il ragno
05-23-2009, 07:46 AM
I'm aghast. Donald Westlake is gone - died nearly six months ago (!) - yet somehow I didn't even know it until just now. How could I have possibly missed it? And yet I did.
RIP to one of the best-loved and least-celebrated Great American Writers. This absolutely sucks.
http://www.efanzines.com/EK/eI13/W0008C.jpg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/09/obituary-donald-westlake
Obituary: Donald Westlake
Nick Kimberley / Friday 9 January 2009
A sly wit surfaced repeatedly throughout the long literary career of Donald E Westlake, who has died aged 75 from an apparent heart attack. Under various pseudonyms he produced around 100 novels - Westlake himself lost track of the figure - many short stories and at least eight screenplays.
His speciality was the caper novel, in which a criminal or a gang sets about relieving an institution or an individual of money, property or relations, usually to be foiled, not by the police, but by a comic combination of fate and their own ineffectuality. His character John Archibald Dortmunder, hero of more than a dozen novels, was the embodiment of the likably hopeless criminal, forced to commit the same crime over and over again until he gets it right.
It was in 1962, with half a dozen books already under his belt, that he assumed the identity of Richard Stark for The Hunter. This was his first novel to feature the criminal anti-hero Parker - who never acquired a first name.
In essence the 23 novels featuring Parker were capers, although they were not in the least funny. Instead they were dark, bitter accounts of the savage life enjoyed by a criminal who knows no fear and respects no morality but his own. They do not provide any kind of psychological profile of their central figure; instead they bring the reader face to face with an automaton who acts rather than thinks, and whose deeds are invariably self-serving and violent.
The Parker novels are Westlake's greatest achievement, and they retain a dedicated following, but it was the cinema that gave them their widest circulation. The most famous film derived from the series is John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), in which Lee Marvin played up Parker's vicious solipsism. The film renamed the character Walker; in Playback, the 1999 Mel Gibson remake, he became Porter.
Jean-Luc Godard took the Parker novel The Jugger as the basis for his 1966 movie Made in USA, but since he failed to give due credit, Westlake sued and prevented the film being released in the US. Several other films based on Westlake's fiction locate a brash nihilism that the author did not seek to deny.
Westlake himself wrote a number of Hollywood screenplays. The finest was the adaptation he made of Jim Thompson's novel The Grifters, which Stephen Frears filmed in 1990. Between them Westlake and Frears uncovered something profound that Thompson's novel, not one of his best, barely hinted at. The result was a movie that had the power of Greek tragedy while remaining true to its pulp fiction roots.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n11/n59104.jpg http://i21.ebayimg.com/05/i/001/31/cf/ce21_1.JPG http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0843953578.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
In any directory of crime fiction pseudonyms, there should be a special place reserved for Westlake. He was christened Donald Edwin Westlake, initials which prompted the schoolboy nickname "Dewdrip", and perhaps persuaded him that noms de plume were a good idea. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Yonkers and Albany in New York state, he attended several colleges, graduating from none of them.
His first novel, The Mercenaries, was published in 1960 under the name Donald E Westlake. Then he filleted his given names for "Edwin West", which he used for four further novels published in 1961 and 1962 and blessed with such titles as Campus Doll and Young and Innocent. Then came the Richard Stark persona and Parker.
Other "false" identities followed, notably Tucker Coe (five novels) and Samuel Holt (four). As Alan Marsh, or Marshall, he wrote mildly salacious pornography in the 1960s. The names were the shared property of several authors, including the crime novelist Lawrence Block, a friend and occasional collaborator, and it is unclear which novels bearing the names are Westlake's work. In later life he rarely spoke about such torrid fantasies as Apprentice Virgin (1962) and Bed of Shame (1964), but it seems unlikely that he was ashamed of them.
Nor does the roll-call of pseudonyms end there. As John B Allan he wrote a biography of Elizabeth Taylor (1962), and as J Morgan Cunningham created Comfort Station (1970), "inspired by the works of Arthur Hailey" and including on its cover an endorsement, "I wish I had written this book!", from none other than Donald E Westlake.
While Westlake was in London working with Frears on The Grifters, I interviewed him. He was probably fed up with being asked about the Parker novels, by then ancient history, but he patiently put up with my queries. Not that he had much new to say about the books; he did not know why their tone was so much bleaker than anything else he had written, and he had little inclination to provide any kind of psychological or political explanation.
He said that he had no intention of returning to Parker, who had made his last appearance in Butcher's Moon (1974). In 1997, however, encouraged by the publisher and bookseller Otto Penzler, he resurrected Parker, and Richard Stark, for the novel Comeback. Three further Parker novels followed, no doubt simply to prove that Westlake could still do dark.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n15937.jpg http://violentworldofparker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/greeneagle1967.jpg http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/01Cs8rW28idQm/340x.jpg
He certainly had little else left to prove. He received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for The Grifters. Although he did not win, there were many who thought that he should have. In 1993 the Mystery Writers of America bestowed on him the well-earned title of Grand Master.
