The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

Donald E. Westlake: An Interview

Donald E. Westlake is too complex a writer to characterize simply. In his twenty-five-year career, he has published upwards of sixty books. As Richard Stark, he wrote hard-boiled adventure novels about a tough professional thief named Parker; as Tucker Coe, he wrote about a neurotic ex-cop struggling to overcome his disgraceful dismissal from the force; under his own name, he has written a series of stories about a soft-boiled homicide detective named Abe Levine, who can never get used to death. Westlake is perhaps best known for his novels about John Dortmunder, a bewildered burglar who approaches his work with resignation while Westlake exposes him to the humiliations of comic circumstance.

Regardless of the pseudonym or the series character he employs, Donald E. Westlake is among the most admired writers in the field. We can only endorse the observation of Francis M. Nevins that “when the history of contemporary suspense fiction is compiled, he is likely to be recognized as one of its new masters.”

NBM: Christopher Porterfield in Time described you as “a softspoken, owlish ectomorph who resembles most of his protagonists.” Is that accurate?

Westlake: No, I don’t think so. When I started writing, my heroes tended to be older than I was, and now they’re younger, so I guess they just sort of stayed at that age of adventure. To some extent, every character is out of what’s in your own brain. I won’t do this a lot, but I’m going to paraphrase a famous writer. Aldous Huxley said that every character in every book is some part of the writer. He said the reason that he had never been able to create a character in any of his books who was driven by a need for money is that he’d never had a need for money. That doesn’t mean that if you write about a mass murderer, you are a mass murderer, but that some of the emotions or attitudes of that character are in you. In terms of behavior, in the Dortmunder books there is a feeling that things more often than not are not going to work out, but you should do the work anyway and enjoy it as much as you can, even if disaster is at the end. That’s something that I’ve shared with Dortmunder. And a kind of inane hopefulness, I share with Kelp.

NBM: You’ve used at least three pseudonyms: Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, and Curt Clark — those in addition to your own name. Why the pseudonyms, especially when it’s no secret that Richard Stark, for example, is really Donald E. Westlake and, in fact, the books are even marketed as Donald E. Westlake novels written under the name Richard Stark?

Westlake: That’s now. During the twelve years that the Parker series was being written, I resisted very much being linked with those books. Now it’s like a previous room that I don’t go into anymore. That was me then. Essentially, the reason to use different names is the same reason that General Motors does: product identification. If it’s a Cadillac you’re looking for, and when you get it home you find it’s a Chevy, you get annoyed. And if it’s a comedy that you’re looking for, and you get it home and there’s nothing but blood on every page… There’s a science-fiction writer named Poul Anderson whom I think of as the strongest example of the other way to do it. He writes everything under his name. There are one or two kinds of things that he does that I like a lot, would read. The High Crusade, for instance; terrific book. There are other things also — sword and sorcery, stuff like that — I have no interest in. So I don’t tend to go out and look for Poul Anderson, because I don’t know what I’m going to get.

NBM: You said you resisted being identified with the Richard Stark books. Why is that?

Westlake: Because I wanted the freedom of not being Westlake pretending to be this other guy. Under a pen name, it’s just this other thing, and it’s completely separate from me. So I can unlimber all of that equipment in some way.

NBM: You’ve written some sixty books in twenty-five years as a professional writer. That makes you one of the most prolific respectable contemporary mystery writers. What is it about gènre fiction that makes writers so prolific?

Westlake: I think it may be because so much of what you’re doing involves conventions, whether you are working with them or against them. In the comedy, you’re working against them, but the conventions still exist. Raymond Chandler said, if you get stuck in a book, just bring into the room a man with a gun. By the time you explain who he is and why he’s there, the story’s going again. It’s like a legal contract — so much of it is boilerplate. A genre novel is not that extreme, but you know what the conventions are that you’ll be working with or against. If you are writing, say, a novel about a married college professor having an affair with a student, there are some conventions to help along the way, but not very many. So what is the thing that keeps the rubber band wound tight? It’s hard, I think; that’s slower work. There was one book I did called Brothers Keepers. It was one of the very rare times that I started with the title. The title was “The Felonious Monks.” It was going to be a book about some monks who have a problem, and they have to commit a crime to get out of it. I got into the book a little bit and liked the characters too much to distort them into criminals, so I wound up writing the book without the crime. That meant that, first of all, I couldn’t use the title. But, secondly, now what the hell is the book about? The monks are in a building with a ninety-nine-year lease and the lease is up and the owner of the land wants to put an office building there. The monks know that the lease should be renewable, but it has been stolen from them. So what I was going to do was have them steal it back; but instead it turned out to be a love story between one of the monks and the landlord’s daughter. The whole middle section of that book has nothing to do with crime. It’s a comedy, but it’s about a sworn celibate who has run off to Puerto Rico with the landlord’s daughter. And now what? That was the slowest writing I’ve ever done in my life. A page a day at best, because where am I and what s going on and how do I believe — much less the reader — that there is a tension in here, that the story is going somewhere.

