Dancing Aztecs

In all the years I've been mentioning it, I realize that I've never written a proper review of Donald Westlake's masterpiece, Dancing Aztecs. My opinion about it has varied, but I've always believed it's the pinnacle of Westlake's comic caper writing, surpassing even his Dortmunder books, because it stands in its own little universe. The story is that a shipment of duplicates of a pre-Columbian artifact from South America includes the smuggled solid gold original, and our large cast of characters spend the book trying to locate and cash-in on the find. It features well-drawn, amusing characters with quirks and foibles, and a fluid set of alliances among them. Entertainingly, it includes the lowest-speed car chase on record. It's a wonderful rendition of the lost treasure story told in a 1920s Russian novel (which was filmed as The Twelve Chairs by Mel Brooks). I've complained from time-to-time that Dancing Aztecs suffers from being stuck in the decade in which it was written, the 1970s, with a number of prejudices and dated ideas that come from that. However, that is a problem only in the way that Gatsby being stuck in the roaring twenties is a problem: it doesn't change the overall quality of the narrative and the timeless nature of the conflict.