His last novel, Get Real, is due to appear in April. To the end he wrote everything on one of two manual typewriters, because, he said, he needed "something that fights back".
He was married three times. He is survived by his wife and sometime collaborator, the gardening writer Abby Adams, four sons, two stepdaughters, a stepson and four grandchildren.
• Donald Edwin Westlake, writer, born 12 July 1933; died 31 December 2008
http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com/2009/01/donald-westlake-in-memory-of-con-man.html
DONALD WESTLAKE: IN MEMORY OF A CON MAN
Michael Carlson
Most obituaries of Donald Westlake concentrated, rightly, on his prolific output, more than 100 novels and an equal number of short stories, as well as some exceptional screenplays. Westlake was one of the last of a dying breed, the generation which followed the great pulp magazine writers, and made their livings pounding out paperback originals on manual typewriters. For Westlake, the habit was so ingrained he never gave up his typewriters; he once explained to me that, although he stockpiled old machines to cannibalize for parts, the real difficulty was finding ribbons, which he went through at a prodigious rate.
http://violentworldofparker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/53-cutie-by-donald-westlake.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dvv8lzRjbLk/SSDfA8AwdyI/AAAAAAAAAW0/d2rC9E02QVs/s320/albums.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_tznXDhSf3gI/SNP06hb176I/AAAAAAAAArQ/XHbA-yJv4vk/s320/stark.jpg http://img.auctiva.com/imgdata/3/4/6/8/9/1/webimg/242994939_tp.jpg
I met Westlake a couple of times; the last was a wonderful lunch thrown by Quercus at Chez Elena in Charlotte Street, where Don and Abby were literally the life of the party. I started thinking how that Donald Westlake was the antithesis of his Richard Stark alter ego, in much the same way that the Dortmunder books are a reflection in a fun house mirror of the Parker novels, and then it occurred to me that a central theme of Westlake's work has always been human frailty. His characters are done in, or nearly so, by their weaknesses, their foibles, and in his plots, which he basically made up as he went along, letting the characters find their own ways through situations which usually arise out of those flaws. Then they generally run up against people with more serious flaws, most commonly greed, and things accelerate from there. 'You never really know what you're doing,' he said to me, and I think that applies to most of his characters too.
Even Parker, who wants to know, and control, everything. In fact, Parker is a successful professional thief precisely because he has none of those human failings, the reason for that being he has very little in the way of human feeling, especially in the first series (the redux is a somewhat kinder, gentler sociopath), and he takes advantage of, or takes revenge on, those who do have them.
Like many great comic writers, Westlake's humour had dark roots. The best comedians see the world as a noirish place, and find it funny. Westlake described the Parker books as growing out of an image he had of a man walking across the George Washington Bridge, the feeling of being an outsider he'd experienced himself coming to New York during a peripatetic youth. When he said that, it reminded me of the somewhat lost hero of 'Up Your Banners', a straightforward comic novel he wrote around the student protest movement in the late 1960s, and Westlake loved being reminded of that. He made the connection to Parker himself, saying he'd introduced Grofield, the actor and part-time thief, to the Parker novels in order to have a little comic relief. Grofield spun off into a few books of his own, and at about the same time Westlake, as Tucker Coe, wrote five novels about the ex-cop Mitch Tobin, whose existential angst in expressed by his working on a wall in his backyard. It was as if Tobin were the antithesis of Grofield. Remember too that the opening of the Grofield novel Blackbird, with its failed armored car robbery, was used as the opening of the Parker novel Slayground which was also made into a British movie starring Peter Coyote, Robbie Coltrane, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite actress.
It's tempting to concentrate on the playfulness of Westlake's writing: how he and Joe Gores inserted their characters into each other's books, how Grofield pops up in The Hot Rock (still one of the great heist movies, and one of Robert Redford's best roles, with Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel stealing every scene they can from him) or how in Jimmy The Kid the Dortmunder gang use a fictional Parker novel, Child Heist, as the blueprint for their own kidnappingwas while contemplating how one can write the words 'fictional Parker novel' with a straight face that it finally occurred to me that what Donald Westlake actually was, what made him such a treasure as a writer. Westlake was a con man, a first-class con man, and we readers were the marks.
This is no great revelation. Go to Westlake's website and you're greeted with a quote 'I believe my subject is bewilderment' and then another one 'but I could be wrong'. He even wrote a novel called 'God Save The Mark', which won the first of his three Edgars. When he wrote an Arthur Hailey-parody paperback original, Comfort Station, as J. Morgan Cunningham, the book appeared with a blurb saying 'I wish I had written this book'. Signed Donald E Westlake!
Think about it. Westlake started out working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, writing critiques of manuscripts sent in, with a fee, by hopeful would-be writers from across America.
