Preview of God Save the Mark Summary:

It is all too easy to treat God Save the Mark's story of a tainted inheritance and its pursuit by a variety of greedy schemers as pure entertainment with no evident social concerns. The protagonist, Fred Fitch, is an introverted bachelor whose inability to avoid confidence tricksters is used as both a running gag and the explanation for his failures in human relationships. It is precisely Fitch's difficulties in distinguishing between deceivers and truthtellers, however, that determines his — and since the book is narrated in the first person, also the reader's — perception of society: It is seen as an essentially unregulated confusion of conflicting claims, where appearances are seldom an accurate reflection of reality and the most surprising event is for someone to turn out to be exactly what they say they are.

Although Westlake's comic novels continually mitigate this somewhat dystopian...