Donald E. Westlake

• Born: July 12, 1933
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: December 31, 2008
• Place of death: San Tancho, Mexico

Types of Plot: Inverted; comedy caper

Principal Series: Parker, 1962-1974, 1997-; Alan Grofield, 1964-; Mitch Tobin, 1966-; John Dortmunder, 1970-

Contribution

By combining the intricate plotting characteristic of mystery writing with the deconstructive energies of comedy and satire, Donald E. Westlake invented his own form of crime fiction, the comic caper. Comedy was a significant element in the fiction Westlake published under his own name during the late 1960’s, beginning with The Fugitive Pigeon (1965). In those novels, harried protagonists bumblingly encounter the frustrations of everyday life while sidestepping dangerous enemies. Somehow, all the negative forces are rendered harmless in the end, as is usual in comedy. In the same period, Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, produced novels featuring master thief Parker, which developed increasingly more complex capers, or “scores.”

With The Hot Rock (1970), Westlake united these two creative forces in a single work and found his perfect hero/ foil, John Archibald Dortmunder. In the series of novels that followed, Dortmunder designs capers as brilliant as Parker’s. His compulsive associates follow through meticulously, but these capers never quite succeed. The reader, hypnotized by the intricacy and daring of Dortmunder’s planning, watches in shocked disbelief as the brilliant caper inexorably unravels. The laughter that inevitably follows testifies to Westlake’s mastery of this unique subgenre.

Some of Westlake’s novels have been made into American, English, and French films starring actors as varied as Lee Marvin (Point Blank, 1967), Sid Caesar (The Busy Body, 1967), Robert Redford (The Hot Rock, 1972), Robert Duvall (The Outfit, 1973), George C. Scott (Bank Shot, 1974), Dom DeLuise (Hot Stuff, 1979), Gary Coleman (Jimmy the Kid, 1983), Christopher Lambert (Why Me?, 1990), Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith (Two Much, 1996), and Mel Gibson (Payback, 1999). Westlake has also scripted several films, most famously his Academy Award-winning screenplay for The Grifters (1990, based on Jim Thompson’s novel, directed by Stephen Frears and starring John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening).

Westlake was thrice awarded the Edgar. The first was for his novel God Save the Mark (1967); the second for his short story “Too Many Crooks” (1989), which appeared in the August issue of Playboy. The Grifters won an Edgar for best motion picture screenplay in 1991. The Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master in 1993. He received lifetime achievement awards in 1997 from the Bouchercon Mystery Convention and in 2004 from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Biography

Donald Edwin Westlake was born July 12, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Albert Joseph Westlake and Lillian Bounds Westlake. He was educated at Champlain College and the State University of New York at Binghamton and served in the United States Air Force from 1954 to 1956. Westlake married Nedra Henderson in 1957, and they were divorced in 1966. He married Sandra Foley in 1967; they were divorced in 1975. These marriages brought Westlake four sons: Sean Alan, Steven Albert, Tod David, and Paul Edwin. In 1979, he married writer Abigail Adams, with whom he collaborated on two novels, Transylvania Station (1987) and High Jinx (1987).

After a series of jobs, including six months during 1958-1959 at the Scott Meredith literary agency, Westlake committed himself to becoming a full-time writer in 1959. He quickly became one of the most versatile and prolific figures in American popular literature. His first novel, The Mercenaries, published in 1960, was followed by more than sixty other titles, some published under Westlake’s own name, some under the pen names Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, and Timothy J. Culver. During 1967, for example, as Richard Stark he published The Rare Coin Score and The Green Eagle Score, both featuring the ruthless thief Parker, and The Damsel, starring the more charming Alan Grofield. In the same year, Anarchaos, a work of science fiction, appeared under the pseudonym Curt Clark; Westlake’s name was on the cover of Philip, a story for children, and the comic crime novel God Save the Mark. The latter received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, demonstrating that Westlake’s writing was distinguished as well as prolific. Westlake died of a heart attack on December 31, 2008 at age 75.

In an interview with Publishers Weekly in 1970, Westlake credited his experience in a literary agency for his understanding of the practical aspects of the literary life. His books have enjoyed good sales not only in the United States but also abroad, especially in England.