Meredith found some great wordsmiths there. Evan Hunter, of course, like Westlake, would establish a second identity for a different sort of book. Lawrence Block would, like Westlake, move between hard-boiled and comic crime. This crowd included Brian Garfield and John Jakes, who would become best-sellers. All of them would write to order under multiple pseudonyms. Some, like Robert Silverberg, could turn out perfectly-typed manuscripts as quickly as they could type. These guys would play poker every week, and practice their con games. They even wrote one novel as a joint enterprise to help one of them out, one player sitting out and writing as chapter while the rest played on, then another sitting out, and so on.
Meredith, as their agent, would get them bulk contracts for paperback originals and contract the work out. This included a huge number of adult novels, of which Westlake claimed to have written 28, though others put the number at 39, or more. He used the name Alan Marshall (or Marsh) for most of them, wrote some with Block who was writing as Sheldon Lord, but also let other writers use the name to sell books published under imprints like Bedside, Nightstand, and the probably unintentionally punning Midwood. It was the same publisher who printed Jim Thompson's later novels, including The Grifters, for which Westlake won another Edgar, and an Oscar nomination. He described writing these books by doing exactly one chapter, fifteen pages a day, for ten days, and figured out that at $900 a pop, he was earning $22.50 an hour. In the Dortmunder novel Bank Shot (filmed with George C Scott lisping for reasons best-known to him) Kelp hits a car whose trunk is filled with adult novels, and all the titles Westlake lists as being visible are ones he wrote.
Westlake then wrote a very funny novel, Adios Scheherazade, about a man who writes porn, cashing in one more time on that genre which is probably the biggest con of all, when you think of con-men as giving the mark what he thinks he wants. I wonder if one of the reasons Westlake wasn't more successful in Hollywood was that those guys never really know what it is they want. But you look at his best work, like the screenplay of The Grifters, or the original screenplay for The Stepfather, or his adaptation of his own novel Cops & Robbers, or the Hammett adaptation Fly Paper (despite some odd casting) for Showtime's Fallen Angels series. Or maybe it was because he simply liked sitting at the typewriter and being the master of his own destiny.
http://violentworldofparker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/slayground1984.jpg http://img.infibeam.com/img/e7018901/035/7/9780446677035.jpg http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n4/n23768.jpg
But I can't escape this sense of Westlake carrying on the con as the reader turns the pages, and I think that's why the Parker books are so special, and may remain the focus of critical attention on Westlake's career. Critics tend to value seriousness over humour, and Richard Stark's books were written with such a taut prose, especially considering the early Sixties milieu in which they first appeared, that they jumped out at you. He was performing that same con, keeping your attention focused, but with such economy that the story-telling was subsumed totally in the force of the story. I remember being transfixed by them when I discovered them, somewhat bizarrely, in the library at Dickinson College, where I found myself teaching. I've written at length for both Shots and Crime Time on the film adaptations of the Parker books, although Point Blank remains a classic film, and was Westlake's own favourite, I remain exceptionally fond of John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall the screen's best Parker (though, like all the adaptations, not called Parker). It is a small and perfectly formed crime film that deserves a higher reputation.
Westlake's reputation, on the other hand, has probably never been higher. The early Parker books are being reprinted by the University of Chicago, which says something about American academe as well as the quality of Westlake's writing. Those fabulously entertaining Sixties novels are re-appearing, and as for the early adult stuff, well, let's say university presses need not worry.
But anyone who knew Donald Westlake, even casually, was aware of how full of life he was. You imagine someone who writes seven days a week as being an introvert, but he was anything but. He died on New Year's Eve, as he and Abby were about to go out, and although that is tragic, I see something touching in the thought that he lived his life at a full pace until he just suddenly stopped.
Writers never die, of course, as long as they are being read. And I believe Donald Westlake will go on being read for a very long time. Readers love being conned, after all, and who could do it better?
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-westlake8-2009jan08,0,2232963.story
Hollywood rarely did Donald Westlake justice
The late Donald E. Westlake wrote his books as if for the screen, and many made it there, but Hollywood just didn't seem to get it.
By Scott Timberg
January 8, 2009
One of the enigmas in the long and rich career of Donald E. Westlake was that this author of more than 100 novels, many of them popular, accessible and plot-driven works of crime fiction, both grim and comic, received such a spotty handling by Hollywood.
Roughly two dozen films emerged from Westlake's novels or involved screenplay work by the man himself. But only two -- 1967's "Point Blank," based on the first novel he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark, and Westlake's adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Grifters" (1990) -- are clear standouts. Both films, oddly, were done by British directors (John Boorman and Stephen Frears, respectively) well out of the Hollywood mainstream.
"When you read the books, your superficial sense of them is that they're totally movie-ready," said Terrence Rafferty, a veteran film critic who's written for the New Yorker and GQ. But adaptations of Westlake's work, he said, range mostly from not very good to the "train wreck" that is 2001's "What's the Worst That Can Happen?" and the "absolutely dreadful" case of 1974's "Bank Shot."
Otto Penzler, Westlake's longtime friend and publisher, calls the author's Hollywood career "erratic." He sees it as "mostly bad luck. There were a couple of good films, but they were mostly lousy." Penzler has a special disdain for the 1982 Gary Coleman vehicle "Jimmy the Kid."
