89 Quotes by Sarah Weinman

'A Burglar's Guide to the City' makes disparate connections seem obvious in hindsight, and my worldview is altered a little bit more, and far for the better, as a result. We'll never know, but I suspect Donald Westlake would have enjoyed it - and perhaps been a little unsettled by it, too.

Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of '29 - triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war.

It takes about seventy-five pages for a Parker reference - from 'The Score,' specifically - to show up in Geoff Manaugh's 'A Burglar's Guide to the City.'

How can quality crime fiction not be produced with available subject matters as the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the creation of organized police forces, the dawn of forensic science, and the rise and fall of Romanticism?

Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.

As I considered Parker and his absurdist reflection in the Westlake-authored 'Dortmunder' novels, I wrote, 'His natural ability to observe human behavior and to follow an idea, no matter how bizarre, through to its proper, rightful finish echoed the vision of an architect.'

'Laura' was overtly political for sure. Caspary was trying to make a point about women and independence and how men viewed them, with derision or condescension or on a pedestal, when the real person was ignored.

A few hours after the news broke about the death of crime writer Donald E. Westlake, a newspaper asked me to write a tribute. In short order I did so, calling attention to his decades-long career, both under his own name and that of his primary alter ego, Richard Stark, who introduced the unsentimental antihero-heister Parker to the literary canon.

Five years before 'Kitchen Confidential' - and before then, the 'New Yorker' essay that led to the book - Bourdain published 'A Bone in the Throat,' a crime novel set in the restaurant world he lived and breathed.