The late Donald E. Westlake had three words posted on a sign above his Smith-Corona typewriter: 'WEIRD VILLAIN LIAISON." Those were the words that gave him fits when writing because he could never remember the proper order of the vowels.

I thought of this while reading his 1966 novel “The Spy in the Ointment,” which is about a liaison of weird villains.

This novel came early in Westlake's career, soon after he shifted from serious crime novels to comic crime novels. The narrator is J. Eugene Raxford, a pacifist. In the 1960s the feds were as suspicious of pacifists as they are now of Republicans, and so they tap his phone and monitor his movements. Gene knows about it but doesn't much care. He's a true pacifist, after all.

To prove how harmless he is, Gene agrees to become an FBI spy at a meeting of representatives from small fringe groups on both the far left and the far right. Most of these people seem too wacky (or weird) to be dangerous to anyone, but that is not true of the leader of this meeting, a young man whose evil plans include blowing up the United Nations building. The weird villains are his patsies. What's more, he is the brother of Angela, Gene's wealthy girlfriend, who goes with him to this meeting and whose life he must ultimately put aside his pacifism to save.

Many complications pile up in barely 200 pages, most of them comic, but for a comic novel there are a surprising number of bodies lying around when it's all over.

“The Spy in the Ointment” is not Westlake at his best — that will come later with the Dortmunder novels and especially his classic “Dancing Aztecs”;— but it shows him in the process of developing his talent as an author of comic crime. ( )

2.5 stars.
This is not his best, but still an entertaining crime caper from 1966. Cold war counter spies play a big role, so it's obviously dated. ( )