The issue of Westlake's Hollywood legacy is worth pondering now, after the novelist's death, at age 75, of a heart attack on New Year's Eve. Next week, the first-ever film adaptation of Westlake's work, "Made in USA," opens at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles, more than four decades after it was made.
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And that movie highlights another irony: The film, well regarded by the few who have seen it, was directed by Jean-Luc Godard, who is, of course, a Frenchman.
It makes you wonder, Why was it so hard for Hollywood to get Westlake right?
So many attempts
Westlake, who spent most of his life in and around New York City, was admired not just by noir-heads like Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino, but by highbrow novelists like Ireland's John Banville as well. Over a career that spanned five decades, he wrote all kinds of novels, including science fiction and espionage, under a host of pen names to mask his prodigiousness.
But Westlake's major work breaks down into two main series: The comic-heist novels he wrote under his own name, featuring the luckless protagonist John Dortmunder, and the grim, austere Parker novels -- written under the pseudonym Richard Stark -- about an ultra-violent, emotionless hitman with his own rigid code of personal ethics.
"They're so plot-driven," said Penzler of the Parker books. "And what a great character -- there are very few professional crooks in literature who you don't relate too but you sort of root for, because he has this kind of bizarre integrity."
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Many film adaptations of Westlake's novels, both in the U.S. and Europe, have come from the Stark novels. The writer himself described those books, which began with 1962's "The Hunter," as "stripped down and bleak, no adverbs. . . . The name will be 'Stark' to remind me what we're doing here."
Godard's "Made in USA," which uses the Stark novel "The Jugger," about Parker looking into the death of a safecracker, as a jumping-off point, was still close enough to the book that the film was legally tied up for decades over a permission dispute. Despite being the first Westlake adaptation, the 1966 film is only just now -- thanks to the author's agreement -- getting an American release.
It also stands to date as perhaps the most eccentric film ever made from the novelist's work, in part because an actress (Anna Karina) plays the ultra-macho Parker. The film follows her as she seeks answers about the death of her lover in a French-speaking Atlantic City populated by philosophical hoods and singing waifs.
According to actor László Szabó, who plays a corrupt cop in "Made in USA," Westlake's novel was not on the actors' minds much during the shoot. "Jean-Luc just gave us eight to 10 pages of writing," which the actor thinks ensured that the author would not overpower the auteur.
"It was an oddball film even for Godard," Westlake told Variety in 2004.
That movie was followed a year later by Boorman's "Point Blank," which concerns Parker -- here called "Walker" -- rising virtually from the dead after being betrayed by his wife and partner. The next Stark film was the 1968 blaxploitation movie "The Split" -- appropriate since some of Stark's earliest supporters were black men who may have responded to the protagonist's outsider status -- starring NFL great Jim Brown.
In a filmed interview called "The Hunter," the author pointed out that three very different actors played his antihero in the first three films -- Karina in Pop art dresses for "Made in USA," Lee Marvin in a '60s suit for "Point Blank" and the rugged Brown for "The Split."
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As Westlake recalled: "A friend of mine said, 'So far, Parker's been played by a white guy, a black guy and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.' "
For many, it was Marvin who captured Parker's style perfectly. "Lee Marvin was the perfect Westlake actor," Rafferty said. "Impassive and a serious man." (Boorman, oddly, claimed never to have read the novel, "The Hunter," that his celebrated film was based on.)
It's the role Mel Gibson played in "Payback," the 1999 Brian Helgeland movie also based on "The Hunter," a film that many thought made Parker (who in the film is called "Porter") seem too sympathetic -- something that doesn't work with this kind of amoral killer.
Westlake himself, interestingly, called Robert Duvall, who played Parker (called "Macklin") in "The Outfit," the 1973 adaptation of the third Stark novel, "perhaps the closest to Parker. What Lee Marvin did was a wonderful destroyed Lee Marvin. What Robert Duvall did was a wonderful, terse, taciturn Parker."
http://violentworldofparker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/outfit_poster2.jpg
His screenwriting
Westlake's other series protagonist, Dortmunder, hasn't fared much better on the big screen; the one exception being the Robert Redford-starring, William Goldman-adapted "The Hot Rock" from 1972. According to Rafferty, part of the problem is that Hollywood filmmakers were often too quick to soften the "cool, very dry, fatalistic" Westlake tone.
Penzler, who is also the editor of "The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps," has another theory on why adaptations of Westlake weren't more successful.
"The screenwriter they should have hired for all these was Westlake himself. Look at what he did with 'The Grifters.' "
But Westlake's screenwriting career was a mixed success at best. He wrote the well-regarded 1987 horror film "The Stepfather," about a homicidal suburban dad, starring "Lost's" Terry O'Quinn. "The Grifters' " critical and box-office success and Westlake's Oscar nomination for his work in the film made him popular in Hollywood, but his movie career never caught fire. He worked on the James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies" but did not receive screenwriting credit, and he co-wrote the script for 2005's "Ripley Under Ground."
