Drowned Hopes

Truly great Dortmunder caper where he is invited to help an old cellmate who happens to be a terrifying sociopath recover stolen money from the bottom of a reservoir. It's not really Dortmunder's thing, but seeing as if he doesn't the old cell-mate intends to resort to dynamite and flood a valley full of unsuspecting citizens, he feels obliged to make the effort. There follows a series of attempts to get down to the money and to get the money up. None of them go smoothly. Complications accrue and increase, as does the cast of characters involved, with lots of old familiars and a few new faces, such as Wally the round moist computer guy and Doug the diver, and with each disaster Dortmunder becomes more and more reluctant and has to be show more persuaded back to the job with extreme measures lest Tom the cellmate decide to go ahead with the whole dynamite thing.

Daft as a brush but full of a kind of remorselessly hilarious logic, Drowned Hopes is pure wet brilliance. It's even got that line about no dogs in a reservoir which set at least one friend of mine wondering about a certain film title. show less

My fifth Dortmunder book! He and the gang are after a coffin full of money - in a reservoir, under fifty feet of water! And, believe it or not, they didn't get it on their first attempt! Or second. Or...

LOVED the subplot of Bob, the young fella who works at the damn! The poor guy! Lol!
I also loved (as I have in other Dortmunder books) Andy Kelp’s penchant for stealing cars with MD plates! And finally I loved that in this book, Dortmunder believes that the reservoir is trying to kill him! Believes that, and actually fears that it is so! So crazy! The book is just a crazy, funny bunch of characters trying to do something that they really can't do! Fun to read! And funny ending too!

My favorite of the Dortmunder novels so far. (So far meaning so far as I have read, since of course there won't be any more Dortmunder novels.) I've only read a few, maybe 5 or 6, including some that came long after this one, but Drowned Hopes has some of the finest of Westlake's good-naturedly cynical writing that I've come across. The wedding scene at a tiny upstate NY church -- a whole chapter in itself -- is a near-perfect little vignette of its own. Westlake has a genius for quick but evocative characterization second to none, and he lavishes it on even the

This is a somewhat unusual Dortmunder criminal caper book for a couple of reasons: it's partly set in upstate New York, and it has a fun side story with an unlikely hero. Dortmunder has a problem: a disturbing old cellmate wants him to help recover a lost cache. Along with the usual gang experiencing fish-out-of-water in the suburbs this story, they wind up using the services of Wally, a computer geek. Westlake's dry humor and command of language is in superb form here, from Dortmunder's girlfriend May's imagined cigarette fiddling (she's trying to quit) to brief descriptions of towns and people. There's a certain warmth, too, to Wally's story -- he imagines the only place he'd find comfortable would be in outer space, among short, show more plump, moist aliens, but this adventure he gets dragged into rewards him more than he expects. This is my favorite Dortmunder book. show less

Donald Westlake's Dortmunder novels are quite different to the books he puts out as Richard Stark. The lean, neo-noir stylings slide into a more comedic territory , the prose puts on some comfortable weight and the dog of a story becomes shaggier. If Stark novels are a thin futon, the Dortmunder stories are a waterbed. There's nothing wrong with a waterbed, of course, but they don't appeal to everyone.

Unlucky thief Dortmunder is unwillingly roped into his latest heist. A sociopathic former cellmate wants to blow up a dam - to retrieve money he buried in a now-sunken village forty years ago. Dortmunder is convinced there's a way to get the money without killing thousands of people. But will his ingenuity get him the money before his show more accomplice takes him - and several townships - out?

Drowned Hopes is a fairly leisurely affair, clocking in at over four hundred pages it may be the longest Westlake novel, and I confess to a little impatience at times. The story is so affable, and Westlake's dry, ironic prose unwilling to take *anything* too seriously, it can feel a little inconsequential.

Mind you, like a long, rambling drive in the country (of which the novel features several), there's certainly much to appreciate if you're in the right mood. I don't find Westlake laugh-out-loud funny, but his mis-matched and put-upon cast are generally amusing, and Westlake's literate, but never high-faluting eye, is ever taking small, sly digs at them.

Though quite different from his writing as Richard Stark, there's a similar level of accomplishment to both the prose, and the plotting of Drowned Hopes. Westlake is methodical and logical in his planning of even the most ridiculous crime - and equally methodical in thinking of all the ways it can go wrong.

Nonetheless, without a tangible feeling that anything was at stake, and an almost televisual conviction that everything would turn out - if not for the best, definitely not for the worst - I did find myself flagging at times, despite the humour, affection and general solid craft that went into Drowned Hopes.

If you like a comedic crime caper, and are willing to take an amble into Dortmunder's world, for ambling's sake, you're likely to enjoy this novel. Personally, I prefer the campari-bitter, jerky-lean pleasures of the Richard Stark novels, but it's really more a matter of taste than merit. show less

Apparently there is a whole series of "Dortmunder" books and this isn't the first. It's a mildly amusing crime caper novel, in which Dortmunder is the brains (allegedly) for the underwater salvage of a recently released psycho's spoils from an armed robbery. It would have been a lot better, though, if not for the computer geek and his computer. The book was published in 1990 and the PC was still pretty new-fangled (the first time I used one was only the year before). The computer geek as comedic butt is not so much the problem (but more on that later) as the enormous length of time spent describing the PC and how it works, what you can do with it (play Donkey Kong, for instance), which nobody needs these days, only to be followed by a show more bunch of highly unrealistic uses and responses from it. (It's as if there's a mind in there that can talk back to the user). It's dated as well as crass.

If you can leave that aside, the rest of it is amusing, particularly the ironic ending, but it's hard to do as the PC takes up far to much space in the book and just when you think you're permanently done with it, it makes a come-back. I suspect that other Dortmunder novels, with no PC obsessions evident might be better than this one.

Back to the computer geek: It's a species that's going extinct. This is because knowing heaps about computers is not the preserve of socially inept obsessives any more. The younger the generation the more computer knowledge is ubiquitous and unremarkable. Electronic computing pervades life now and the people who have grown up in that environment take it for granted. It is normal and familar. The people who know most about it, far from being social pariahs by assumption are celebrated. So the computer geek as comic butt is a concept that is dating rapidly. Other socially inept geeks are replacing them. show less

I suppose tastes vary. I see that some find this the best Dortmunder ever but it falls flat for others. I was in the latter category; having read all the Dortmunders until this point then listened to most of them on Audible, this is my least favorite so far.
Partly, it is the Audible narrator who is racing through the story with little effort to differentiate characters or give time to absorb the dialog. Partly, it is the story (which didn't impress me much when I read it either), featuring a genuinely unlikable "guest star". There are fewer fun sequences in this than in most of the other stories.
That said, it does have some enjoyable minor guest characters that we don't spend enough time with, and a moment or two remind me of what the show more series can be. show less