Donald Westlake: The Patron Saint of the Hardboiled Heist Novel

Donald E Westlake (1933-2008) is your favorite writer’s favorite writer. The man wrote over 100 fiction books and almost all of them are pure pulp. I can’t recommend his books enough, if you’re into hardboiled fiction, pick one up.

This is a guy who counts Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, and Lawrence Block among his fans. Not to mention John Borges and Matt Pagourgis. I mean that’s something!

The man was incredibly prolific. So much so, he had to create a gang of pseudonyms just to keep up with the content he’d churn out. The most famous of those pseudonyms was, of course, Richard Stark who had more of a successful career than the man who created him.

Richard Stark’s Parker series is what got me into writing crime fiction. It’s the hardest of hardboiled, with the main character, Parker a career criminal. If Westlake’s a writers writer then Parker is the criminal’s criminal.

Many of the Parker novels start with him not feeling good about the plan for the caper and then being right. Some of the books start off right when things get bad, and then it’s even more downhill from there. Whatever the heist, wherever the caper, it’s bound to be a good story with Westlake at the wheel.

Here’s Westlake talking about Parker being a blue collar workman.

I’ve always said Parker is basically a workman, with the professional workman’s goal of getting the job done ably, efficiently and without interruption. It’s true his job is a dramatic one, but it’s still a job. The only way somebody’s going to be interested in watching a guy take the hinges off a door is if there’s a hundred thousand dollars on the other side.

Donald Westlake in an interview for Mystery Scene’s 2008 Fall Issue #106

Here’s the link to the whole interview, it’s interesting to hear him talk about Parker being a throwback even for 1960’s standards.

Funny thing is, the Parker series was supposed to be a one-off, and reading The Hunter you get the feeling that there’s no way out for this guy. But the editor at Pocket Books, Bucklyn Moon said he would buy it if Parker could escape at the end and Westlake would write “three more books a year about him.” Which Westlake was able to do for the first two years.

Aside from the first book where Parker is especially brutal, he’s neither good nor evil. He’s just, Parker. All of his Parker books are great but some stand-outs for me are The Score where he robs an entire town in North Dakota, The Seventh where the heist of a college football game goes bad, and Slayground where Parker is trapped in an off-season amusement park fighting the mafia after a heist goes south. But honestly, all of them are excellent those are just a few standouts.

If you’re more of a comic book kind of person, Darwyn Cooke’s got you covered with his masterfully done graphic novels of some of the Parker books. They’re great but you’re missing out on the wonderfully written work of Westlake.

I do love how Cooke covers the plan in The Score.

The Parker books have been adapted into multiple movies. The first and best actor to play Parker was Lee Marvin, he really is the perfect Parker. Even though his name in Point Blank (1967) is actually Walker, he’s the embodiment of Parker. The French adaptation of The Score, Mise à Sac (“Pillaged”) has Michel Constantin playing ‘Georges’ (why can’t they just call him Parker?) robbing a French mining town instead of North Dakota. That also came out in 1967.

The Split (1968) has the great Jim Brown playing Parker. It’s based on The Seventh and also features Warren Oates, Donald Sutherland, and Gene Hackman.

In 1973 Robert Duvall played Parker in The Outfit. Peter Coyote played Parker in the 1983 British adaptation of Slayground. Mel Gibson was Parker in Payback, the second adaptation of The Hunter. And lastly, Jason Statham was Parker in, Parker which was based on Flashfire.

Now reading the Parker books doesn’t get you the full scope of Westlake’s writing. Parker is very, very, hardboiled. But Westlake wrote some amazing comedic capers that are worth reading, especially the Dortmunder series starting with The Hot Rock which was later developed into a movie of the same name starring Robert Redford as Dortmunder. Martin Lawrence also played Dortmunder (changed to Kevin Caffery) in What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (2001).

And then there’s the Mitchell Tobin series Westlake wrote under the pen name, Tucker Coe. Tobin is a disgraced cop and an unlicensed private eye. The Tobin series are great mysteries and yet another layer in the Westlake onion. The first book in that series is Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death.

Hard Case Crime has been putting out quite a few books by Westlake and at least one by Stark. 361 is one of my favorites, which came out the same year as The Hunter. Here’s what sold me when I saw it at the book store:

The men in the tan-and-cream Chrysler came with guns blazing. When Ray woke up in the hospital a month later, he was missing an eye, and his father was dead. Then things started to get bad…

– Hard Case Crime

Hard Case Crime also came out with the first book written by Donald Westlake as Donald Westlake, The Cutie which was originally titled The Mercenaries. Before that book he wrote some soft-core porn paperbacks, collaborating with Lawrence Block on one. Here’s a post about that.

I mentioned his pseudonyms, another favorite writer of our’s got his pen name from Westlake. Stephen King needed a pen name because like Westlake he was churning out a lot of books and didn’t want to oversaturate the market with King books. Also, the Bachman books are very different from King’s earlier work. The Running Man being one of them. Like Westlake’s various pen names, these ones feel different.

It’s said that King was reading a Richard Stark book and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive when he came up with the nom de plume, Richard Bachman. He later used the rest of the Richard Stark name for the book The Dark Half where the character’s pseudonym, George Stark comes to life. This I find very interesting because King killed off Richard Bachman after battling with drug addiction. King wrote bogus biographies for Bachman but my favorite is Bachman’s “posthumous work,” The Regulators:

Before his death from cancer in late 1985, Richard Bachman published five novels. In 1994, while preparing to move to a new house, the author’s widow found a cardboard carton filled with manuscripts in the cellar. These novels and stories were in varying degrees of completion. The least finished were longhand scribbles in the steno notebooks Bachman used for original composition. The most finished was a typescript of the novel which follows . . .

Editors note, The Regulators by Richard Bachman

Donald Westlake also had a lot of fun with his pseudonyms. In 1977 he ‘interviewed’ Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, and Timothy J. Culver for an article in the book Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion. Here’s a list of (some of) his pseudonyms:

• Richard Stark – Parker and Groefield series
• Alan Marshall (or Alan Marsh) – Was a house name for softcore porn paperbacks. Lawrence Block also wrote under this name.
• Tucker Coe – Mitchell Tobin series
• James Blue – (used once for a short story – was the name of Westlake’s cat)
• Ben Christopher – (used once)
• Samuel Holt – Wrote 4 mysteries under this name.
• John B. Allan: He wrote Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America’s Most Talented Actress and the World’s Most Beautiful Woman under this name.
• John Dexter – Another house name for softcore vintage sleaze.
• Curt Clark – For a sci-fi novel Anarchaos and the short story “Nackles“
• Timothy J. Culver – For the thriller Ex Officio
• J. Morgan Cunningham – for the book, Comfort Station, which has the blurb “‘I wish I had written this book!’ – Donald E. Westlake.” On the cover – Check the link, it’s there.
• Judson Jack Carmichael  – For the 2002 mystery, The Scared Stiff.

Further Reading:

Look no further than donaldwestlake.com – the official website handled by his family.
The Getaway Car by Donald Westlake – is a lot like Stephen King’s On Writing. It starts with a funny autobiography and then goes more into his writing and writing in general where he waxes poetic on private eye fiction. If you’re a writer or a fan of his work this one’s a must-read.