Analysis

Donald E. Westlake’s earliest novels were praised by the influential Anthony Boucher of The New York Times as highly polished examples of hard-boiled crime fiction. Although Westlake wrote only five novels exclusively in this idiom, concluding with the extremely violent Pity Him Afterwards in 1964, he did not entirely abandon the mode. The novels he wrote under the pen names Richard Stark and Tucker Coe all display elements of hard-boiled detective fiction. In fact, much of this work invites comparisons to that of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The resemblances, however, are much more a matter of tone than of character or structure. Although Tucker Coe’s hero, Mitch Tobin, solves murder mysteries, he does so as a discredited police officer rather than as a private detective. The two Richard Stark series are even less traditional, since their protagonists are thieves and murderers. Illustrating the inverted mode of crime fiction, these novels draw the reader into sympathy with, or at least suspended judgment toward, Parker and Alan Grofield. Whether attributed to Stark or Coe, all these novels present a professionally controlled hard edge.

Parker Series

Parker, the master thief, is a remarkable creation in himself: calculating, meticulous, highly inventive, and totally lacking in normal human feelings. In some respects he resembles characters in the earlier novels published under Westlake’s own name, but Parker elevates these qualities through exaggeration. For example, murder is easy for Parker, but small talk is difficult, as are most human relations, because Parker sees no practical advantage to such transactions. When involved in a caper, Parker is all business, so much so that he feels no sexual desire until the current heist is completed. Then he makes up for lost time. The purely instrumental nature of this character is further evident in the fact that he has only a surname. According to Francis M. Nevins, Jr., the first novel in the series, The Hunter (1962), came so easily to Westlake that he had written more than half the book before he noticed that Parker had no first name. By then, it was too late to add one unobtrusively. Because Parker normally operates under an alias in the series, this lack causes few problems. Parker was scheduled to wind up in the hands of the police at the end of The Hunter, and it was Westlake’s editor at Pocket Books who recognized the potential for a series. Westlake easily arranged for Parker to escape and to pursue a successful criminal career.

The basic plot in the Parker novels and in the Grofield series is an elaborate robbery, a heist, caper, or score. In The Seventh (1966), for example, the booty is the cash receipts of a college football game; in The Green Eagle Score, the payroll of an army base; in The Score (1964), all the negotiable assets in the town of Copper Canyon, North Dakota. Daring robberies on this scale require sophisticated planning and criminal associates with highly varied skills, weapons, transportation, electronic equipment, explosives, and perhaps uniforms, false identification, or other forms of disguise. Engaged by the detailed planning and execution of the caper, readers temporarily suspend the disapproval that such an immoral enterprise would normally elicit. Thus, readers experience the release of vicarious participation in antisocial behavior.

Westlake cleverly facilitates this participation through elements of characterization. For example, Parker would unemotionally kill in pursuit of a score, and he can spend half a book exacting bloody revenge for a double cross, but he will not tolerate needless cruelty on the part of his colleagues. Furthermore, he maintains a rigid sense of fair play toward those criminals who behave honestly toward him. His conscientiousness is another winning attribute. In the same way, Grofield appeals to readers because he is fundamentally an actor, not a thief. He steals only to support his unprofitable commitment to serious drama. In addition, although Grofield often collaborates with Parker on a caper, his wit and theatrical charm give him more in common with the comic protagonists of Westlake’s The Spy in the Ointment (1966) and High Adventure (1985) than with the emotionless Parker. Thus, despite being far from rounded characters, both Parker and Grofield offer readers the opportunity to relish guilty behavior without guilt.

Westlake left off writing the Parker series with Butcher’s Moon (1974), telling interviewers, “Parker just wasn’t alive for me.” He had wearied of the noir voice. So Parker fans were delighted when, after twenty-three years, he returned in Comeback (1997) to steal nearly half a million dollars from a smarmy televangelist, only to find that a co-conspirator means to kill Parker and keep the loot for himself. A New York Times notable book of the year, the novel found a reception so hot that Westlake quickly followed up with a string of Parker best sellers, including Backflash (1998), Flashfire (2000), and Breakout (2002). In Nobody Runs Forever (2004), Parker’s perfect bank heist disintegrates spectacularly and leaves the more than usually frustrated thief running before the bloodhounds, apparently without possible escape. Refuge does, however, present itself in the opening pages of Ask the Parrot (2006), in the person of Tom Lindahl, an embittered whistle-blower who has been quietly plotting revenge. The titular bird is the cause of an uncharacteristcally comic episode in this otherwise noir novel.