NBM: Do you ever feel you write too much, spread yourself too thin?

Westlake: Yes, occasionally, but not very often. If I’m working a deadline, I might feel I have to work too fast, but more often I have more books ready than I can get published. The books begin walking on each other’s heels. You see the word “another” begin to come into every review. Sometimes I think, Oh my God, I’m one step from “Yet another.”

NBM: So pseudonyms are a concession to the marketplace and the publication process?

Westlake: Yes, more or less. In the early days, I would fill in between books with things under pen names. In the last ten to fifteen years, I’ve filled in with movie or television work. I call it an unintended WPA writers’ project. They pay you the money, and you do the job, and they say thank you very much and put it on a shelf.

NBM: Anthony Boucher observed that you have an acute insight into criminal thinking. How do you achieve it? Do you research criminal activity?

Westlake: I’m not a heavy researcher. It’s boring. I grew up plotting all sorts of heists. It may be that the writer is a failed crook. He has a more cowardly way to do it, you know: “Well, let’s just put it on paper.” Then, because of what I’ve written over the years, I’ve gotten letters from people in jail. They tell me funny stories. Essentially, I’m somebody they can talk shop to, in a funny way, so some stuff comes from them.

NBM: To what extent do you read other mystery writers?

Westlake: I have read all of the early hard-boiled writers. Chandler is just a little too baroque for me. Every sentence has three syllables too many.

NBM: Too self-conscious?

Westlake: Yeah. Hammett, I think, is terrific. His use of language and his use of emotion — he’s sparing with both, and it’s very well done. Cain, too. Cain switched back and forth. You get something like Serenade and that’s pure Chandler. But then The Postman Always Rings Twice is so clean. Then there’s a guy who was doing Gold Medal originals in the 1950s and into the 1960s named Peter Rabe. He was absolutely wonderful. An awful lot of Richard Stark comes out of Peter Rabe. He had an oblique style that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Then he sort of disappeared for a while and came back with a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing that didn’t work. But for a while he was terrific. I know very little about him. On a dust jacket it said that he had a degree in psychology from Queens College and that his master’s thesis had been on frustration. His books were crooks dealing with frustration: they were very good.

I read fewer and fewer crime or mystery novels over the years; I don’t think that they are getting worse or that I’m getting better. It’s a certain amount of overload. I had been hearing about Elmore Leonard for a while and I kind of resisted. I met the man, and he’s a nice man, and I still resisted. Then the Washington Post asked me to review LaBrava. I said, “This guy’s wonderful,” and I ran out and read all of the others. They were all wonderful, except, sometimes it’s a mistake to read right through all of them. Now I’ve been resisting Glitz, I’m not sure why.

I think Leonard has treated his general career the way I treated Richard Stark: Let me take my shoes off and relax. You know, play and experiment and fool around and not worry in the same way that I would if it was under my own name.

NBM: What happened to short stories? Is it simply a matter of markets drying up and financial pressures on the writer to produce longer works?

Westlake: I’ve used this line a couple of times with would-be writers and so on — there’s only one thing in the United States that cost a nickel in 1947 that costs a nickel today: that’s a word in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In fact, the dollars in the short story market have not changed. In the 1930s, the slicks paid twenty-five hundred dollars; the slicks were Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Today, the slicks are Playboy and Cosmopolitan, and they’re paying twenty-five hundred dollars. Book prices have changed; movies have changed; everything else has changed but the short story. If you write a novel, there are thirty publishers, and so far as I can tell, there’s a movie producer in every phone booth in Los Angeles. They at least have enough money to buy you lunch. But the magazines and the short story field are very restricted.

NBM: How many movies have been made from your novels?