The author said: "If I write a novel, I'm a god. If I write a screenplay, I'm a minor deity."
"He was a total realist," said Penzler, who said that Westlake loved watching movies and did not expect Hollywood to be a cakewalk. But he was not the kind of writer who liked setting his books aside for long to work on a film. "At the end of the day, he was a novelist."
RIP to one of the best-loved and least-celebrated Great American Writers. This absolutely sucks.
http://www.efanzines.com/EK/eI13/W0008C.jpg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/09/obituary-donald-westlake
Obituary: Donald Westlake
Nick Kimberley / Friday 9 January 2009
A sly wit surfaced repeatedly throughout the long literary career of Donald E Westlake, who has died aged 75 from an apparent heart attack. Under various pseudonyms he produced around 100 novels - Westlake himself lost track of the figure - many short stories and at least eight screenplays.
His speciality was the caper novel, in which a criminal or a gang sets about relieving an institution or an individual of money, property or relations, usually to be foiled, not by the police, but by a comic combination of fate and their own ineffectuality. His character John Archibald Dortmunder, hero of more than a dozen novels, was the embodiment of the likably hopeless criminal, forced to commit the same crime over and over again until he gets it right.
It was in 1962, with half a dozen books already under his belt, that he assumed the identity of Richard Stark for The Hunter. This was his first novel to feature the criminal anti-hero Parker - who never acquired a first name.
In essence the 23 novels featuring Parker were capers, although they were not in the least funny. Instead they were dark, bitter accounts of the savage life enjoyed by a criminal who knows no fear and respects no morality but his own. They do not provide any kind of psychological profile of their central figure; instead they bring the reader face to face with an automaton who acts rather than thinks, and whose deeds are invariably self-serving and violent.
The Parker novels are Westlake's greatest achievement, and they retain a dedicated following, but it was the cinema that gave them their widest circulation. The most famous film derived from the series is John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), in which Lee Marvin played up Parker's vicious solipsism. The film renamed the character Walker; in Playback, the 1999 Mel Gibson remake, he became Porter.
Jean-Luc Godard took the Parker novel The Jugger as the basis for his 1966 movie Made in USA, but since he failed to give due credit, Westlake sued and prevented the film being released in the US. Several other films based on Westlake's fiction locate a brash nihilism that the author did not seek to deny.
Westlake himself wrote a number of Hollywood screenplays. The finest was the adaptation he made of Jim Thompson's novel The Grifters, which Stephen Frears filmed in 1990. Between them Westlake and Frears uncovered something profound that Thompson's novel, not one of his best, barely hinted at. The result was a movie that had the power of Greek tragedy while remaining true to its pulp fiction roots.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n11/n59104.jpg http://i21.ebayimg.com/05/i/001/31/cf/ce21_1.JPG http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0843953578.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
In any directory of crime fiction pseudonyms, there should be a special place reserved for Westlake. He was christened Donald Edwin Westlake, initials which prompted the schoolboy nickname "Dewdrip", and perhaps persuaded him that noms de plume were a good idea. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Yonkers and Albany in New York state, he attended several colleges, graduating from none of them.
His first novel, The Mercenaries, was published in 1960 under the name Donald E Westlake. Then he filleted his given names for "Edwin West", which he used for four further novels published in 1961 and 1962 and blessed with such titles as Campus Doll and Young and Innocent. Then came the Richard Stark persona and Parker.
Other "false" identities followed, notably Tucker Coe (five novels) and Samuel Holt (four). As Alan Marsh, or Marshall, he wrote mildly salacious pornography in the 1960s. The names were the shared property of several authors, including the crime novelist Lawrence Block, a friend and occasional collaborator, and it is unclear which novels bearing the names are Westlake's work. In later life he rarely spoke about such torrid fantasies as Apprentice Virgin (1962) and Bed of Shame (1964), but it seems unlikely that he was ashamed of them.
Nor does the roll-call of pseudonyms end there. As John B Allan he wrote a biography of Elizabeth Taylor (1962), and as J Morgan Cunningham created Comfort Station (1970), "inspired by the works of Arthur Hailey" and including on its cover an endorsement, "I wish I had written this book!", from none other than Donald E Westlake.
While Westlake was in London working with Frears on The Grifters, I interviewed him. He was probably fed up with being asked about the Parker novels, by then ancient history, but he patiently put up with my queries. Not that he had much new to say about the books; he did not know why their tone was so much bleaker than anything else he had written, and he had little inclination to provide any kind of psychological or political explanation.
He said that he had no intention of returning to Parker, who had made his last appearance in Butcher's Moon (1974). In 1997, however, encouraged by the publisher and bookseller Otto Penzler, he resurrected Parker, and Richard Stark, for the novel Comeback. Three further Parker novels followed, no doubt simply to prove that Westlake could still do dark.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n15937.jpg http://violentworldofparker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/greeneagle1967.jpg http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/01Cs8rW28idQm/340x.jpg
He certainly had little else left to prove. He received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for The Grifters. Although he did not win, there were many who thought that he should have. In 1993 the Mystery Writers of America bestowed on him the well-earned title of Grand Master.