Mitch Tobin Series

Mitch Tobin comes much closer to filling the prescription for a rounded fictional character, largely because of his human vulnerabilities and his burden of guilt. After eighteen years as a New York City police officer, Tobin was expelled from the force because his partner, Jock Sheehan, was killed in the line of duty while the married Tobin was in bed with Linda Campbell, the wife of an imprisoned burglar. Afterward, consumed by guilt but supported by his understanding wife, Kate, Tobin tries to shut out the world by devoting all his time and energy to building a high brick wall around his house in Queens. The world keeps encroaching, however, in the persons of desperate individuals needing help—usually to investigate a murder—but unable to turn to the police. A crime kingpin, a distant relative’s daughter, the operator of a psychiatric halfway house, the homosexual owner of a chic boutique—all seek Tobin’s aid. Partly in response to Kate’s urging, partly because of his own residual sense of decency, Tobin takes the cases, suffers the resentment and hostility of the police, and solves the murders.

Although Tobin returns to his wall after every foray into the outside world, with each case he clearly takes another step toward reassuming his life, thereby jeopardizing his utility as a series character. In fact, Westlake wrote in the introduction to Levine (1984) that Tobin’s character development inevitably led to the expiration of the series. In the final novel, Don’t Lie to Me (1972), Tobin has a private investigator’s license and is regularly working outside his home as night watchman at a graphics museum. Linda Campbell reappears, several murders take place, and a hostile police officer threatens and beats Tobin, but he copes with it all effectively and without excessive guilt—that is to say, he comes dangerously close to becoming the conventional protagonist of crime fiction. At this point, Westlake wisely abandoned the pen name Tucker Coe and turned to more promising subjects.

Nonseries Novels

By 1972, the year of Mitch Tobin’s disappearance, Westlake had already published, under his own name, a number of comic novels about crime. Thus, Westlake was already well on his way toward establishing his unique reputation in the field. Appearing at the rate of about one per year, beginning with The Fugitive Pigeon in 1965, these novels usually featured a down-to-earth, young, unheroic male hero, suddenly and involuntarily caught in a tangled web of dangerous, often mob-related, circumstances. Charlie Poole, Aloysius Engle, J. Eugene Raxford, and Chester Conway are representative of the group. Though beset by mobsters, police, and occasionally foreign agents, these protagonists emerge, according to comic convention, largely unscathed and usually better off than when the action commenced, especially in their relations with women. In this respect they resemble Alan Grofield, as they do also in their personal charm and their sometimes witty comments on contemporary society. Westlake’s achievement in these novels was demonstrated by their continuing favorable reception by reviewers such as Boucher and by the recognition conveyed by the Edgar Allan Poe Award for God Save the Mark.

Dortmunder Series

The novels in the Dortmunder series depart from these patterns in various ways. For one thing, John A. Dortmunder is not young or particularly witty. Nor is he an innocent bystander: He is a professional thief. Furthermore, he is seldom much better off at the end of the novel than he was at the beginning, and his only romantic attachment is a long-standing arrangement with May, a food market checker, who fell in love with Dortmunder when she caught him shoplifting. Finally, Dortmunder is not a lone wolf, despite his frequently expressed wish to be one, but only one member of what is probably the least successful criminal gang of all time.

