John Dortmunder

John Dortmunder

John Archibald Dortmunder is a fictional character created by Donald E. Westlake, and who is the protagonist of 14 novels and 11 short stories published between 1970 and 2009. He first appeared in the novel The Hot Rock, published in 1970.

Westlake originally intended The Hot Rock to feature his character Parker and to publish it under his Richard Stark pseudonym. However, the plot involves a precious gem that is stolen, lost, stolen again, lost again, etc. (after five tries, Dortmunder captures it), which seemed too comic a situation for a hard-boiled creation like Parker. Westlake therefore rewrote the novel with a more bumbling and likable cast of characters, led by a pessimistic, hard-luck professional thief. A neon sign Westlake spotted, which reported the extended version of the DAB beer acronym "Dortmunder Actien Bier", suggested the name for the book's new protagonist.

Dortmunder is similar to Parker in several ways. He is a career criminal and a "planner," creating schemes for burglaries and assigning responsibilities to his team. He is tall with stooped shoulders and "lifeless thinning hair-colored hair" and has a disreputable "hangdog" face which rarely smiles. He shares a home with a longtime girlfriend, May Bellamy, a supermarket cashier; they live in Manhattan on East 19th Street. Unlike Parker, however, Dortmunder is a nonviolent character who devises schemes that are usually outlandish and over-the-top, and the fact that something almost always goes wrong in spite of careful planning for a long time gave him the reputation of being jinxed (and despite claiming not to be superstitious, he has believed so, too). In fact, Dortmunder gets worried when things go smoothly and seems relieved when something does go wrong. In most novels, Dortmunder's team earn only small amounts of money; the resultant heists, therefore, are only Pyrrhic victories, and the moral for the reader is that Crime Does Not Pay .. at least not very well. However, since Why Me? he and his team have usually come out ahead in each caper (in addition to not being arrested), and in Good Behavior, What's The Worst That Could Happen? and Get Real Dortmunder and his crews come out way ahead (several thousand dollars worth).