp, and breathing was a conscious matter."
Image from https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/g14473188/new-york-greenwich-village-1960s-photos/

Clay doesn’t understand why Ganolese takes such an interest. The usual procedure when dealing with a troublesome low-level associate like Billy-Billy is to arrange an “accident” before police attention is drawn to Ganolese’s syndicate. But Ganolese is boss, and so Clay, low on sleep and fretful about wanting a stable relationship with his girl, hits the streets to seek out the not-so-friendless addict:

It was almost six o’clock, and rapidly becoming light. The streets had that tired gray look which is a combination of too late at night and too early in the morning.

Donald E. Westlake emerged as one of the premier crime novelists in an era that produced several greats; The Cutie was his first credited novel and in many ways a fitting harbinger for a first-rate career. The prose is sure-footed; accomplished; with a clipped, focused energy that keeps you reading. The dialogue is snappy, the characters full of life.

It’s also full of common pulp-fiction tropes, like villains who fire through peepholes and leave recently-killed corpses waiting for our protagonist just one half-step ahead of the police. Clay’s woman doesn’t understand why he lives a life of crime and struggles to rationalize why she sticks around with him.

Clay may seem like a standard-issue hood, but he avoids looking like one: "I'm more the insurance-salesman type. and I have no bulges under my coat. I never carry a gun on my person. It's a cheap way to a fast conviction."
Image from https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4047486-the-cutie

Clay even has one of those moments where he tells a cop (a rare honest one in this novel) that there’s no real difference between them:

“You’re a crook, Grimes,” I said. “You’re a crook, just like me, just like everybody else in this world. There isn’t a man alive who isn’t a crook, and who hasn’t always been a crook, and who won’t always be a crook. But I’m just a bit more honest than most of you. I admit I’m a crook.”

For most of the novel, you do get a probing, often humorous character study of what it is to be a muscle man for a gang of wise guys. Clay isn’t an assassin or a hitman; he has killed but prefers leaving that to others when he can. He doesn’t enjoy his livelihood so much that he turns us off. He just avoids asking indelicate questions.

Speaking of questions: What is a “cutie?” Looking at the cover of the Hard Case Crime edition, you might suspect an attractive woman with long legs and ample cleavage. But such a character never appears.

The Cutie was originally published in hardcover by Random House as The Mercenaries, a title Westlake reportedly disliked. To this point, Westlake's literary career consisted of well-regarded short stories and a few forays into risqué literature published under pseudonyms.
Image from https://www.existentialennui.com/2012/01/review-mercenaries-1960-aka-cutie.html 

Instead, it’s a term frequently used by Ed Ganolese in reference to whoever is pulling these moves against his operation, this mysterious person, likely male, who framed Billy-Billy and whom he sends Clay off to find. “I want that cutie nailed to a wall,” Ed says.

An online dictionary defines it as “a person who tries to outsmart an opponent, as an athlete who outmaneuvers an opposing player.” It’s not a term I am familiar with, and it doesn’t quite align with the figure we encounter here, not after all is revealed and we learn his identity. Being “cute” as I understand it falls someplace short of entrapping hoodlums with the victims of your crimes.

Ed’s obsession with the “cutie” throws his whole operation into turmoil. As it centers around a mystery involving a dead woman and a missing junkie, you understand why Clay is at a loss to understand why his boss’s motivation. Here’s a spoiler for you: After it’s all over, and Westlake has played all his cards, we still don’t know why Ed was so committed.

Clay’s motivations are easier to get, especially as he is very forthcoming in his first-person commentary. He has a good life, he says, with a nice apartment, a beautiful lust object to share his nights, and plenty of time to himself after his duties are performed.

Clay's bachelor pad somewhere in the West 80s of Manhattan includes a secret compartment next to his stereo equipment where he hides Billy-Billy when the police come looking for him. After they leave, though, Billy-Billy has fled, setting the plot in motion.
Image from https://www.archdaily.com/937738/modern-design-as-seen-through-the-lens-of-playboy-magazine/5e98db3eb357652a3c00008b-modern-design-as-seen-through-the-lens-of-playboy-magazine-photo

It is the best part of the book, having Clay explain how things are in his unique, sardonic style:

There are maybe twelve million cars in this country, and ten million of them look like plastic toys from Japan, all chrome and pink and yellow. So when a cop is trying to be inconspicuous, what does he drive? A black Chevy. With opposition like that, it’s a wonder Ed Ganolese hasn’t taken over the whole country.

Clay is torn between his life working for Ganolese and the nightclub dancer Ella who waits for him back home. Every ranking member of the Ganolese syndicate has a wife, he thinks, why not him?

In his conversations with Ella, Clay admits to being in love with her. But he also is bothered by the likelihood that the more she knows about what he does for a living, the less she will return that feeling. Given what we know about his work, this seems a sensible reservation.

Clay finds himself in police custody more than once as The Cutie develops. "And everything clangs," he explains. "They open a door way down on the other end of the corridor, and the clang runs through all the metal, sounding like somebody just hit a J. Arthur Rank gong right next to your ear."
Image from https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/woman-forced-to-give-birth-in-a-dirty-jail-cell.html

Whatever its flaws, The Cutie keeps you reading. Westlake even this early in his career knew how to sustain a narrative thrust across several chapters, each having its own secondary characters. A long section of the book has Clay interview several known male associates of Mavis St. Paul, the woman whose murder got pinned on Billy-Billy. All describe her the same way; a good-time girl with a materialist agenda.

The dialogue is funny, though it feels less substantial the more it goes on:

 “How strong a suspect am I?” he asked suddenly.

“I don’t have any rating system set up,” I told him.

Donald E. Westlake in later life, at home in New York City. Calling him "prolific" and "influential" barely scratches the surface. He had an entire subgenre, bad-guy lit, all sewn up by the time of his death in 2008.
Image from https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/gtfy.04589/

The best thing about the book may well be the time in which it was set, post-1950s New York City before Kennedy and the Beatles arrived. There is a hint of cocktail jazz and soft blues in the digressive way Westlake paints the picture of the shadow world Clay inhabits. Another reviewer sees echoes of “Mad Men’s” Don Draper in Clay, and that is a good analogy both for the character and his milieu. Both are about making deals and not sweating consequences.

But those consequences are soon coming, it is suggested by the end of the book. This also happens to be the best part of The Cutie, a deft, open-ended wrapper to the ride we have been on. The fact we never really got reasons for why certain things happened is less annoying when you realize this is not a firm story but rather a mood piece.

Westlake established two well-remembered running characters during his long career, Parker and John Dortmunder. Clay, like them, is a criminal type, but unlike them did not appear in any more stories. He works better as a stand-alone, trapped forever in his own cold world.