In the course of the novels making up the series, the membership of this gang varies somewhat, depending on the caper at hand. Andy Kelp steals cars for a living, usually doctors’ cars because they come with outstanding optional equipment and can be parked anywhere. Another regular gang member is Stan Murch, a getaway driver who talks obsessively about the shortest drive between two points. He is often accompanied by his mother, a cynical New York cabbie who is usually referred to as Murch’s mom. She and May sometimes act as a sort of ladies’ auxiliary, making curtains in Bank Shot (1972) and taking care of the kidnap victim in Jimmy the Kid (1974). The mammoth and very dangerous Tiny Bulcher is also frequently on hand. Sullen, ignorant, and violent, he often frightens his fellow crooks, but he is strong enough to lift or carry anything. Fictional criminals who can be categorized in this way according to their obsessions and character defects seem to belong more to the world of conventional Jonsonian comedy than to the frightening world of contemporary urban America. This disparity permits Westlake to approach disturbing subject matter in these novels without upsetting his readers.

Among the early members of Dortmunder’s gang are Roger Chefwick, expert on locks and safes and an obsessive model-train hobbyist; Wilbur Howey, who served forty-eight years in prison on a ten-year sentence because he could not resist the temptation to escape; and Herman X, whose criminal activities support both black activist political causes and a sybaritic lifestyle. As the series developed, extra hired hands became less frequent, although the regular planning sessions of Dortmunder, Kelp, Stan, and Tiny in the back room of Rollo’s beloved and atmospheric bar remained de rigeur.

Dortmunder does the planning, even though the original idea for the crime is usually brought to him by someone else, often his old pal and nemesis, Andy Kelp. In What’s So Funny? (2007), Dortmunder is presented with a heist he cannot refuse. An unscrupulous former cop named Eppick has the ability to put Dortmunder in prison but instead chooses to use his leverage to acquire a valuable chess set through the unwilling services of Dortmunder and his associates. Westlake thoroughly milks the comic irony of Eppick’s choice of this singularly unlucky thief to pull off a nearly impossible theft.

Comedy and Mystery

In Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), John G. Cawelti argues that detective fiction generally functions as a comic genre because it subdues the threatening elements of life through the powers of mind and structure. Overly elaborate plotting, that is, inevitably triggers some sort of comic reader response. Even before discovering Dortmunder in 1970, Westlake showed evidence of a similar conviction in the incredibly complex kidnap caper he created for Who Stole Sassi Manoon? (1968). Later, Help I Am Being Held Prisoner (1974) develops another non-Dortmunder caper of Byzantine complexity, a double bank robbery conducted by prison inmates who have a secret passage to the outside world. In these novels, as in the Dortmunder and Parker series, the intricacy of the caper both enthralls readers and distracts them from the negative judgments they would make in real life.

The fundamental difference between the comic and the chilling capers lies in the degree to which Westlake permits realistic circumstances to undermine the design. Paradoxically, the comic variety entails a greater degree of realism. Though Parker must sometimes settle for a fraction of his anticipated haul, Dortmunder gets even less. Moreover, the antagonistic forces subverting Dortmunder’s plans are rarely the sorts of dangerous assassins whom Parker encounters but more mundane elements such as weather, illness, time, and coincidence—in other words, real life. The distinction of Westlake’s comic caper novels, therefore, arises from his combining the coherence available only in elaborately constructed fiction with the comic incoherence familar to readers in their everyday lives. Such comedy, though often howlingly hilarious, is ultimately a serious, highly moral form of literature.

Humans and Smoke

Westlake’s Humans (1992) showed just how seriously he intends his comedy. In the 1990’s he undertook a number of novels that are neither comedy capers (though they are occasionally highly comedic) nor hard-boiled. In Smoke (1995), Freddie Noon, a burglar, breaks into a secret tobacco research laboratory, swallows some experimental solutions, and finds himself invisible. Humans, however, is narrated by an angel, Ananayel, who has been sent by God to arrange the end of the world. “He” encounters obstacles not only from the resident devils, who will do anything to thwart God’s will, but also from his growing love for a human woman.

The Ax

The Ax (1997) addressed the phenomenon of the increasing, one might say hasty, layoffs and downsizing in the name of the corporate bottom line that ruined hundreds of thousands of American lives during the period of greatest prosperity that America had ever known. The protagonist, Burke Devore, gets fired from his middle-management position at a paper mill, and his rage drives him to commit murder—in fact to commit mass murder.

