Collected Stories

About Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake was born on July 12, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York.

A former U.S. Air Force pilot and one time actor, Donald Westlake has become the writer most associated with tales of organized crime. Indeed, in story after story, he has demonstrated his particular belief that crime is actually not very different from any other type of business enterprise-and the intelligent criminal is just, one more example of ‘Organization Man’.

Westlake wrote constantly in his teens, and after 200 rejections, his first short story sale was in 1954. Sporadic short story sales followed over the next few years, while Westlake attended Champlain College of Plattsburgh, New York (now defunct) and Harpur College in Binghamton, New York.

In 1959, Donald Westlake moved to New York City, initially to work for a literary agency while writing on the side. Buy by 1960, he was writing full-time. His first novel under his own name, The Mercenaries, was published in 1960; over the next 48 years, Westlake published a variety of novels and short stories under his own name and over a dozen pseudonyms.

He was married three times, the final time to Abigail Westlake (also known as Abby Adams Westlake and Abby Adams), a writer of nonfiction (her two published books are An Uncommon Scold and The Gardener’s Gripe Book). The couple moved out of New York City to Ancram in upstate New York in 1990. Abby Westlake is a well-regarded gardener, and the Westlake garden has frequently been opened for public viewing in the summer.

In Westlake’s early novels like Killing Time (1961), about the running of a corrupt upstate New York town, he dealt with organized crime from the inside with great objectivity; but over the years elements of humor and the absurd have crept into his work in the shape of bungled robberies and inept confidence tricks.

In 1962, by way of contrast, he adopted the pen name Richard Stark and started a series of novels about Parker, a cold-blooded professional thief, who was later transferred to the screen in Point Blank (1967).

Not content with this, Westlake invented a second major character, Mitch Tobin, a guilt-ridden former New York cop turned private eye, whose adventures appear under the name Tucker Coe.

More recently still, he has begun writing a number of capers about a group of inept thieves led by criminal manqué John Archibald Dortmunder.

Donald Westlake was known for the great ingenuity of his plots and the audacity of his gimmicks. His writing and dialogue are lively. His main characters are fully rounded, believable, and clever. Westlake’s most famous characters include the hard-boiled criminal Parker (appearing in fiction under the Richard Stark pseudonym) and Parker’s comic flip-side John Dortmunder. Mr. Westlake was quoted as saying that he originally intended what became The Hot Rock to be a straightforward Parker novel, but “It kept turning funny,” and thus became the first John Dortmunder novel.

Most of Donald Westlake’s novels are set in New York City. In each of the Dortmunder novels, there is typically a detailed foray somewhere through the city. He wrote just two non-fiction books: Under an English Heaven, regarding the unlikely 1967 Anguillan “revolution”, and a biography of Elizabeth Taylor.

Westlake was an occasional contributor to science fiction fanzines such as Xero; and used Xero as a venue for a harsh announcement that he was leaving the science fiction field.

For this remarkable display of virtuosity, Donald Westlake has won numerous awards, including three Edgars and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters.

Donald E. Westlake died of a heart attack on Wednesday, December 31, 2008. He was 75.