Donald Westlake (a.k.a. Richard Stark) 1933-2008

So sad to be in a world where Donald Westlake won't be writing any more novels. I discovered Westlake in Stephen King's The Dark Half; in an afterword, King talked about how fictional tough-guy writer George Stark was modeled on Westlake's "Richard Stark" alter ego. I was 17 years old, and I remember thinking I really needed to track down some stuff by this Stark guy. But this was an internet-less 1989, and I couldn't find a single one, in print or used. Life moved on. In 1997, I read and loved a novel called The Ax by Donald Westlake, and later remembered that, oh yeah, this was that Stark guy. The first Stark novel I found was The Damsel, a beat-to-hell Signet edition I found on the bargain shelves at Otto Penzler's Mysterious Bookshop. (Shelves, I later learned, that Westlake helped build.) I read it in a gulp, and craved more. By that time, Stark had resumed writing the Parker novels, and slowly... very, very slowly... older Starks returned to print. In the years that followed, I finally managed to track down all of the original Parker (and Grofield) novels, from The Hunter through Butcher's Moon. If there's a better series of American crime novels, I have yet to discover it.

And of course, I devoured all of the Westlakes I could find. I enjoyed them all, but loved the harder-edged stuff the best: The Ax, Killing Time, 361, The Hook, Don't Lie to Me, Murder Among Children, Killy, The Smashers (a.k.a. The Mercenaries).

But it was Stark's novels about Parker, a tough amoral heister with no first name, that really grabbed me. So much so that when I decided to write a straight crime novel, I wrote one about a mute getaway driver named Lennon. Needless to say, The Wheelman owes a serious debt to Richard Stark. So do a lot of other tough guy novels in the Stark mode, including Max Allan Collins' Nolan series, Garry Disher's Wyatt, and more recently Dan Simmons' Joe Kurtz and Tom Piccirilli's Chase. None of these would have happened without Stark blazing the trail, inventing a subgenre with a form as strict (and beautiful) as a sonnet.

My wife and I even named our first-born son Parker, in honor of both the Richard Stark character (as well as Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man).

A year and a half ago, I was lucky enough to meet Westlake at the MWA Edgar Awards. Sarah Weinman introduced us, and I believe I just stood there, trying like hell not to say something stupid/stammer/collapse. Thankfully, Westlake was gracious, funny, and totally laid back. I shook his hand, and thanked him for his "body of work" (or something geeky like that). Incidentally, this was the Edgars where Stephen King received the MWA Grandmaster Award. I wish I could have gathered both of them in the same place to tell them: You two! You're the ones who did this to me! And God, I can't thank you enough.

I'm very sad about Westlake's passing, but I am hugely grateful for the large body of work he left behind. And the best way to honor a departed writer is to re-read their work and promote it to those who haven't had the pleasure. So if you haven't, pick up 361. Or the University of Chicago Press edition of The Hunter. Or The Ax (which is wayyyyy timely all of a sudden). Or maybe start with Hard Case's The Cutie, a reprint due next month that was Westlake's first crime novel (published as The Mercenaries). And then you can read them all in order.

People die, but stories and novels have that odd shot at immortality. I really like Westlake's chances.