I'm trying to figure out how to tell the story I want to tell here. It necessarily contains a short blunt Anglo-Saxon word which, in many contexts, I have no trouble employing, but which, in the present context, seems to me to present the wrong tone, to be off-key. So I tell you what; when we reach any point, in dialogue or wherever, that the word I have in mind would be deployed, I'll use the word "magruder" instead. Okay?

I considered Ross Thomas a friend, to the extent that two people can be friends who live three thousand miles apart and never belonged to the same Moose lodge. Another mutual friend of ours, Gary Salt, my long-time agent, lived on the Left Coast like Ross and probably saw him more often.

At one point in his speckled career (all of us who put bread on the table by spinning words from straw have speckled careers), Ross was rewriting the screenplay of Hammett, from the Joe Gores novel, for Francis Coppola, as a result of which he asked Gary a favor. He had added a character, he explained, a reporter that Hammett would meet in a bar, who would give Hammett a piece of information that would later turn out to be vital. The reporter would only be in the one scene, but the audience should be able to remember him whenever that vital fact emerged, so would Gary mind if Ross called the character "Gary Salt," that being an easy and a memorable name?

Gary said he wouldn't mind at all, in fact he'd be honored. And then he added these fateful words: "Just remember, some day my mother's going to see that movie. So I don't care who the character is, just so he doesn't magruder children and animals."

"No no," Ross said. "He's just a reporter Hammett meets for one scene in a bar."

Now, here's what Gary didn't know, or didn't fully appreciate. Ross was a contrarian. He couldn't help himself; if told he couldn't do something, he would not rest until he'd done it. A Monsignor Knox, back in the twenties, had compiled a list of subjects that could not be used in detective novels: dwarfs, Chinamen, etc. Ross saw that list somewhere, and immediately set out to write a detective novel about every one of those taboos: The Eighth Dwarf, Chinaman's Chance, etc.

So now watch what happens. Screenplays aren't written, they're rewritten. Draft after draft goes by, and the reporter in the bar becomes a photographer, the photographer becomes a pornographer, then the pornographer becomes the head of a pornography ring and the principle villain in the story, and by the time the film was made "Gary Salt" was the most evil guy in the movie and, yes, he did magruder children and animals. Gary took it philosophically, understanding by then that Ross couldn't help it. I don't know if Gary's mother ever saw the movie; hope not.

This characteristic, potentially troublesome in other areas, served Ross well in his writing career. His novels are so good -- and they are -- because he absolutely refuses to be ordinary. He won't follow the plot guidelines, he won't make tidy action-figure characters. When he comes to a fork in the road, he takes a different road.

Ross had to go his own way, and the result is a body of work that's constantly surprising without stretching credibility, the whole described with economy and wit, and absolutely unmistakable: Here is a Ross Thomas novel.

Here, in fact, is a Ross Thomas novel, the second of the three he wrote about Artie Wu, pretender to the Imperial Chinese throne, and the guy watching his back, Quincy Durant, a pair of adventurers and con artists picking their delicate way through the shifting societies of the south Pacific Rim. (The aforementioned Chinaman's Chance was the first, and Voodoo, Ltd. unfortunately the last.)

This time, the principal setting is the Philippines just after the ouster of Marcos, and the sense of time and place is one more of the many pleasures to be found herein. Yes, that was what the Philippines felt like in those unsettled days, when no one knew yet what the post-Marcos world would become but everyone felt the need to make a dollar out of it.

It's the inimitable Ross Thomas at his best. The dialogue zings, the story twists like a go-go dancer, and you often can't tell the players even with the program. Step aboard, make yourself comfortable, but do stay alert. We're off.

Copyright © 2003 by Donald E. Westlake