Many years ago, when I was a kid growing up, I used to be a regular at the Mary Wilcox Memorial Library in town, and tore through most of their kids' books before mounting an assault on the adult section. The librarian at the time, Mrs. Sinclair, was a terrific woman who knew pretty much everybody in town, and what they liked to read.
One time when I went in to look for new stuff, she handed me a copy of Castle in the Air by Donald E. Westlake. "I think you'll like this," she said, "He's really funny."
She was right, and over the twenty-ish years since then, I've read dozens of his books. Which is only a fraction of his prodigious output-- he's one of those authors who used to write under several pseudonyms because publishers didn't believe he could be writing four books a year. He's best-known for two series of crime fiction: the comic caper novels featuring the hapless master thief John Archibald Dortmunder, and the grimmer thrillers written as "Richard Stark" featuring a main character known only as Parker. His writing has spanned all sort of genres, though, and he brought a high degree of craftsmanship to all of them. He wrote books where I didn't care for the ending, but I never read a Westlake that I thought was badly put together.
So I was saddened to learn that Donald Westlake died Wednesday. He's one of those authors who has been a part of my life for so long that I almost started to take him for granted. Every year or two, a new Westlake would turn up, and I'd spent a pleasant couple of days reading it. It's really sad to know that the next new Westlake to turn up (Get Real, a Dortmunder novel) will be the last.
He had a great run, though: almost fifty years as a writer, with over a hundred books to his credit. And he brought a great deal of pleasure to thousands of people, which is more than most can say. He'll be missed.
If you haven't had the pleasure of reading him before, The Hot Rock is the first Dortmunder novel, and a good place to start. If you like darker books, The Hunter is the first Parker novel (and has been made into a movie twice, most recently the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback). My favorite is almost certainly What's the Worst That Could Happen?, which somebody really ought to think about making a movie of (I choose not to believe the persistent rumor of a movie version starrign Martin Lawrence).
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"He who has nothing has nothing to lose. And he who has nothing to lose has already won."
-- Donald E. Westlake, Trust Me on This
Wasn't he great? Scenes from Westlake's work keep running through my head. The scene from "Smoke" with the flying cell phone; the scene from "Drowned Hopes" with the AMC Pacer rolling down the train tracks under the reservoir until the buoyancy of the ping pong balls cause the car, and Dortmunder and Kelp, to flip over and begin floating; the scene from the short story "Too Many Crooks" with Dortmunder and Kelp digging into a bank fault and finding it filled with employees and customers because the bank is being robbed. Well, we get one last Dortmunder novel later this year; "Get Real". And I've already begun to reread them all.
John Dortmunder was such a great character that Wikipedia has a page on him, listing all the comic crime novels he was in. Remember Jimmy the Kid, where their victim ends up with the ransom? Bank Shot, where they steal a bank?
Westlake wrote the screenplay for The Grifters, which still creeps me out. The characters in the movie, I mean.
He was good when he started and, amazingly, got better and better until I came to believe that no one wrote a smoother or better hard-boiled or comic mystery than Donald Westlake. I've read them all, more than once, and I never read a sentence that I didn't like.
Every five or six years I get all the Parker novels he wrote under the name Richard Stark and read them in order. Then all the Dortmunder novels he wrote under his own name. Then the stand alone novels.
Escapist entertainment? The best. Intelligent observations? Top drawer. Interesting characters? Oh yeah. Funny (Westlake) or really hard-boiled (writing under the name Richard Stark)? None funnier and none tougher. Plots than enthrall? Be prepared to be hooked.
Best of all is the writing.
New to Westlake or his Stark pen name? Pick your mood, and then choose something fairly recent (last 10 years). Read a couple. Then go back to the early ones and read them in order.
Enjoy.
Today: NPR's Fresh Air remembers Donald Westlake with interviews from 1988 and 1997.