Reviews for Thieves' dozen

The average rating for Thieves' dozen based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-09 00:00:00 James Bonnell It turns out that short stories about luckless professional thief John Dortmunder are just as enjoyable as his novel length adventures. As the late Donald Westlake explains in a brief introduction, he never planned for Dortmunder to be more than the main character in a single novel, but that turned into a very successful series. Over the years, he'd have the occasional odd idea that wasn't enough for a novel, and somehow found that he'd written enough short stories for a collection. Most of these are what you'd expect for stories about the gloomy thief who constantly finds himself pulled into elaborate and outlandish schemes. My favorite one in this collection is Too Many Crooks . Dortmunder and his buddy Andy Kelp tunnel into a bank vault after closing time only to find out that the bank was being robbed by somebody else and the vault is full of hostages. Hilarity ensues. One of the more interesting things in the book isn't a story. Westlake explains in the introduction that it once looked like he might lose the rights to the Dortmunder character due to the assholery of some Hollywood lawyers. (I assume that this is related to the movie version of The Hot Rock.) In case he lost the legal battle, Westlake had a plan to have the main characters operate under new names after being wanted by the police, but he had problems coming up with a suitable name for Dortmunder. He finally decided on the name of John Rumsey, but Westlake was shocked to realize that when he tried to write a novel with the different names that Dortmunder became different despite the fact he was supposed to be the same exact guy. As Westlake comically explains it, Rumsey was shorter than Dortmunder. The lawsuit was eventually dropped, but Westlake included a John Rumsey story. To Westlake, Rumsey and his cohorts are a version of Dortmunder and his gang from a parallel universe where everything is slightly different. It was a fun twist to add to the collection.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-27 00:00:00 Sheila Sexton Short stories and errata better than the later novels.