Nathaniel Rich
In the world of crime fiction the heist novel is a scrappy island nation that speaks its own dialect, practices bizarre customs, and has few allies. Unlike the procedural, the psychological thriller, or the noir, the heist narrative is fundamentally a comic form. It promises the fun of a magic trick: How will our heroes manage to steal a treasure of spectacular value from a seemingly impregnable location? The answer can follow one of three paths.
1) The Happy Ending:
The heist succeeds, and everyone walks away victorious, fulfilled, and wildly rich. It is the rare crime story that ends happily ever after, which is why it’s favored by Hollywood (Ocean’s 11, The Italian Job, The Thomas Crown Affair). The closest tonal analogue to the Happy Ending heist plot in conventional crime fiction can be found in the whodunit, when Inspector Poirot or Maigret or Dupin tidily solves the murder and celebrates with a cup of tisane and several spoons of sugar. The comedy is more Aristotelian than ha-ha; the heroes’ fate is never in real doubt.
2) The Catastrophe:
The “Man Plans, and God Laughs” plot (from the Yiddish: “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht”). Despite planning every detail of the crime with exquisite precision, chance intervenes, and everything collapses about as badly as possible. The Catastrophe shares some of the genetic code with noir, in which a downtrodden hero, pushed to extreme desperation, commits an immoral act to save himself or someone he loves, only to plunge deeper into the abyss. Each act offers another double-or-nothing bet, which inevitably resolves in a dud. It is possible, of course, to play the catastrophe plot as tragedy. But it’s more fun, and perhaps more honest, to play it as farce. The Coen Brothers specialize in this form; literary examples include many of Donald E. Westlake’s novels, such as Richard Stark’s The Score, in which Parker tries to steal an entire town.
3) Pride Before the Fall
The heist succeeds brilliantly, satisfying the reader’s desire for the elegant solution of the criminal puzzle. In the aftermath, however, it all falls apart. Lionel White’s Clean Break, adapted by Stanley Kubrick as The Killing, is a classic of the form: when one of the heistmen is betrayed by his faithless wife, the crew gives up its gains gradually, then suddenly. Kubrick’s script was written by Jim Thompson, whose The Getaway is another exemplar of the form. See also Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rohdenbarr novels, in which a successful heist unerringly leads to far more spectacular disasters.
While writing Cloudthief, I kept these classics within whispering distance:
The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake
Weary Dortmunder and his addled crew of thieves are hired to steal the prize possession of the small African nation of Akinzi: the Balabomo Emerald. And they succeed—briefly, at least. They manage to extricate it from a guarded public display in the middle of Manhattan on a weekday. But as the police close in on the thief carrying the emerald, he swallows it. Later, having recovered it from his bowels, he hides the emerald in the wall of his prison cell before he is transferred to another facility. So the crew must steal it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Six heists, all of the same object, each more satisfying, and more ridiculous, than the last.
The difficulty of the crime is matched by the difficulty of the narrative trap Westlake concocts for himself. How, the reader wonders, will Westlake pull off the seemingly impossible feat of sustaining the reader’s interest, and curiosity, through six iterations of the same plot? Like Dortmunder, Westlake pulls through, each twist more unexpected than the next. A work of high narrative refinement and comic genius.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
The sheer complexity and scale of the typical heist target tends to demand a collaborative effort. You need an inside mole, a driver, a pilot, a procurer, a confidence artist, a heavy or two, a fence, a weasel…you need, in other words, an ensemble. And all those people need to talk to each other, usually at length: characters must argue the soundness of their plan, discuss every potential variation, express fears of failure and dreams of success, squabble and bicker and harangue. Much of the fun of the heist plot lies in the power struggles, the rivalries, and the exasperation of the various assembled personalities. A great heist novel, then, demands great dialogue: original, economical, vivid. Higgins’ novel is a masterclass in the form, a novel written almost entirely in speech:
“I should’ve known better’n to trust a cop,” Eddie said. “My goddamned mother could’ve told me that.”
“Everybody oughta listen to his mother,” Foley said.
Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze
If I didn’t hate epilogues, I would have used this for Cloudthief:
“If you fell in there…you’d be insane before you ever hit bottom.”
For decades Chaze’s masterpiece was the ultimate samizdat text of the noir canon, discussed in awestruck tones by connoisseurs but almost impossible to read. I know several readers who passed around the same single tattered photocopied version. Original paperbacks sold for hundreds of dollars, if you could find them. (The French translation was only slightly more accessible.) Thanks to the efforts of Barry Gifford, the novel’s leading evangelist and one of the great screwball noirists of our time, the novel was finally brought back into print several years ago by New York Review Books.
Tim, a roughnecker just back from four months on a rig in the Atchafalaya River, falls for Virginia, a working girl slumming it in Krotz Springs. They set off for Denver on a mission to hold up an armored truck and hide it in a desolate cave. Tim and Virginia love each other and hate each other but they sure as hell don’t trust each other. The results are as predictable as they are exhilarating.
Black Wings doubles as one of my favorite books about New Orleans, though the novel’s caravan of toxic lust and deceit doesn’t roll into the French Quarter until the final act. Chaze was born in Mamou, Louisiana and wrote for the New Orleans bureau of the Associated Press, before later settling in Hattiesburg. He understood how the city’s glamor and tawdriness conspire together to make people lose their minds. When it came time to name my own star-crossed misfits, I didn’t overthink it. They’re called Tim and Virginia
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