His last novel, Get Real, is due to appear in April. To the end he wrote everything on one of two manual typewriters, because, he said, he needed "something that fights back".
He was married three times. He is survived by his wife and sometime collaborator, the gardening writer Abby Adams, four sons, two stepdaughters, a stepson and four grandchildren.
• Donald Edwin Westlake, writer, born 12 July 1933; died 31 December 2008
http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com/2009/01/donald-westlake-in-memory-of-con-man.html
DONALD WESTLAKE: IN MEMORY OF A CON MAN
Michael Carlson
Most obituaries of Donald Westlake concentrated, rightly, on his prolific output, more than 100 novels and an equal number of short stories, as well as some exceptional screenplays. Westlake was one of the last of a dying breed, the generation which followed the great pulp magazine writers, and made their livings pounding out paperback originals on manual typewriters. For Westlake, the habit was so ingrained he never gave up his typewriters; he once explained to me that, although he stockpiled old machines to cannibalize for parts, the real difficulty was finding ribbons, which he went through at a prodigious rate.
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I met Westlake a couple of times; the last was a wonderful lunch thrown by Quercus at Chez Elena in Charlotte Street, where Don and Abby were literally the life of the party. I started thinking how that Donald Westlake was the antithesis of his Richard Stark alter ego, in much the same way that the Dortmunder books are a reflection in a fun house mirror of the Parker novels, and then it occurred to me that a central theme of Westlake's work has always been human frailty. His characters are done in, or nearly so, by their weaknesses, their foibles, and in his plots, which he basically made up as he went along, letting the characters find their own ways through situations which usually arise out of those flaws. Then they generally run up against people with more serious flaws, most commonly greed, and things accelerate from there. 'You never really know what you're doing,' he said to me, and I think that applies to most of his characters too.
Even Parker, who wants to know, and control, everything. In fact, Parker is a successful professional thief precisely because he has none of those human failings, the reason for that being he has very little in the way of human feeling, especially in the first series (the redux is a somewhat kinder, gentler sociopath), and he takes advantage of, or takes revenge on, those who do have them.
Like many great comic writers, Westlake's humour had dark roots. The best comedians see the world as a noirish place, and find it funny. Westlake described the Parker books as growing out of an image he had of a man walking across the George Washington Bridge, the feeling of being an outsider he'd experienced himself coming to New York during a peripatetic youth. When he said that, it reminded me of the somewhat lost hero of 'Up Your Banners', a straightforward comic novel he wrote around the student protest movement in the late 1960s, and Westlake loved being reminded of that. He made the connection to Parker himself, saying he'd introduced Grofield, the actor and part-time thief, to the Parker novels in order to have a little comic relief. Grofield spun off into a few books of his own, and at about the same time Westlake, as Tucker Coe, wrote five novels about the ex-cop Mitch Tobin, whose existential angst in expressed by his working on a wall in his backyard. It was as if Tobin were the antithesis of Grofield. Remember too that the opening of the Grofield novel Blackbird, with its failed armored car robbery, was used as the opening of the Parker novel Slayground which was also made into a British movie starring Peter Coyote, Robbie Coltrane, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite actress.
It's tempting to concentrate on the playfulness of Westlake's writing: how he and Joe Gores inserted their characters into each other's books, how Grofield pops up in The Hot Rock (still one of the great heist movies, and one of Robert Redford's best roles, with Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel stealing every scene they can from him) or how in Jimmy The Kid the Dortmunder gang use a fictional Parker novel, Child Heist, as the blueprint for their own kidnappingwas while contemplating how one can write the words 'fictional Parker novel' with a straight face that it finally occurred to me that what Donald Westlake actually was, what made him such a treasure as a writer. Westlake was a con man, a first-class con man, and we readers were the marks.
This is no great revelation. Go to Westlake's website and you're greeted with a quote 'I believe my subject is bewilderment' and then another one 'but I could be wrong'. He even wrote a novel called 'God Save The Mark', which won the first of his three Edgars. When he wrote an Arthur Hailey-parody paperback original, Comfort Station, as J. Morgan Cunningham, the book appeared with a blurb saying 'I wish I had written this book'. Signed Donald E Westlake!
Think about it. Westlake started out working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, writing critiques of manuscripts sent in, with a fee, by hopeful would-be writers from across America.
Meredith found some great wordsmiths there. Evan Hunter, of course, like Westlake, would establish a second identity for a different sort of book. Lawrence Block would, like Westlake, move between hard-boiled and comic crime. This crowd included Brian Garfield and John Jakes, who would become best-sellers. All of them would write to order under multiple pseudonyms. Some, like Robert Silverberg, could turn out perfectly-typed manuscripts as quickly as they could type. These guys would play poker every week, and practice their con games. They even wrote one novel as a joint enterprise to help one of them out, one player sitting out and writing as chapter while the rest played on, then another sitting out, and so on.
