Donald E. Westlake
American crime fiction in the mid-twentieth century occupied a broad and restless territory, running from the grimly serious to the structurally playful, and few writers moved across that span with the consistency that the form demanded. Donald Edwin Westlake, born in Brooklyn on July 12, 1933, spent his career working that range as a novelist, crime fiction writer, and screenwriter, producing more than one hundred novels and non-fiction books and writing in English under at least twenty pseudonyms.
Educated at Binghamton University, Westlake established himself within crime fiction and detective fiction while developing a particular specialty in the comic caper — a mode that places unusual demands on pacing and construction. He created two characters whose names recur across his bibliography: Parker and John Dortmunder. Among his notable works are The Hunter and The Grifters, titles that indicate something of the range he sustained. He also wrote occasional science fiction, moving beyond the genres most closely associated with his name without abandoning them as his primary territory.
The pseudonyms — at least twenty of them — allowed Westlake to publish under different names across his long career, extending a body of work that in sheer volume already set him apart from most of his contemporaries in the field. As a screenwriter he worked in a form with its own distinct requirements, separate from those of prose fiction, and his contributions there added another dimension to a career that was already difficult to summarize under a single heading.
The Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master in 1993, the organization's highest designation. He also received Edgar Awards, Gumshoe Awards, and Shamus Awards over the course of his working life. Westlake died on December 31, 2008, in Mexico, and it is that Grand Master honor, alongside the documented breadth of his output across crime fiction, detective fiction, comic capers, and screenwriting, that the record most firmly supports.
Quotes by Donald E. Westlake
I did the first Parker novel, in which he got caught, and the editor at Pocket Books took me to lunch and said, 'Is there any way that this guy could get away at the end, and you could do three books a year for us?' And I said, 'I think so.'
A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.
The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.
With writing, I prefer the solo effort, but when a team is working right, as it did on 'The Grifters,' boy, it's exhilarating.
I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'
Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo, Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.
The critics didn't like it at all. They felt it was crude and violent without meaning, and they dumped on it. 'Point Blank' marked a shift in movie-making, and they weren't ready for it. However, I think those were the last negative words ever said about it.
However, inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise could always recognize one another.