Kahawa

The 1995 republication of 1982’s Kahawa by Mysterious Press includes an introduction by Westlake that signaled how strongly he indicts the kind of crime about which he writes so (apparently) casually. It also showed that by comparison, even in the Parker novels there were lengths to which he would not go, a barrier beyond which lies soul-blanching horror. Kahawa is based on a true story: In Idi Amin’s Uganda, a group of white mercenaries stole a coffee-payload railroad train a mile long and made it disappear. Of Uganda after Amin fled, Westlake writes in his introduction, “Five hundred thousand dead; bodies hacked and mutilated and tortured and debased and destroyed; corridors running with blood. . . .” His research, he reported, “changed the character of the story I would tell. As I told my wife at the time, ’I can’t dance on all those graves.”’ One is reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, in Heart of Darkness (1899), who murmurs as he looks upon civilized England, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

After spending considerable time in those dark places, many a writer turns to absurdism. Westlake’s blessing is that, though his outrage seems to grow by the year, he has never lost his sense of humor. Although he documents the atrocities of Uganda, he also creates lovable characters over whom a reader might well weep. Although he plans the end of the world, he dramatizes how precious and valuable are human follies and foible-filled lives. Westlake, after the 1990’s, is no longer the madcap he pretends, who remarks, “It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name.” Westlake’s ever-evolving career has proven that he is not merely a “genius of comedy” or a “heistmeister.” He has become one of the truly significant writers of the twentieth century.

Principal Series Characters:

• Parker is a ruthless, brilliant master thief with no first name. Through an elaborate underground criminal network, Parker is recruited or sometimes recruits others for daring thefts: an army payroll, an entire North Dakota town. Meticulous and coldly efficient, he will kill without compunction but abhors needless violence.
• Alan Grofield is an aspiring actor, thief, and sometimes associate of Parker. Grofield is more charming, human, and humorous than Parker but equally conscienceless in perpetrating the thefts and scams by which he subsidizes his acting career.
• Mitch Tobin , an embittered former police officer, is guilt-ridden because his partner was killed while Tobin was sleeping with a burglar’s wife. Though he tries to hibernate in his Queens home, Tobin grows progressively more involved with other people by reluctantly solving several baffling murders. Eventually, he becomes a licensed private detective.
• John Dortmunder is a likable two-time loser who lives a quiet domestic life with May, a grocery checker and shoplifter, when not pursuing his chosen career as a thief. Often lured into crimes against his will by Andy Kelp, Dortmunder designs brilliant capers that always go wrong somehow.
• Andy Kelp , an incurable optimist, is a car thief who steals only doctors’ cars. He is a sucker for gadgets and Dortmunder’s longtime associate and jinx.
• Stan Murch is a gifted getaway driver who monomaniacally discusses roads, routes, detours, and traffic jams, often with his mother, a cabdriver usually referred to as Murch’s mom.
• Tiny Bulcher , a cretinous human mountain, leg breaker, and threat to the peace, is often called “the beast from forty fathoms.”

Bibliography

Banville, John, and Donald Westlake. “Lives of Crime: Novelists John Banville and Donald Westlake Compare Notes on the Seedy Worlds That Inspire Their Fiction.” Interview by Malcolm Jones. Newsweek 149, no. 15 (April 23, 2007): 56. Banville and Westlake talk about using pseudonyms and creating different sorts of novels.

Cannon, Peter. “A Comic Crime Writer.” Publishers Weekly 254, no. 6 (February 5, 2007): 25. Profile of Westlake traces his history and notes that Westlake writes six days a week on an old Smith-Corona typewriter.

Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Knight sees Westlake as a transitional writer, one whose characters derive from the traditions of earlier fictional private eyes but who live and work in a modern America, with all its broadened understanding of race, gender, and psychology.

Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. An excellent, all-around trove of information for the reader. Priestman discusses paid assassins, such as Parker, who are a mainstay of the thriller.

Taylor, Charles. “Talking with Donald E. Westlake, Grand Master of Crime.” Newsday, March 18, 2001, p. B11. Profile focuses on the career of Westlake and his longevity as a writer. Westlake says that he does not use outlines and writes for his readers.