God Save the Mark
by Donald E. Westlake
Summary
Fred Fitch is the most swindled man in New York. Con artists cross the street to find him; he has bought shares in nonexistent uranium, subscribed to magazines that never existed, wired bail money to strangers, and been fleeced so reliably that the Bunco Squad keeps his file within reach. Westlake's premise is what happens when the world's softest mark inherits three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars from an uncle he barely knew, an Uncle Matt who, Fred learns at the reading of the will, was himself a career con man, and who has just been murdered.
The inheritance turns Fred's ambient predation professional. Every grifter in the five boroughs converges, wearing the costumes of lawyers, cops, spiritual advisers, long lost relatives and civic causes; two women, his uncle's devoted nurse and companion, the stripper Gertie Divine, and a mysterious young woman named Karen Smith, take competing positions on his behalf or on his bankroll; and somewhere in the carnival is the person who killed Uncle Matt and has scheduled Fred next. The comedy is structural, not decorative: Fred's education in suspicion proceeds exactly one con too late at every step, and Westlake engineers the reversals so that gullibility itself becomes the instrument of detection, the mark's eye view being, in the end, the only vantage from which the whole swindle is visible.
It remains one of the funniest books the genre has produced, and the machinery underneath is a proper murder mystery, fairly clued.
Around two hundred and seventy pages.
Best for readers who want the comic caper at its origin point, innocence weaponised, every page a small con executed on the reader.
Historical Context & Significance
God Save the Mark won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1968, the only best novel Edgar of Donald E. Westlake's career, a statistic the genre treats as its favourite scandal given what that career became: under his own name the comic capers of the Dortmunder gang, under Richard Stark the Parker novels, the coldest professional crime fiction ever written, and a dozen other identities, the whole shelf eventually earning him the Grand Master title and three Edgars across categories.
This book is where the Westlake comedy locked into place, the form he effectively invented, the crime novel as farce with real stakes, and its DNA runs through Elmore Leonard's grins, Carl Hiaasen's Florida and every caper film since.
Hollywood never landed Fred Fitch; Westlake meanwhile wrote The Grifters screenplay, Oscar nominated, giving the con world its dark twin. He died in 2008, mid career by his standards, at seventy five.