one more for the road

Call Me a Cab, by Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime, 2022)

This is the fifth posthumous novel to appear under Westlake's name since his death over a dozen years ago. Each, including this, has come with a claim that it will (probably) be the last. This one, which was written about 1978 and appeared in abridged form then as a magazine story, but for some reason never made it to book form, is the only one of the five that isn't darkly serious, and despite the publisher's name there is no crime. It's not comic, but it is fairly lighthearted.

The gimmick here is that a young woman, unable to decide whether to accept her longtime boyfriend's marriage proposal, is taking an extra five days to think about it by taking a taxi across the country instead of flying from NYC to LA to meet him. It's told in first person by the cabbie, and the idea of a young male cabbie narrator with an attractive young woman as his passenger may make you think of Westlake's 1969 novel Somebody Owes Me Money. It should, because not only are the situations similar, so are the characters.

Like Chester, the cabbie in Money, Tom, the cabbie in Cab, is a relaxed fellow with no goals in life other than to get along at what he's doing. Katharine, the passenger, is an achiever with a high-powered job, used to making decisions, and perplexed as to why she's hesitating over this one.

The rather sloggily-paced book traces their drive across the country, their adventures along the way (taking a woman in labor to the hospital, being scooped up while on a walk by a rich elderly couple in a fancy car who want to take them on a pub crawl - in western Kansas?), details the mechanics of getting meals (shared) and hotel rooms (not shared), and recounts their conversations, particularly about marriage - Tom is divorced - and their differing goals in life.

Eventually they do meet the boyfriend and arrive in LA (in that order), and Katharine has a sudden burst of self-realization that she could have had a lot earlier, except then there would be no story, and I'd better stop there. This isn't top-drawer Westlake, but it's very far from bottom-drawer either.