Westlake: I think there are twelve. From books under my name, there’s The Busy Body, The Hot Rock, Bank Shot, Jimmy the Kid, Two Much, and that’s five. Now Richard Stark — there’s Point Blank, The Split, The Outfit, and Slayground. There were two made in France: one called Mise en Sac from a book called The Score, and one called Made in U.S.A. from a terrible book called The Jugger. And then for one movie. Cops and Robbers, I wrote the screenplay first.

NBM: What do you think of the finished products?

Westlake: It’s such a crap shoot. The auteur theory assumes that the director is in charge — and all the people know that this person’s in charge. Nobody’s in charge. It’s three blind men describing the elephant every time. There have been everything from terrific movies to movies that I refuse to see. Just hearing of them has been enough.

NBM: What makes the difference? Is there an element in there? Is it a director or producer who’s concerned?

Westlake: I don’t know. I don’t know.

NBM: Is it your involvement?

Westlake: No. For instance, The Hot Rock and Bank Shot had the same producer. They were made within a year or two years of each other. The Hot Rock came first and was mostly successful. There were a few little problems with it, beginning with the fact that Robert Redford was terribly miscast. He did an honorable job, a very good job, but there was just no way to look at him and think “loser.” There were a couple of other little problems, but mostly I thought it was a fine movie. It had a wonderful screenplay by William Goldman, so that helped. The director, Peter Yates, was very uneven, put out terrible turkeys. But at the same time he made good movies, like Bullitt. But then a year or two years later, the same producers got at least as good a cast together for Bank Shot. The screenplay was quite bad and that was maybe part of the problem, but then they hired Gower Champion to direct it, and it turned out he couldn’t direct movies, at least not comedy. Somebody who saw the movie said it was a farce shot in close-up, so that every time anybody slipped on a banana peel, they fell out of frame. You never knew what was going on. George C. Scott, why not? He could have been terrific. But that’s one I won’t see.

NBM: How much direct input do you have in the movies that are made from your books?

Westlake: None.

NBM: You sell it and stand back?

Westlake: Yeah. Twice the screenwriter consulted me. When William Goldman was doing The Hot Rock, he called me and said, “I want to have lunch with you and I want you to tell me everything you know about those characters that you didn’t put in the book.” I thought that was very smart. At every step of the way, he would send me drafts and call. I would argue with him and he’d argue with me. Usually, he would explain why he was doing what he was doing, and I would say okay. Every once in a while I would convince him. That was fine. But it was strictly between him and me. It wasn’t anything the producers asked me to do. As soon as his job was done, my relationship with the movie ended. Goldman’s smart about this, too. The day the principal photography starts, he leaves the country, goes to France or wherever, and he comes back when the movie’s over. He doesn’t want at the end of the third week to be called up and told, “Listen, the actress we hired can’t do this. Will you rewrite?” His job is done.

A guy named Richard Blackburn, who wrote the first screenplay for Slayground, did the same thing to a lesser extent. He wanted to talk about the book; he showed me the rough draft. But he stayed too close to the book.

NBM: He stayed too close to the book?

Westlake: Yeah, he did. It’s a different form. The producer thought so, too, I guess, because he fired Blackburn. That’s another movie I won’t go to. Blackburn was shown the other guy’s script, so he talked to me about it. He said, “I don’t know what they’re doing, but the director loves it; it’s very pretentious.” There is one line in it: “My gun spits truth.” I won’t go to see that either.

NBM: Joe Gores, Robert Parker, and Elmore Leonard, to name at least three, are writing detective series for TV. Do you have any inclination to answer them with a nice robbers series?

Westlake: You couldn’t have a criminal All in the Family on TV. Television is still in the old Hays office days. I’ve done a whole bunch of things for television. Luckily, almost none of it has been on the air.

NBM: Why do you say “luckily”?

Westlake: Television is much worse than movies.

NBM: Is it the minor leagues?

