Books Profile

Donald E. Westlake

Crime Novelist, Comic and Otherwise By Stewart Mason

Donald E. Westlake was two novelists in one, specializing in both dark, violent crime novels and deadpan parodies of same.

Donald E. Westlake was two novelists in one. Literally. As Richard Stark, the best known of his several pen names, Westlake wrote 24 violent, nihilistic crime novels starring a remorseless thief and killer named Parker. After several similarly hardboiled works under his own name, Westlake grew to specialize in manic comic novels, 14 of them featuring Parker's slapstick doppelganger, the terminally unlucky career criminal John Dortmunder. Unlike contemporaries like Elmore Leonard, Westlake rarely crossed over to the mainstream bestseller lists, but he maintained a fiercely loyal following among mystery and crime fiction fans, publishing over a hundred books before his 2008 death. His occasional ventures away from crime were generally less well-received, although the horror story The Ax was a best seller later filmed (as Le Couperet) by noted director Costa Gavras. Westlake's screenplay for 1990's The Grifters scored an Oscar nomination, but with rare exceptions -- John Boorman's Point Blank, Peter Yates' The Hot Rock and Jean-Luc Godard's Made In USA (loosely and without permission adapted from the Parker novel The Jugger) -- the films based on Westlake's novels tend to be awful, with little of his outlandish wit, needling cynicism and breakneck pacing.

TAGS: Comic Novels, Crime, Dortmunder, Hard-Boiled, Mystery, Nihilism, Parker, Pulp Fiction,

FACTS: ; Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States; Donald Westlake

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