The Hot Rock

by Donald E. Westlake

Westlake had an idea for a Parker novel, but it was too funny, so he invented John Dortmunder, a comic version of Parker. The Hot Rock introduced Dortmunder and also launched the genre of the “comic crime caper.” I read a Dortmunder book in high school, Drowned Hopes, and it really influenced my writing at the time.

Westlake’s writing is to the point, no wasted words, nothing boring. He doesn’t want you to get hung up on unimportant details. He’s telling you a story, and you can trust him not to waste your time.

In The Hot Rock, five criminals are hired by Major Iko to steal The Balabomo Emerald from one African nation (Akinzi) for another (Talabwo), but because of various mishaps, they have to perform caper after caper trying to get it.

For my own memory, I’m going to recount the main plot points here, so MASSIVE SPOILERS follow. Here’s the run down:

• They steal it from a museum, but Greenwood gets arrested. At the last second, he swallows the emerald.
• They break Greenwood out of jail. But he doesn’t have the emerald – he had already passed it and had to hide it in the police station.
• They land a helicopter on the roof of the police station, bust in, and discover that the emerald is missing. They were double-crossed by Greenwood’s lawyer, Prosker, the only other person Greenwood had told about this. Prosker had already retrieved the emerald and then checked himself into a maximum security insane asylum.
• To abduct Prosker from the asylum, they ram a small train engine through the fence and jump out wearing wet suits and holding machine guns. This is so surreal, the inmates think they’re hallucinating.
• Prosker put the emerald in a safety deposit box. They don’t trust him to retrieve it, and they can’t break into the bank, so they hire Miasmo the Great to hypnotize one of the bank guards (in a great scene on an elevator, pp. 236-238). Dortmunder rents a box of his own, goes to it with the guard, then says the phrase “Afghanistan banana stand,” and the guard does whatever Dortmunder tells him to.

So D gets the emerald back, but then Major Iko double-crosses them and won’t pay. They surprise him at the airport and get the emerald back. He says he’ll get the money together. In the final scene of the book, Dortmunder goes to the Akinzi embassy and arranges to swap the real emerald for a fake. He knows Iko will eventually contact him to buy the emerald back, and he’s going to make sure Iko pays $200k for a piece of green glass. The End.