Thieves' Dozen

It was, but it wasn't right for Playboy. I thought, however, it might be right for The Armchair Detective, a very good magazine devoted to the mystery genre, and to my delight they thought so, too, so that's where "Jumble Sale" was published.

That story, set in Arnie Albright's charming apartment, was written in the fall of 1993, twelve years after John and I had first entered the lists of the ten-yard dash. In that time, we'd combined for seven short stories and one workout, and until then I'd had no particular goal in mind beyond each event, assuming every time that this story was the last, that John and I had longer fish to fry. But now it occurred to me that if we combined on just two or three additional mini-sagas, we'd have enough for a collection. So all I had to do was think of two or three more stories.

I don't know how it is with anybody else, but I can never think about what I'm supposed to think about. Dortmunder short stories had come along and come along, never anticipated and never particularly needed, but as soon as I decided I should do another Dortmunder short story, I couldn't think of one. Here I was, most of the way across the stream, with only two flat stones to touch to reach the other bank, and not a flat stone could I find anywhere inside my head (which is usually full of them).

It wasn't until more than four years later, when I'd given up on the idea of a Dortmunder collection or any more Dortmunder short stories for any reason at all, a time when I was supposed to be thinking about something else entirely, when here it came, and it couldn't have been more simple. John would leave home on a little errand, that's all. "Now What?" the story was called, and it was back to Dortmunder working solo, and all he was trying to do was get from point A to point B. Well, he got back to Playboy; he could settle for that.

And we found the same home with the final story in this assemblage, "Art and Craft," in which, I admit, John did poach on territory not normally his own. Maybe it's that he's been associated in bookstores and libraries with detective stories and their sleuths all these years-though, in his case, mostly in rebuttal- that led him at last to make, in "Art and Craft," the kind of observation of tiny detail that's usually the province of cerebral plainclothesmen and grandmas with cats. Still, his use of the technique remains peculiarly his own.

And I guess Dortmunder remains peculiarly mine, at whatever length. Originally, he was just passing through. He wasn't expected to have legs, and yet here he is, still domitable but bowed, apprentice, it would appear, of both the extended romp and the quick hit, the perhaps-not-exactly-surgical strike.

Through these years of John Dortmunder's brief encounters, there has remained one constant, and her name is Alice Turner. She was the fiction editor at Playboy, where seven of the stories herein first appeared, and through all these travails she continued to look upon John and me with bemused disbelief followed by stoical acceptance. (Acceptance is an important quality in a magazine editor.) Her suggestions have been not onerous and always to the point, and have definitely improved the product. She's also a terrific person who, in her off-hours, wrote a history of Hell, so what's not to like?

Speaking of which, some years ago, as a result of a contractual contretemps with a motion picture studio (the closest thing to evil incarnate left in this secular age), it looked for a while as though I might either have to stop writing about John entirely-a horrible thought-or change his name, which the harpies were claiming for themselves. A pseudonym for John seemed a possibility, since he'd been known to sail under colors other than his own once or twice already, but when I went to choose that new name, nothing worked. John Dortmunder was John Dortmunder, damn it, and nobody else.

After brooding for a month, I finally settled on the name Rumsey, which I had found on an exit sign on the Saw Mill River Parkway, north of New York City. Rumsey seemed to me closest in feeling, in philosophy, in Weltanschauung (not to mention weltschmerz) to Dortmunder.

I typed out the name a few times: John Rumsey. John Rumsey. John Rumsey. Hmmm.

Fortunately, the evil empire's shadow receded from my peaceful village, so Dortmunder could go on being Dortmunder after all, and once that happened, I could admit to myself that even Rumsey wasn't a completely satisfying substitute. The problem is, John Rumsey is short. John Dortmunder is of average height, but John Rumsey is short. If the guys were to get together in the back room of the O.J. Bar & Grill to scope and scheme some new outrage, John Rumsey would be the shortest guy in the joint. Don't ask me how I know; I know.

Hey. Maybe this is really Rumsey, here in this collection. You think?

ASK A SILLY QUESTION

ART THEFT, OF COURSE," SAID THE ELEGANT MAN, "HAS BEEN overdone. By now it's thoroughly boring."

Dortmunder didn't say anything. His business was theft, of art or whatever else had value, and he'd never supposed it was meant to be exciting. Nor, while tiptoeing around darkened halls in guarded buildings with his pockets full of stolen goods, had he ever found boredom much of a problem.

The elegant man sighed. "What do people of your sort drink?" he asked.

"Bourbon," Dortmunder said. "Water. Coca-Cola. Orange juice. Beer."

"Bourbon," the elegant man told one of the two plug-uglies who'd brought Dortmunder here. "And sherry for me."

"Coffee," Dortmunder went on. "Sometimes Gallo Burgundy. Vodka. Seven-Up. Milk."

"How do you prefer your bourbon?" the elegant man asked.

"With ice and water. People of my sort also drink Hi-C, Scotch, lemonade, Nyquil-"

"Do you drink Perrier?"

"No," said Dortmunder.

"Ah," said the elegant man, closing the subject with his preconceptions intact. "Now," he said, "I suppose you're wondering why we all gathered you here."

"I got an appointment uptown," Dortmunder answered. He was feeling mulish. When a simple walk to the subway turns into an incident with two plug-uglies, a gun in the back, a shoving into a limousine outfitted with liveried chauffeur beyond the closed glass partition, a run up the stocking of Manhattan to the East Sixties, a swallowing up into a town house with a garage with an electronically operated door, and an interview at gunpoint with a tall, slender, painfully well-dressed, 60ish, white-haired, white-mustached elegant man in a beautifully appointed and very masculine den imported intact from Bloomingdale's, a person has a right to feel mulish. "I'm already late for my appointment," Dortmunder pointed out.

"I'll try to be brief," the elegant man promised. "My father- who, by the way, was once Secretary of the Treasury of this great land, under Teddy Roosevelt-always impressed upon me the wisdom of obtaining expert advice before undertaking any project, of whatever size or scope. I have always followed that injunction."

"Uh-huh," said Dortmunder.

"The exigencies of life having made it necessary for me," the elegant man continued, "to engage for once in the practice of grand larceny, in the form of burglary, I immediately sought out a professional in the field to advise me. You."

"I reformed," Dortmunder said. "I made some mistakes in my youth, but I paid my debt to society and now I'm reformed."

"Of course," said the elegant man. "Ah, here are our drinks. Come along, I have something to show you."

It was a dark and lumpy statue, about four feet tall, of a moody teenaged girl dressed in curtains and sitting on a tree trunk. "Beautiful, isn't it?" the elegant man said, gazing fondly at the thing.

Beauty was outside Dortmunder's visual spectrum. "Yeah," he said, and looked around this subterranean room, which had been fitted out like a cross between a den and a museum. Bookcases alternated with paintings on the walls, and antique furniture shared the polished wood floor with statuary, some on pedestals, some, like this bronze of a young girl, on low platforms. Dortmunder and the elegant man and the armed plug-uglies had come down here by elevator: apparently, the only route in and out. There were no windows and the air had the flat blanketlike quality of tight temperature and humidity control.