Westlake: It isn’t even that. It’s the Peter Principle run rampant. You’re dealing with a network. The people in the offices are dumb; they’re just dumb. I could do a paragraph on it, but it would wind up with dumb. The people I’ve dealt with, whether a good movie or a bad movie, were dumb. In the movies, you’ve got lively, intelligent, hard-driving people, because they tend to be entrepreneurs. Whereas in the networks they tend to be employees, and all they’re interested in is protecting themselves. A great dullness comes out. I’ve had conversations with people that were just beyond belief. I wouldn’t know how to write it that funny. Just one example: A few years ago, I was asked to do a TV movie, what they call a “back door pilot,” a two-hour movie, and if it works, then they would make a one-hour television series from it, but at least they get the movie on the air. The idea was an overly tough and mean cop who’s gone too far, has been reassigned to juvenile probation in the South Bronx. He has to work with a group of eleven- or twelve-year-old kids who already have felony convictions behind them. They are the toughest kids you’ve ever seen, and he’s the toughest cop they’ve ever seen, and they are his charges. The first thing they do is try to hire a hit man to kill him. That was their way: “Dirty Harry meets the Dead End Kids in the South Bronx.” So we had meetings and I said, “Are you sure you want it this tough and mean?” “Yes, yes.” So I did character sketches of the kids and a story outline. When the kids can’t get rid of the cop, they decide to make him a hero. They find a person who has been murdered and help the cop solve the crime in order to get him back in the police force’s good graces, so he will be transferred back where he belongs.

I was working for an independent production company — entrepreneur — and when I got the first draft of the story done, we went over to the network and sat down with executives. Over two and a half hours they kept backing away from every hard-nosed concept in the whole thing. At one point this executive said, “Now this one kid we’ve got here who is a very quick runner”—he is a very quick runner because his specialty is gold chains; he pulls them off women’s necks. The executive said, “I’m not necessarily saying he could be in training for the Olympics, but, maybe if you don’t like that, you know, so we can show there’s some hope for rehabilitation, maybe since he can run so fast, he could get a delivery job after school, working for the neighborhood florist” — in the South Bronx! The producer and I looked at each other and we didn’t say anything to him because there’s no point in it. But afterward, we asked each other, “Is this guy touched?” Delivering for a florist? In the South Bronx? The last flower was eaten in 1947.

NBM: Did you ever have the impulse to give them exactly what they wanted, their just deserts?

Westlake: Well, it’s hard. I tried it with that one. I think they were going to go forward until the screen actors’ strike came along. There’s a sort of a pace to these things. The project went along for eight or nine months, then a new project was launched, so that was the end of it. As I described it to someone at the time, I tried to give them as much of what they want and as little of what I don’t want as possible. It didn’t work. That’s hard to do. It’s hard, writing down. If you know it works this way, it’s hard to write how you know it doesn’t work. I don’t know how to explain that better.

NBM: You’ve been very critical in the past of the publishing industry and particularly the way publishers have handled paperbacks and mystery writers in general. Do you see publishers getting any better at what they do, or worse?

Westlake: It’s an ongoing problem, the corporate mentality again. More and more publishers are simply an element in CBS, or an element in Warner’s. There’s an individual responsibility lacking. When Viking was Tom Guinzburg and Random House was Bennett Cerf and Knopf was Knopf and Scribner was Scribner, then there was somebody who, in the first place, had a personal stake in the books he published. Either because he edited them or had his name on them. As Viking becomes a subsidiary of Penguin, and Random House becomes one-quarter of one percent of Newhouse, there’s nobody who has that same feeling. You’ve got people whose primary job is to keep their job — or find a better one. There’s no commitment. There are fewer and fewer entrepreneurs.

NBM: So your feeling is that the future of quality publishing lies with middle-size publishers who are big enough to be effective and yet small enough to escape being takeover targets?

Westlake: Yes. The primary aim of mainstream publishing now is blockbusters. Like the movies — going for blockbusters. You have to have the one great big hit. They do combination hard-cover/paperback deals up front because the auctions got to be too terrifying. Some publishers now do only four or six or eight books a year. Until they bought Dutton, NAL just published a few hard-cover books a year, and they were exclusively those they felt they could make into blockbusters. Years ago, I said the same thing about the movies. Most of the movies then were earning twelve million dollars, and two movies a year were earning sixty million dollars. If, as a result, you try not to make a twelve-million-dollar movie but aim for a sixty-million-dollar movie, then you are gearing the industry entirely to make movies for people who don’t go to movies. It’s the twelve-million-dollar movies that arc being seen by the people who go to movies. Book publishing is doing the same thing. They are gearing the industry to sell books to people who don’t other-wise buy books. Something is left out and I’m not sure what it is, but it’s crazy. Still, it is the pond I swim in.

NBM: So what comes next for you?

Westlake: Oh, more.