Meredith, as their agent, would get them bulk contracts for paperback originals and contract the work out. This included a huge number of adult novels, of which Westlake claimed to have written 28, though others put the number at 39, or more. He used the name Alan Marshall (or Marsh) for most of them, wrote some with Block who was writing as Sheldon Lord, but also let other writers use the name to sell books published under imprints like Bedside, Nightstand, and the probably unintentionally punning Midwood. It was the same publisher who printed Jim Thompson's later novels, including The Grifters, for which Westlake won another Edgar, and an Oscar nomination. He described writing these books by doing exactly one chapter, fifteen pages a day, for ten days, and figured out that at $900 a pop, he was earning $22.50 an hour. In the Dortmunder novel Bank Shot (filmed with George C Scott lisping for reasons best-known to him) Kelp hits a car whose trunk is filled with adult novels, and all the titles Westlake lists as being visible are ones he wrote.
Westlake then wrote a very funny novel, Adios Scheherazade, about a man who writes porn, cashing in one more time on that genre which is probably the biggest con of all, when you think of con-men as giving the mark what he thinks he wants. I wonder if one of the reasons Westlake wasn't more successful in Hollywood was that those guys never really know what it is they want. But you look at his best work, like the screenplay of The Grifters, or the original screenplay for The Stepfather, or his adaptation of his own novel Cops & Robbers, or the Hammett adaptation Fly Paper (despite some odd casting) for Showtime's Fallen Angels series. Or maybe it was because he simply liked sitting at the typewriter and being the master of his own destiny.
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But I can't escape this sense of Westlake carrying on the con as the reader turns the pages, and I think that's why the Parker books are so special, and may remain the focus of critical attention on Westlake's career. Critics tend to value seriousness over humour, and Richard Stark's books were written with such a taut prose, especially considering the early Sixties milieu in which they first appeared, that they jumped out at you. He was performing that same con, keeping your attention focused, but with such economy that the story-telling was subsumed totally in the force of the story. I remember being transfixed by them when I discovered them, somewhat bizarrely, in the library at Dickinson College, where I found myself teaching. I've written at length for both Shots and Crime Time on the film adaptations of the Parker books, although Point Blank remains a classic film, and was Westlake's own favourite, I remain exceptionally fond of John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall the screen's best Parker (though, like all the adaptations, not called Parker). It is a small and perfectly formed crime film that deserves a higher reputation.
Westlake's reputation, on the other hand, has probably never been higher. The early Parker books are being reprinted by the University of Chicago, which says something about American academe as well as the quality of Westlake's writing. Those fabulously entertaining Sixties novels are re-appearing, and as for the early adult stuff, well, let's say university presses need not worry.
But anyone who knew Donald Westlake, even casually, was aware of how full of life he was. You imagine someone who writes seven days a week as being an introvert, but he was anything but. He died on New Year's Eve, as he and Abby were about to go out, and although that is tragic, I see something touching in the thought that he lived his life at a full pace until he just suddenly stopped.
Writers never die, of course, as long as they are being read. And I believe Donald Westlake will go on being read for a very long time. Readers love being conned, after all, and who could do it better?
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-westlake8-2009jan08,0,2232963.story
Hollywood rarely did Donald Westlake justice
The late Donald E. Westlake wrote his books as if for the screen, and many made it there, but Hollywood just didn't seem to get it.
By Scott Timberg
January 8, 2009
One of the enigmas in the long and rich career of Donald E. Westlake was that this author of more than 100 novels, many of them popular, accessible and plot-driven works of crime fiction, both grim and comic, received such a spotty handling by Hollywood.
Roughly two dozen films emerged from Westlake's novels or involved screenplay work by the man himself. But only two -- 1967's "Point Blank," based on the first novel he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark, and Westlake's adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Grifters" (1990) -- are clear standouts. Both films, oddly, were done by British directors (John Boorman and Stephen Frears, respectively) well out of the Hollywood mainstream.
"When you read the books, your superficial sense of them is that they're totally movie-ready," said Terrence Rafferty, a veteran film critic who's written for the New Yorker and GQ. But adaptations of Westlake's work, he said, range mostly from not very good to the "train wreck" that is 2001's "What's the Worst That Can Happen?" and the "absolutely dreadful" case of 1974's "Bank Shot."
Otto Penzler, Westlake's longtime friend and publisher, calls the author's Hollywood career "erratic." He sees it as "mostly bad luck. There were a couple of good films, but they were mostly lousy." Penzler has a special disdain for the 1982 Gary Coleman vehicle "Jimmy the Kid."
The issue of Westlake's Hollywood legacy is worth pondering now, after the novelist's death, at age 75, of a heart attack on New Year's Eve. Next week, the first-ever film adaptation of Westlake's work, "Made in USA," opens at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles, more than four decades after it was made.
