1976;
350 pages. New Author? : No. Genres : Crime Fiction; Comedic Mystery. Overall Rating : 9½*/10.
It's a brilliant scam. A New York City museum is willing to pay a
million dollars for the famous “Dancing Aztec Priest”, an ancient figurine made of solid gold
with emeralds for eyes (see the book cover image).
Unfortunately, it presently resides in the dirt-poor South American nation
called Descalzo, where the people revere it, pray to it, and are unlikely to give it
up for any price. But couldn't a skilled sculptor create a cheap plaster lookalike, and switch it out? The only challenge then would be getting it through
customs when shipping it into the United States.
And that’s where the brilliancy comes in.
Why not make a bunch of lookalikes, put them in crates bound to NYC,
mark the crate that has the real Dancing Aztec in it, and pay some airport hustler
with access to the JFK airport tarmac to steal the designated crate before it goes through customs inspection?
Finding such a hustler is easy, it’s our protagonist, Jerry
Manelli, who's already doing a profitable business stealing small amounts of baggage on a regular basis at JFK. Just have someone call him from
Descalzo when the plane leaves there and tell him the million-dollar figurine
is in “Crate E”.
Funny thing though. The first
five letters of the Spanish alphabet are pronounced “ah”, “bay”, “say”, “day”, “ay”. So when the native Descalzan tells the Jerry
to swipe “Box ay”, guess which one he
grabs? Oopsie. Someone else is going to get the real
statuette, not realizing how much it’s really worth.
What’s To Like...
Dancing Aztecs
chronicles the madcap antics that ensue after the scammers become aware
of the mix-up described above. As luck
would have it, the rest of the Dancing Aztecs, sixteen in all, were then all given out as “thank-you
mementos” at an awards banquet given by a group called the Open Sports
Committee. That means the sixteen
trophies went sixteen separate ways to people scattered all over the greater
New York City area. Good luck finding
the right Aztec.
Things
rapidly get more complicated. The bad
guys go chasing the statues. Our
hustler-hero figures out why the baddies wanted him to hijack the
special crate and he forms his own team to track down the statues. Some of the sixteen recipients also wise up
and work together to do the same, including one who even teams up with his wife’s
paramour. The baddies in Descalzo
start their own caper and they have the added challenge of hijacking an
airplane to get to the US, then somehow evading arrest.
All this probably sounds confusing, but somehow Donald E. Westlake’s
storytelling makes everything easy to follow.
It helps that he includes a handy Cast-of-Characters at the very
beginning, warns you any time the storyline goes non-linear (which happens a lot), and keeps the settings limited to the NYC area, Descalzo, and a
brief side trip to Pennsylvania.
Weirdly,
the book doesn’t have chapters, Westlake simply adds a brief header (such as: “in the
beginning…”, “prior to which…”, that night…”, some time earlier…”)
which lets you know you’re heading into a new section of the tale.
I
chuckled at the national drink of Descalzo: something called “gluppe”, which is made
by fermenting rotting yam skins and lima-bean stalks. Westlake gives us a nice “feel” for the various
boroughs of NYC, and it’s a treat anytime the Olmecs get mentioned. The book was published in 1976, and there
were some neat nods to long-forgotten people from back then, including Sonny
Jurgensen, Alex Karras, Shirley Chisholm, and Stokely Carmichael, the latter
getting a local Squash Court & Snack Bar named after him. There’s also a very slight “is it natural or
supernatural” aspect to the tale, and I always like that.
The
ending is skillfully done, with a couple well-timed twists and a neat “six months later” epilogue. Everyone lives happily ever after, or, at
least no unhappier than they were before all this craziness transpired.
Kewlest New Word ...
Agley (adj.)
: awry; askew; wrong. (a Scottishism).
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.0/5
based on 42 ratings.
Goodreads:
4.00/5
based on 513 ratings and 60 reviews.
Kindle Details…
Dancing Aztecs currently sells for $7.99
at Amazon. Donald E. Westlake has
several dozen other e-books at Amazon, ranging in price from $1.99
to $14.99,
the latter being for the most recent release in his acclaimed “Dortmunder”
series.
Excerpts...
The state trooper
was driving a Fury II. State troopers love Fury IIs. State troopers will go on driving Fury IIs
until some car company puts out a car called Kill. Then state troopers will drive Kills. State troopers get their self-image from
Marvel Comics. (loc. 2106)
The Dancing Aztec
Priest. Three children were making fun
of it, as usual; giggling at it, prancing before it, trying to imitate its
stance.
It looked so real
(…) And it gave just as much enjoyment
to these disrespectful brats as had its predecessor. What do children care whether their plaything
is gold or gilt, the original or a copy, priceless or valueless? In any event, the true original Priest long
ago was flesh, and long since dead, that flesh ages ago converted to yams by
the wonder of the natural order. And we
eat the yams, and we are all the
Dancing Aztec Priest. (loc.
6306)
Where he walks tombstones grow, and where he sits the sun never
shines. (loc. 2531 )
There
are a couple of nits to pick, mostly about things that were the norm back in the 70s or which Donald Westlake, who passed away in 2008, has no control over.
For
starters, there were a ton of typos.
My impression was that the publisher digitalized Dancing Aztecs
by scanning the pages and converting them to “.doc” format. Okay fine, I’ve used that sort of program before, and you still have to proofread the Word document. They didn’t, and it shows via all sorts of
annoying misprints: wife/with,
sate/sale, m/in, worm/worth, well/we’ll (3 times!!), Watty/Wally,
scoffing/scarfing, and many, many more. If someone was paid to proofread this
manuscript, they should be shot.
There are at least a half dozen ethnic and sexual slurs, some of them
done multiple times. I cringed each time
one popped up, but reminded myself that back in 1976, such language was
acceptable. Similarly, a couple of the
sections are written in what might be called “jive” or “ebonics”, and for me they
fell flat. And for those who get
offended by cusswords, I counted 30 instances in the first 25%.
Despite all that, I thoroughly enjoyed Dancing Aztecs. I’m in awe
that the author could juggle so many separate storylines and not leave the reader
in a befuddled fog. This book is not
part of his famous “Dortmunder”
series, but I found it just as charming and entertaining. If you’ve never
read a Donald Westlake novel, this is as good a place to start as any.
9½ Stars. It’s not a spoiler to say that the whereabouts of the missing Dancing Aztec Priest is revealed at the end of the book. Just for fun then, try to figure out, alongside the book’s various characters, who has it. I'm confidently betting that you’ll be wrong.
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