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And that movie highlights another irony: The film, well regarded by the few who have seen it, was directed by Jean-Luc Godard, who is, of course, a Frenchman.
It makes you wonder, Why was it so hard for Hollywood to get Westlake right?
So many attempts
Westlake, who spent most of his life in and around New York City, was admired not just by noir-heads like Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino, but by highbrow novelists like Ireland's John Banville as well. Over a career that spanned five decades, he wrote all kinds of novels, including science fiction and espionage, under a host of pen names to mask his prodigiousness.
But Westlake's major work breaks down into two main series: The comic-heist novels he wrote under his own name, featuring the luckless protagonist John Dortmunder, and the grim, austere Parker novels -- written under the pseudonym Richard Stark -- about an ultra-violent, emotionless hitman with his own rigid code of personal ethics.
"They're so plot-driven," said Penzler of the Parker books. "And what a great character -- there are very few professional crooks in literature who you don't relate too but you sort of root for, because he has this kind of bizarre integrity."
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Many film adaptations of Westlake's novels, both in the U.S. and Europe, have come from the Stark novels. The writer himself described those books, which began with 1962's "The Hunter," as "stripped down and bleak, no adverbs. . . . The name will be 'Stark' to remind me what we're doing here."
Godard's "Made in USA," which uses the Stark novel "The Jugger," about Parker looking into the death of a safecracker, as a jumping-off point, was still close enough to the book that the film was legally tied up for decades over a permission dispute. Despite being the first Westlake adaptation, the 1966 film is only just now -- thanks to the author's agreement -- getting an American release.
It also stands to date as perhaps the most eccentric film ever made from the novelist's work, in part because an actress (Anna Karina) plays the ultra-macho Parker. The film follows her as she seeks answers about the death of her lover in a French-speaking Atlantic City populated by philosophical hoods and singing waifs.
According to actor László Szabó, who plays a corrupt cop in "Made in USA," Westlake's novel was not on the actors' minds much during the shoot. "Jean-Luc just gave us eight to 10 pages of writing," which the actor thinks ensured that the author would not overpower the auteur.
"It was an oddball film even for Godard," Westlake told Variety in 2004.
That movie was followed a year later by Boorman's "Point Blank," which concerns Parker -- here called "Walker" -- rising virtually from the dead after being betrayed by his wife and partner. The next Stark film was the 1968 blaxploitation movie "The Split" -- appropriate since some of Stark's earliest supporters were black men who may have responded to the protagonist's outsider status -- starring NFL great Jim Brown.
In a filmed interview called "The Hunter," the author pointed out that three very different actors played his antihero in the first three films -- Karina in Pop art dresses for "Made in USA," Lee Marvin in a '60s suit for "Point Blank" and the rugged Brown for "The Split."
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As Westlake recalled: "A friend of mine said, 'So far, Parker's been played by a white guy, a black guy and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.' "
For many, it was Marvin who captured Parker's style perfectly. "Lee Marvin was the perfect Westlake actor," Rafferty said. "Impassive and a serious man." (Boorman, oddly, claimed never to have read the novel, "The Hunter," that his celebrated film was based on.)
It's the role Mel Gibson played in "Payback," the 1999 Brian Helgeland movie also based on "The Hunter," a film that many thought made Parker (who in the film is called "Porter") seem too sympathetic -- something that doesn't work with this kind of amoral killer.
Westlake himself, interestingly, called Robert Duvall, who played Parker (called "Macklin") in "The Outfit," the 1973 adaptation of the third Stark novel, "perhaps the closest to Parker. What Lee Marvin did was a wonderful destroyed Lee Marvin. What Robert Duvall did was a wonderful, terse, taciturn Parker."
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His screenwriting
Westlake's other series protagonist, Dortmunder, hasn't fared much better on the big screen; the one exception being the Robert Redford-starring, William Goldman-adapted "The Hot Rock" from 1972. According to Rafferty, part of the problem is that Hollywood filmmakers were often too quick to soften the "cool, very dry, fatalistic" Westlake tone.
Penzler, who is also the editor of "The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps," has another theory on why adaptations of Westlake weren't more successful.
"The screenwriter they should have hired for all these was Westlake himself. Look at what he did with 'The Grifters.' "
But Westlake's screenwriting career was a mixed success at best. He wrote the well-regarded 1987 horror film "The Stepfather," about a homicidal suburban dad, starring "Lost's" Terry O'Quinn. "The Grifters' " critical and box-office success and Westlake's Oscar nomination for his work in the film made him popular in Hollywood, but his movie career never caught fire. He worked on the James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies" but did not receive screenwriting credit, and he co-wrote the script for 2005's "Ripley Under Ground."
The author said: "If I write a novel, I'm a god. If I write a screenplay, I'm a minor deity."
"He was a total realist," said Penzler, who said that Westlake loved watching movies and did not expect Hollywood to be a cakewalk. But he was not the kind of writer who liked setting his books aside for long to work on a film. "At the end of the day, he was a novelist."